Something For The Weekend: Furniture - Brilliant Mind

Furniture are yer classic '80s one-hit wonders - a ragtag of Londoners and Eastern-Europeans who, astonishingly, released four albums. But 'Brilliant Mind' is their sky-highlight. A precious, pristine, perfectly distilled four minutes of fame.

'Brilliant Mind' made the UK Top 20 in the days when the UK Top 20 really mattered, but it's surrounded by a wonderful swirl of obscurity. A pop hit not popular enough for anyone to actually remember.

It's a song so good it became the death of them; a black hole insatiably sucking back everything else the band put out to prove how they weren't just about one song.

But they were, and what a song: jaunty, off-kilter intro... chilly, pre-packaged drum-fills... standard-issue miserabilism... And then that thrilling, mid-point starburst of sax-propelled sorrow and self-pity.

In the second half of the '80s, easily digestable synth-pop was bedded in and the silly haircuts and costumes made it all the more non-threatening. But Furniture's story isn't kitsch or pastel-shaded; it's a tragedy. Shat on and shafted by record-company greed and incompetence, they were under-supported, had their album pulled and deleted, were dropped, cast out into a lengthy court-case... And when they re-emerged in 1989, the world had moved on and their moment had gone.

With hindsight, 'Brilliant Mind' is more than just a dark and doomy wallow; a lament to love and obsession gone awry. It's the signature song for the band's descent from Top Of The Pops to rock-bottom ("Everybody's yelling about you and yours and how I'd have the answer if I'd only open up and just let you in/They must be out of their brilliant minds...")

And, excuse the clever-cleverness, but have a back-to-back listen to Furniture and this National track. Those Tindersticks/Nick Cave comparisons seem a bit off now, eh?

[MP3] Furniture - Brilliant Mind
[MP3] The National - Daughters Of The Soho Riots