Virgins and Philistines

Overview

Virgins and Philistines failed to gain a large audience due to difficulty in marketing an album with such a diverse sound—it mixes 1960s and early 1970s pop music with more acoustic based melodies and string arrangements. The album is often regarded as the direct musical predecessor to the later work of The Lightning Seeds in the 1990s, whom Hall would later collaborate with in a songwriting role whilst providing occasional vocals.

Virgins & Philistines contained all original material except "The Hammond Song" (a cover of The Roches song), and "Can’t Get Enough of You Baby" (written by Linzer/Randell), which was the only track that received much airplay. The album was recorded at Strawberry Studios in Stockport (near Manchester) and was produced by Hugh Jones and Jeremy Green, and engineered by Chris Jones.

Additional personnel featured on the album included Pete de Freitas (Echo & the Bunnymen) on drums, Paul Burgess (ex-Camel, also drums), Preston Heyman (percussion), Ian Nelson (clarinet), Katrina Phillips (background vocals).

Release

Virgins and Philistines was released in April 1985 over a year after the group's first release. It charted at #12 on the UK Albums Chart and #28 on the New Zealand Album chart. It was preceded by three singles. The first, "Take", did not chart as highly as their début and only made #70 in the UK. The second single, "Thinking of You", was much better received and returned Hall to the top forty in the UK and Ireland, reaching #12 and #11 respectively. "Castles in the Air" was the final single and directly preceded the album, but it only managed #51.

The album was released in the US with different track listing including the band's self-titled début single. It also added the B-sides "I Can't Get Enough of You Baby", "Pushing Up the Daisies" and "Your Love Was Smashing". "Armchair Theatre" and "Yours Sincerely" were not included, but were later released in the US on the EP; The Colour Field.

The album was released in Canada with the same track order as the US release. Faint Hearts is a shorter 3:58 minute version that excludes the 20 second slow vocal introduction. Another notable difference is the song titles: "I Can't Get Enough of You Baby" appears as "Can't Get Enough Of You Baby" and "The Colour Field" is listed as "The Colourfield".

In 1999, the album was re-released in Japan with twenty tracks, including all of the songs on the UK and US versions of the album plus all of the singles, B-Sides and remixes that were released before and immediately after the original release of Virgins And Philistines.

In 2010, the album was reissued once again, this new version was released by Cherry Red and it included most of the bonus tracks of the 1999 version.

Track listing

Personnel