Doll By Doll – Nite Club, Edinburgh

Bob Flynn’s short live review in the “Gigs” section of Record Mirror (12 September 1981, p. 18) describes Doll by Doll as “mystic guerillas of music, forever turning in the breeze of their imagination, conceding to no style or movement”. Uncompromising but not consistent enough to move beyond cult barriers, they annoy critics by jumping out of every box they are put in. Front man Jackie Leven looks as if he has just undergone “a 48-hour interrogation with the Iranian police” – “probably usual”; he looks a dark and troubled man.

“Teenage Lighting” (as printed) and “The Street I Love” are, Flynn says, the first stirrings of their talent and of this set. Hung on dreams, the songs plunge into the mind, with lyrics “a foot or so too deep for these days” but buried in the harsh guitar and drive of the numbers; the band tread hallucinatory terrain with confidence. The emphasis is on the joining of two extremes – hard and soft, natural and supernatural – into a strong and disturbing mixture of romance and rough reality, “a potent hemlock that few can stomach”. The songs are knocked out with the speed and immediacy of your latest nightmare. Doll by Doll are the essence of the new psychedelic strivings of younger groups, forming “something finer” from the raw materials of the imagination.

The chameleon sound changes back and forth, with a side-step into the new single “Caritas”, “all swirling guitars and voices, aching with feeling”. The closing warning: “All the wrong dudes are making it while they are slagged off for thinking too much. Softly, softly, the time will come for the dreams of the Doll. The timing is wrong, this is not the summer for D by Ds ‘Main Travelled Roads’, it is the summer of mixed-up urban streets.” The text gives no concert date; it probably falls in festival time, late August or early September 1981.