Boys Don't Cry - Boys Don't Cry

Maybe it wasn't the biggest hit in 1986, but dagnabbit it sure did seem to be on the radio all the dang time. "I Wanna Be a Cowboy" may have been viewed as nothing more than a clever one-trick pony in terms of novelty songs in the "Weird" Al era of parody songs, but there was something infectious about the song that put it up there with some of the best '80s poprock ... ever.

Yeah, you may think I'm just spewing a heaping pile of cow droppings but I do mean it. I will even admit that when it came out I wanted to treat the song with disdain and dismiss it as the pile of shit it was - except it wasn't.

More on that later, as a good friend of mine likes to say.

Boys Don't Cry hail from London, England (it may seem obvious, but there are others you know. Like the one in Ontario). The band was the brainchild of vocalist/keyboard player Nick Richards and featured his bandmates Brian Chatton on keyboards, Jeff Seopardi on drums, Mark Smith on bass, and Nico Ramsden on guitar. Yeah, the band featured not one, but two keyboard players. I do wonder how much the drummer actually contributed. I suspect he probably played alongside the programmed percussion.

It was the novelty song that garnered the attention (this is the later part of the more on that later line from above), and ended up being a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that most bands never get a shot at glory; the curse was the band was branded a one-hit wonder. The band was a one and done. Which was too bad, as they actually released a pretty solid, if somewhat generic, album of techno-infused pop songs with a rock edge.

Listening to an album decades after the dust has settled can be a little unfair in terms of assessing criticism and taking shots, as it's like shooting fish in a barrel. Having skipped to the end and knowing how things turned out doesn't make me look like some retrospective genius - it just makes me sound like an asshole.

When I found the album I was actually pretty stoked, as I had never owned a physical copy. I was confused by the cover, as I was expecting the same as the one I got when I bought my digital copy a number of years ago. Nope, it was this generic shot of a band standing behind a chain-link fence that created absolutely zero sense of anticipation.

ZERO.

I know you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but come on, a little effort would have gone a long way, especially since it looks like other regions out there got the cool cover. Good lord, was it the North American sensibilities about boobies? Crop the cover then, problem solved.

Now about my digital copy, I'm a little ashamed to say that I just got the download for the novelty song. I don't think I listened to the album all the way through. If I did, it was playing in the background.

So here I am now, and the album is pretty decent, and side one in particular starts off with a really solid one-two punch with "Cities on Fire," a song that apparently was released as a single but didn't spark, and "22nd Century Boy," which was catchy. It's too bad the label didn't try "Cities on Fire" first, as it was good enough to stand on its own, and it wouldn't have felt like such a departure from the cowboy song.

The only song on the album that really felt out of place was the odd mid-tempo "Josephine," a paint-by-numbers R&B clone that just came across as flat and sort of embarrassing. Musically it almost sounded like a song Culture Club would have been reluctant to record.

Timing, as they say in show business, is everything. Yeah, on that subject — this was also about a year late. As I listened I just thought about Wang Chung (likely unfair, but it is what it is), and heck, to me they had peaked already back in '85 with what I still think of as a near-perfect record: To Live and Die in L.A. However, that argument does sort of collapse if you use Wang Chung's '86 release Mosaic as exhibit A to argue it came out the same year as Boys Don't Cry ... I'd counter that they changed their sound on Mosaic, but who am I kidding?

Maybe that was the issue in a nutshell. Times were changing and while there were some really solid moments on the album, they weren't enough to capture people's imaginations, and the one song that did was a kitschy novelty song.

I suppose the band just sucked it up and tried to carry on. They would be back a year later with Who the Am Dam Do You Think We Am, which was inexplicably retitled Boys Don't Cry when it was released in North America ... I suspect that they probably did cry, as the album didn't register at all, and this would be their last record until they reformed and released Hear It Is! in 2014 ... except who knows who actually heard it.