The Guilty Have No Pride

Death in June never really made an album quite like this one again. I must confess ignorance of the output of Crisis, so I cannot comment on how similar it is to their punk days, but listening to it with knowledge of how they will sound in mind makes for an odd experience. Patrick Leagas (now Patrick O’Kill) provides most of the vocals rather than Douglas P., nor do we have the simple pleasure of the acoustic guitar here; indeed, I cannot describe this as neofolk music. No, The Guilty Have No Pride is a very different beast to what DI6 would produce later.

            

This being said, we should remember that it would be several years before DI6 settled on the sound that they are now most associated with. Though there aren’t really any hints of the kind of music they’d be making from a technical perspective, the spirit, atmosphere and the themes that would come to mark out their work are already here. There is ambiguous mediation on the Second World War and the Holocaust (the latter being dealt with by ‘Heaven Street Mk II’, which is not only one of the best songs DI6 have ever produced, it is also one of their most unsettling/upsetting); uneasy suggestions as to where they’re politics might lie with songs like ‘Nothing Changes,’ ‘Nation’ and…well, the entire album has uneasy suggestions about DI6’s politics. I could write an essay on DI6’s relationship with the Far-Right, and I might even do that at some point- but not here. Here, we’re just going to talk about some of the best music to come out of the 1980s that no one listened to.

         

Speaking of which…

           

Though, inevitably, some tracks are stronger than others, as a whole the album is more-or-less without fault. ‘Nation’ is also a rare instrumental piece, and is one of the strongest elements of the entire album, though the title track itself is something of a non-event, particularly if you’re listening to the 2006 re-release, in which it comes in the middle of the music rather than the end, though this is due to the introduction of several previously unreleased tracks, including a version of ‘Heaven Street’ which I personally prefer to ‘Mk II’. Regarding the 2006 re-release, the extra tracks are worth getting your hands on, though I didn’t much care for ‘In the Night Time.’

            

As a whole, TGHNP is a remarkably claustrophobic and extremely bleak piece of work, and like I said above, not something that was ever quite repeated. Though the neofolk sound that DI6 would develop as it went along is a thoroughly welcome addition to underground music, and one that I am glad to have in my life, I cannot help but wonder how things might have been if they had continued in this direction rather than in the one they would tread. This being said, DI6’s greatest strength, in its early days in particular, has always lain with its ability and willingness to experiment with theme and format. Not many bands could go from post-punk to experimental-dance to fashioning a whole new sub-genre of folk music more-or-less single-handedly, and it is nothing short of miraculous that Death in June managed to do that.