The Wrong People 2010 reissue (sleeve essay)

"And this time," as the album concludes with bitter-sweet optimism, "things will be different." And maybe they will. Or maybe they won't. Furniture's songs may still not reach millions of people, all of whom suddenly decide that what's missing from their music collection is a set of songs which combine intelligence, rhythm, emotion, subtlety, pop smarts, intricacy, romance, fatalism and slow-burning impact. Songs about real people falling in and out of love and sounds which fall in and out of fashion. Songs about things so wrong you don't want them to be right.

THE WRONG PEOPLE was first released in 1986. West London's Furniture had a hit with "Brilliant Mind" but then well-documented rotten luck with reality (a perfect storm of record company snarl-ups, mistakes and miscalculations, all entirely beyond the band's control, which would have been farcical if they weren't borderline tragic) thwarted their ascent. They returned three years later with the equally engrossing Food, Sex & Paranoia but momentum had been lost and Furniture had to settle for beloved cult status rather than riches and fame.

Furniture weren't exactly "Eighties". They never quite fitted in with the prevalent peacocks and pouters, preferring to dig deep, to look for truths and half-truths. Their songs are forever lifting up rocks to see what's underneath. In every track here, lyrics and structures and chosen means of expression eschew the obvious. There's a belief that great songs can both succour and challenge.

A quarter of a century on, the album sounds even better. "Shake Like Judy Says" sets the pace by not setting the pace. Somehow gripping and adrenalized yet morosely reflective, it yields fresh treasures upon every listen. It announces that The Wrong People may not have chosen to "organise a bunch of mindless tonics for your soul", not as its primary objective anyway. That said, "Love Your Shoes" is as happy as a colourfully-painted kite on a sunny day. Or perhaps not: under the exuberant surface, "the best time" we're all going to have is "the time of our worthless lives." It's a track which defies you not to crack a smile however. "Brilliant Mind", now routinely referred to as one of its decade's definitive songs, comes next, rumbling in, all drama and danger, roaring out, all desperation and derring-do.

"She Gets Out The Scrapbook", which later lent its name to a Furniture "Best Of", remains, for many fans, their masterpiece. A gradually building epic of memory, loss and repressed yearning, it is unconscionably strong. "Come on you big bad world, and entertain me," it whispers and hollers. "I Miss You" is no picnic either. Its desires and envies are channelled more positively through the exhilarating run of what used to be "the second side". "Make Believe I'm Him", "The Sound Of The Bell" and "Answer The Door" are messed-up Motown-meets-Morricone rushes of giddy pep. As ever with Furniture, they are subversive, their rhythms thrilling but their themes literary and twisted. "Let Me Feel Your Pulse" brings the razzmatazz, "Escape Into My Arms" is a shadowy seduction, both claustrophobic and cavernous. The finale, "Pierre's Fight", is a mini-movie of raging bulls and brave, if deluded, last stands.

Furniture weren't a lucky outfit but they were a great one, whose low-key legend should, in a just world, be revived and restored by this reissue. You won't, though, find The Wrong People in any of those generic lists of classic canonical albums. Which is how it should be. It'd be a terrible thing for this bible of outsiders and misfits to be embraced by mainstream mediocrity. Jim Irvin, Tim Whelan, Hamilton Lee, Sally Still and Maya Gilder were the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time, and somehow that's how truly magical, durable, beautiful things get done. Wrong is the new right.

Chris Roberts