The Alternative Number Ones: Love And Rockets’ “So Alive”

8:50 AM EDT on September 27, 2023

June 24, 1989

STAYED AT #1:5 Weeks

In The Alternative Number Ones, I'm reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it's for subscribers only. Thank you to everyone who's helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

Sometimes, the song overshadows the band. Love And Rockets, the trio birthed from the ashes of Bauhaus, would've earned themselves a spot in the history of alternative rock even without their one monster hit. They kept going without an iconic frontman, they developed their sound into something clean and sticky, and they cranked out a pretty decent succession of college-radio bangers before they made that one monster hit. But for those of us who weren't there at the time, the monster hit is the one real lasting legacy of Love And Rockets.

The monster hit was simple and memorable, and it really didn't need context to connect. When I started listening to alternative radio as a kid in the early '90s, Love And Rockets were not part of the starter kit. They'd had their moment, and the world had mostly moved on. But I still heard the one monster hit on the radio all the time. It never left rotation, and I was never sorry to hear it. The song made perfect sense to me: A guy gets completely hung up on a girl, even though he doesn't know her well enough to remember her eye color. She's a total mystery to him, and yet he goes into a dizzy reverie whenever he thinks about her. I could relate.

Love And Rockets leader Daniel Ash was past 30 when he wrote "So Alive," but the song itself speaks to a fundamental teenage yearning. It's a simple, breathy, flirty track, and it says what's on its mind directly, without playing around too much. When you're in that awkward phase of life where you're falling in love with someone new every five minutes, a song like "So Alive" can really speak to you. It never even occurred to me to wonder who wrote that song or whether the band had any other tracks as good as that. I didn't know that "So Alive" came from three quarters of the band who helped codify the goth aesthetic, and I didn't know that it had become those guys' one massive crossover American hit. It was just a good song that came on the radio sometimes. It's been a while since I've heard "So Alive" on the radio, but it remains a good song, with or without all of its context.

For the members of Love And Rockets, "So Alive" might've actually been the second time that one of their songs managed to overshadow one of their bands. Bauhaus, the group that made all of them famous in the first place, still stand as one of the all-time great T-shirt bands -- the special category of acts whose merch sales overshadow their cultural impact. Even in the '80s, shortly after Bauhaus broke up, you'd see definitively non-goth types like Peter Cetera and Jordan Knight rocking Bauhaus shirts in videos -- presumably more because they liked the logo and less because they cared about the band, which seemed to properly confuse Daniel Ash when Stereogum interviewed him earlier this year. But if you know a single Bauhaus song, then the song you know is almost certainly "Bela Lugosi's Dead," that band's debut single.

Bauhaus got started in the English city of Northampton in the late '70s. Guitarist Daniel Ash played in a few different local bands with two brothers, drummer Kevin Haskins and bassist David J. Haskins, who simply went by David J. A gaunt, handsome weirdo named Peter Murphy had been school friends with Daniel Ash, and Ash kept trying to get Murphy to join their band. Eventually, Murphy agreed. A few weeks after he joined up, the newly solidified Bauhaus recorded their demo of "Bela Lugosi's Dead," a dread-soaked throb that skittered and thrummed for nearly 10 minutes, establishing the connection between this darkly glamorous new post-punk variant and the old horror movies that inspired its look.

The "Bela Lugosi's Dead" single came out on a tiny British indie called Small Wonder, and Bauhaus signed with 4AD and cranked out four albums in less than four years. Bauhaus' records were self-serious to the point of pretension, and they never shied away from their David Bowie hero-worship. In the UK, Bauhaus' biggest hit was a 1982 version of "Ziggy Stardust," a song so distinctly Bowie that nobody else really ever needed to cover it. Internationally, Bauhaus probably had their biggest moment when they performed "Bela Lugosi's Dead" during the opening credits of The Hunger, the 1983 Tony Scott vampire flick that starred Catherine Deneuve, Susan Sarandon, and -- hey, look at that -- David Bowie.

Bauhaus never really caught on in the US, but the band became an underground sensation and a big influence on the emerging goth subculture. They wouldn't stay together for long enough to capitalize on that scene -- at least, not for a while. While Bauhaus were working on their fourth album, 1983's Burning From The Inside, Peter Murphy was sidelined with pneumonia, and he barely contributed. Daniel Ash and David J dominated that record, even taking lead vocals on some of its tracks. Shortly before that album's release, Bauhaus broke up, and Peter Murphy went solo. (We'll see him in this column before long.) David J went solo, too. Daniel Ash got together with Kevin Haskins and Bauhaus roadie Glenn Campling to form a new band called Tones On Tail.

Tones On Tail had a couple of minor indie hits, but they never made much of a commercial ripple. In 1984, Tones On Tail broke up, and all the members of Bauhaus decided to get back together. Peter Murphy ultimately flaked out, so the other three started a new band called Love And Rockets, taking the name from the Hernandez brothers' long-running underground comic of the same title. In Love And Rockets, Daniel Ash and David J took turns writing songs and swapping lead-singer duties, but their first single didn't come from either of those guys. Instead, Love And Rockets made their 1985 debut with a cover of "Ball Of Confusion," the 1970 Temptations classic with lyrics that unfortunately always feel relevant.

That "Ball Of Confusion" cover and its accompanying video outlined Love And Rockets' style. The new band didn't have a frontman as mesmerizing as Peter Murphy, but they looked cool, dressed well, and had great hair -- a look that was rooted in their Bauhaus days but that also intersected with the British synthpop and the American glam-metal that were taking up a lot of space on MTV. Love And Rockets didn't make happy songs, but they weren't afraid of hooks.

Love And Rockets' first two albums leaned into Floydian psychedelia and didn't make too many commercial waves, but you could hear them progressively becoming more confident, sanding away their weirder edges. They found some college-radio success with tracks like 1986's "Kundalini Express" and "All In My Mind." On their 1987 album Earth, Sun, Moon, Love And Rockets took on a driving acoustic sound, and their single "No New Tale To Tell" became one of the biggest American college-radio hits of the decade.

Love And Rockets couldn't get arrested at home in the UK, but their American cult success kept growing, bit by bit, through the second half of the '80s. I don't think anyone thought they were geniuses, but they wrote catchy songs, continued touring, and evolved just enough that people probably stopped thinking of them as the Bauhaus guys. When the Billboard Modern Rock charts started in 1988, Love And Rockets were nicely positioned, but "Motorcycle," the bleary and Hawkwind-esque lead single from the band's 1989 self-titled album, only made it to #20. I don't think I'd ever heard that song before today.

With hindsight, "So Alive," the song that would become by far the biggest hit of Love And Rockets' career, sounds a whole lot more like a lead single. RCA, the band's American label, put actual muscle into promoting "So Alive," so maybe "Motorcycle" was just a buzz single, intended to remind the world of this band's existence. The story behind "So Alive" is all pretty much right there in the lyrics. Daniel Ash saw a girl from across the room at a party, and he was instantly smitten. Years later, Ash told Songfacts, "It was like I'd known her in a different lifetime or something. It was just this thing that hit me like a ton of bricks. I couldn't stop thinking about her." But Ash was married at the time, so he didn't even talk to this lady. As far as I can tell, he never even met her. Instead, he wrote a song about her.

That party was on a Saturday night. The following Monday, Daniel Ash arrived at a Love And Rockets studio session, where the band had been planning to work on one of David J's songs. Ash told Stereogum the story: "I said, 'No, no, we’re not doing that track. We’re doing this track.' And David and Kevin said, 'Well, can we hear it?' And I said, 'No, I haven’t written it yet.' All I had was the first two chords and the first line of the lyric." So Ash went off by himself with a bottle of whiskey, an acoustic guitar, and a tape recorder. He came back half an hour later with a fully-written song, and they recorded it that day without even talking about it.

"So Alive" sounds very much like a 1989 modern-rock song, with its Fine Young Cannibals-style drum-crack echo and its gasping synth sounds. (The band recorded it with producer John Fryer, one half of the goth/industrial duo This Mortal Coil.) There's also a throwback old-school catchiness to "So Alive." The band clearly learned a lot from glam-rock, but "So Alive" has none of the stentorian Bowie-esque vocals that Peter Murphy brought to Bauhaus. Instead, it sounds a whole lot more like T. Rex, and the female backing vocals, added to the song the day after the recording session, are supposed to evoke Lou Reed's "Walk On The Wild Side." Within two days, the track was complete.

"So Alive" sounds like a song written in half an hour. That's not always a good thing, but it is this time. With his lyrics, Daniel Ash goes first-thought best-thought. He doesn't know what color your eyes are, baby, but your hair is long and brown. Your legs are strong, and you're so, so long, and you don't come from this town. Ash sounds like he's going through his own shit: "I feel I'm on the cross again, baby, that's got nothing to do with you-hoo-hoo." He puts all his fantasies on this one person that he'll never know, trying to imagine what it would be like if he could escape all his responsibilities and devote himself to her. But he can't do any of that, so the entire scenario plays out in his head and nowhere else.

"So Alive" is not a complicated song. Ash repeats a bunch of lyrics, and the rhymes are all first-draft stuff -- "brown" and "town," for instance. Musically, it's a simple shuffle that doesn't build to anything grand. Ash delivers his lyrics in a drawling sing-song, never fully bothering to lock into a melody. He sounds horny and depressed in equal measure, which suits the song. When it takes another person to make you feel so alive, then maybe you weren't feeling so alive in the first place. But the hints of darkness never stop "So Alive" from working as a party record, maybe because those doot-doo backing vocals work so well to sweeten the mix.

"So Alive" definitely objectifies the object of Daniel Ash's desire, and the song's marketing picked up on that. The silhouettes of disembodied legs in the video and on the single's cover art give off "Addicted To Love" vibes. But that objectification is the natural byproduct of mooning over someone you haven't even met, fantasizing about a relationship that'll never be real. Until you get to know this person as a person, they're just images in your mind, made-up stories. Sometimes, you need those made-up stories to get through your day. "So Alive" captures that feeling.

Like every other Love And Rockets record, "So Alive" completely flatlined in the UK. In the US, though, it became a juggernaut crossover hit. Over here, the song topped the Modern Rock chart and went all the way up to #3 on the Hot 100, competing against smashes from titans like Prince and Madonna. Before that, the band had never even appeared on the Hot 100. Love And Rockets opened the Cure's stadium shows that summer, and their self-titled album went gold, even though it didn't really have any other hits. "No Big Deal," the bigger of their two follow-up singles, peaked at #19 on the Modern Rock chart and #82 on the Hot 100, and it turned out to be Love And Rockets' final hit on the latter chart.

After knocking out their first four albums in four years, Love And Rockets took a long, long time to follow up their self-titled LP. Daniel Ash and David J both made unsuccessful solo records in the early '90s. The band finally came back five years later with the rave-influenced 1994 album Hot Trip To Heaven, and absolutely nobody wanted to hear them attempting that sound. As far as I can tell, Hot Trip To Heaven and its attendant singles didn't chart anywhere on the planet. The band's 1996 album Sweet FA did a little better, and they made it to #10 on the Modern Rock chart with "Sweet Lover Hangover," a swaggering single that made sense within its Britpop moment. (It's an 8.) But that was Love And Rockets' last time on any Billboard chart, and they haven't released anything since their widely ignored 1998 album Lift.

Love And Rockets broke up in 1999, but they've gotten back together a few times since then. Bauhaus reunited, too. They played a celebrated set at Coachella in 2005, and they came out with a new LP called Go Away White in 2008. Last year, Bauhaus cancelled an American tour so that Peter Murphy could go to rehab, and that seemed to end the band's reunion, at least for now. This year, Love And Rockets got back together and toured the US again. As long as there are goths -- and there will always be goths -- any available combination of those guys will have an audience in the US. "So Alive" will remain Love And Rockets' one big mainstream moment, and that's fine. It was a good song in 1989, and it's a good song today.

GRADE: 8/10

BONUS BEATS: In an unreliable-narrator moment from Roger Avary's 2002 Bret Easton Ellis adaptation The Rules Of Attraction, James Van Der Beek and Ian Somerhalder get high and maybe make out while listening to "So Alive." Here's that split-screen scene:

BONUS BONUS BEATS: Here's the "So Alive" cover that Better Than Ezra contributed to the 2009 Love And Rockets tribute compilation New Tales To Tell: