New York Dolls - Dancing Backwards in High Heels

  by John Clarkson

published: 23 / 3 / 2011

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Review

At one level ‘Dancing Backwards in High Heels’, the New York Dolls’ fifth studio album and their third since they reformed after a nearly thirty year absence in 2004, looks to the DIY ethos of the punk movement for which they were the precursors for inspiration. At another it hearkens back even further and takes its influences, as the Dolls have always done, from 60’s girl groups, Stax and Motown and above all classic 50’s rock ‘n’ roll. ‘Dancing Backwards in High Heels’ was recorded in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, a city which the New York Dolls have particularly enjoyed playing in since they made their comeback. New bassist Jason Hill and former Blondie guitarist Frank Infante (who has since been replaced by Earl Slick) joined up with original members, vocalist David Johansen and guitarist Sylvain Sylvain, and long-term drummer Brian Delaney to record it in a two week session there last September. The album was produced in rudimentary, no frills style by Hill, who recorded it live. For it Sylvain also recruited several backing vocalists, a saxophonist and strings section through a caterer that he came across, who was both working and singing in a pub around the corner from the studio. This all sounds like a recipe for utter disaster. Many of the soul and early rock ‘n’ roll giants that have had such an effect on the New York Dolls, however, often cut their records in similarly basic and crude circumstances, a fact that the Dolls and Hill, an established producer who has worked with the Killers, homage on ‘Dancing Backwards in High Heels’. The backing musicians and vocalists, while often raw-sounding, also have a surprising force despite their makeshift nature, and ‘Dancing Backwards in High Heels’, like so much of what the New York Dolls’ career has been, is a triumph against the odds. That is not to say that it is without fault. ‘I’m So Fabulous’ scathingly compares the upmarket fashionistas of Los Angeles with their more down-at-heel cousins in New York, but, as superficial as its subject matter, soon outstays its welcome. Overall, however, ‘Dancing Backwards in High Heels’ is an excellent album. The self-mocking ‘Fool For You Baby’(“I’m a fool for you, fool for you baby/That’s just the way it goes”) throws together an exuberant yodel of a vocal from a smitten Johansen with soaring crescendos of backing harmonies, and is tied off neatly with the surprise addition of a clattering rush of a stomping Jerry Lee Lewis-style piano solo. On ‘Funky But Chic’, a strutting mix of crisp beats, soulful horns and sudden changes of rhythm, the New York Dolls forty years on from when they first formed show that they have lost none of their edge when it comes to writing sharp melody or slamming twists into their songs. There are moments of real poignancy as well, as befits a band that has seen four of its members die prematurely, three of them – guitarist Johnny Thunders and drummers Billy Murcia and Jerry Nolan – from drug-related deaths and the other, bassist Arthur Kane, from pneumonia in 2004 three weeks after the Dolls played their first reformation gig. When Johansen sings on crooner’s ballad, ‘Kids Like You’, the lines “No one tells you what to do/Kids like you” and then a few seconds later “You’re gonna get the blues/Kids like you”, it is done straight from the gut and with all the hurt, heartfulness and latter day wisdom that comes from someone who knows first hand the fate that awaits those young men who push their luck too far. ‘I Sold My Heart to the Junkman’, a Frankie Valli-type anthem, is brassier and rockier, but underpinned with a similar sense of melancholy (“I sold my heart to the junkman/But I’ll never fall in love again.”). By its seeming throwaway nature, ‘Dancing Backwards in High Heels’ should be a failure. It may lack the polish and high class production values of other previous New York Dolls albums by Todd Rundgren (1973’s ‘The New York Dolls’ and 2009’s ‘Cause I Sez So’) and George “Shadow” Morton (1974’s ‘Too Much Too Soon’), yet, while certainly hastily recorded, this lack of finesse suits the band. It is a great testimony to Johansen and Sylvian and the diverse nature of the New York Dolls that ‘Dancing Backward in High Heels’ works as well as it does. They continue to take their band along its extended lifespan with great energy, versatility and elegance.

Track Listing:-

1 Fool For You Baby
2 Streetcake
3 Fabulous Rant
4 I'm So Fabulous
5 Talk To Me Baby
6 Kids Like You
7 Round And Round She Goes
8 I Sold My Heart To The Junkman
9 You Don't Have To Cry
10 Baby, Tell Me What I'm On
11 Funky But Chic
12 End Of The Summer

Band Links:-

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