X
At Home With You

I could write a long list of all the things I love about X and their 1985 album At Home With You: how my dubbed cassette copy, with their debut album, X-Aspirations, on the other side is almost too worn to play, how I never tire of it, how Ian Rilen and Steve Lucas’ eight year partnership came to its creative zenith and they never sounded better. But I won’t.

At the time, X had been revitalised by their relocation from Sydney to Melbourne. Rilen and Lucas were bolstered by Cathy Green’s wonderfully loose drumming style and producer Lobby Lloyd’s instinctive understanding of what X were about and how to get the best from them. You can hear it in the album’s second cut, ‘T.V. Glue’, with Lucas’ rudimentary guitar workings – the continuous back and forth of the same pattern until Rilen’s gentle bass links up alongside – taking little steps, very courteous and understanding. And then, right at that golden 30 second mark, Green stomps six massive chugs into her bass drum, Rilen enters with his signature thumping groove and a beautiful trumpet piece comes in over the top and sets the whole thing off. At the one-third mark, when Lucas speaks, “We don’t talk much anymore,” and then, “Hello mother, nice to see you all,” over the top of his quivering guitar, its feels like the song’s been sung from out of space – ground control to Major Tom style, and it very well could have been given the trio’s appetite for letting the good times roll.

Point is, ‘T.V. Glue’ is an amazing song; the very reason I listen to music in the first place. But that’s just one song – there’s a dozen more here coming from the same place, delivered with a passion and commitment so rare in most of today’s groups (could anyone but a celebrated soul singer match Lucas’ gut-wrenching vocal in ‘Movin’ On’?) Available again for the first time in a long time (with a bonus live disc), At Home With You celebrates both a band at the top of its game and those involved in it’s creation that aren’t with us anymore. Turn it up for them.

by Troy D Colvin