St Johns Wood Affair: "Memory Lane" Gets Its Own Visualiser
A standout track from the band's second album 2 draws on a childhood spent in the shadow of Badfinger's darkest chapter. Watch the new visualiser now.
Woodham Lane is a quiet residential street in Woking, Surrey. It's the kind of place where nothing much happens, which is precisely what makes it so haunting when you know what did. Pete Ham of Badfinger lived and died there in April 1975, hanging himself in his garage at twenty-seven after years of being financially gutted by the band's management. Down the other end of the road, roughly a decade later, bassist Tom Evans did the same. Two members of the same band, on the same street, destroyed by the same industry that made "Without You" a worldwide hit and kept every penny.
Keith Smart of St Johns Wood Affair grew up on that street. He was a schoolboy when Ham died a few doors down. His friends' parents later bought Tom Evans' house; the first thing they did was cut down the tree.
"Memory Lane" isn't called "Woodham Lane," but that's where it lives. The track, from St Johns Wood Affair's second album 2 (out now on Think Like A Key Music), is Smart's reflection on the street that shaped him, filtered through the band's hazy, jangly psych-pop lens. It's a fragile piano-led piece with a melodic ache that sits somewhere between wistfulness and grief, the sort of song that knows exactly how heavy its subject is and chooses gentleness over grandstanding.
The new visualiser uses generative video to take the viewer on a walk down the lane itself. It's a fitting approach for a song built on memory rather than narrative: impressionistic, slightly unreal, the familiar made strange in the way that returning to childhood places always is.
2, the band's second album, was recorded raw with zero digital polish, a ramshackle analogue document of a group rooted in the golden age of British psychedelia. St Johns Wood Affair emerged from a 2004 encounter at a Spanish psych festival, where Smart and company shared a stage with Nirvana (the 1960s psych pioneers, not the grunge trio) and received the personal blessing of Patrick Campbell-Lyons. The album has drawn praise from the psych and power pop press, with Brian Shea of Monolith Cocktail calling it "an enjoyable and fun listen, especially for us who are still in love with the 60s sound."
