The Bad Pages

HEDONIST
JANUARY 1996
Baby Bird – Bad Shave

The only record at the moment with the power to out do the Fabric mini-lp. Steven Jones is a fright­ening individual. The entire aura this LP gives off once you have listened to it several times is one of extreme retardation, an inability to put something into words without expressing it in a way that would not be possible if you did not have some sort of problem. It’s beautiful, Jones’ voice is a distant cousin of Bono’s and the production, allegedly all recorded on four track is so open and all encompassing, but its hard not to imagine numerous different psychoses and schizophrenic
episodes in Steven Jones’ life. The broken down episodes in Steven Jones life. The broken down desperation in Shop Girl, the vicious but hilarious cynicism in Valerie, however many times Jones protests that it is not actually real, the less I believe him, his words are simply too real, too beautiful, too confusing. And therein lies the entire point, nobody will know what Baby Bird is about, maybe he just does this so he doesn’t have to go back to Telford, it doesn’t matter, he’s a genius.