A near-invisible presence on the margins of underground pop, Simon Rivers is well into his fourth decade of making sweet, powerful, crushing records – with the Last Party, the Bitter Springs and now Oldfield Youth Club. Weaving the messy threads of suburban life into dense tapestries, he has something of the Go-Betweens' gift for melody, something of Mark E Smith’s ear for language, something of Vic Godard’s common touch, and almost none of the acclaim that should have been his due. Boo hoo.

The Bitter Springs’ sullen, majestic fourth album, (Suburban Crimes Of) Every Happiness, should have been a word-of-mouth sensation when it was released (on CD only on Guy Sirman’s Dishy label) in 2001, but one way or another there were no mouths, no words. The music papers had the Strokes and the Libertines to write about; the Bitter Springs – a bunch of shambling middle-aged men from the western fringes of London – stood no chance. “My songs are the things they leave out of history books,” Rivers says with a shrug. “We never really fitted in with any musical movements. We were as outside of any industry as you could get. We were completely ignored by record labels. We really were the epitome of Independent DIY.”

It had always been that way. A compulsive songwriter since his teens, Rivers left school at 15 (“the deputy head told me not to waste everyone’s time by bothering with any exams”) and made a stream of homemade tapes of his songs in his dad’s garage along with his future wife Kim Ashford and Daniel Ashkenazy. After a short stint with Steve Infield (he overheard Rivers playing guitar while cleaning the neighbours’ windows), Neil Palmer joined as the Last Party’s permanent drummer. The band self-released two albums and recorded two John Peel Sessions but never really topped their 1987 debut single “Mr Hurst” being made Single of the Week in the Melody Maker.

Sensing their card was marked, the band decided to reboot as the Bitter Springs in the 1990s. “We wanted to be heard afresh,” Rivers explains. It was a ploy that seemingly paid off. For a brief post-Britpop moment, the Bitter Springs had what to the outside world might have seemed like a public profile. 1997’s magnificent “It’s Business” got regular plays on the NME office stereo, while “A Good Provider” was Single Of The Week in the same magazine the following year. However, while the core Springs – Rivers, drummer Palmer, bassist Ashkenazy and keyboards man Paul “The Wizard” Baker – plugged away, their first three albums (From The Parish Of Arthritis, Five Die Filming This Lazy Lark and Benny Hill’s Wardrobe) successfully evaded wider acclaim.

“Since 1997, we had made an LP a year with great things expected for all of them and were always disappointed when we’d get barely a radio play and a couple of reviews,” Rivers says. “I was always a bit down after each one, as they take a lot out of me personally. but I’d be: ‘Fuck it: on to the next one that’ll be better received’.”

When it came to Every Happiness, that certainly should have been the case. If previous Bitter Springs LPs could seem like random explosions of material, this one carried a more considered heft. Released the year Rivers turned 40, it was – deliberately or otherwise – a no-budget parallel to Pulp’s midlife cry for help, This Is Hardcore; an infra-red goggled view through the darkness on the edge of town.

“I was working in Hampton for Royal Mail as a postman (still am), living with Kim Ashford (now Rivers) and our son Chaz who was ten then,” Rivers says. “Going into the Suburban Crimes recordings we were as optimistic and excited as ever,  maybe even more so, as we managed to get two musical heroes of ours – Julian Swales and Dan Goodwin from Kitchens of Distinction – to come and play some drums and guitars on a few of the tracks. They were amazing.”

However, if the mood was positive (new drummer Paul McGrath and violinist Andy Gwatkin fleshing out the sound), Every Happiness is spiked with sourness as it depicts a two-up two-down world of scything rage undercut by bitter disappointment. The bloodthirsty Neighbourhood Watch crew of “Muggers Take A Beating” snap at each other over expenses claims; the self-hating Lothario of “Me And Your Wife” reflects on having fruitlessly “searched the whole world for love and found convenience”. The sweet and tender maniac of “Bloodletting”, meanwhile, justifies his explosive rages with sob stories (“I am a vicious man, but I’ve paid for what I am”).

Made by men of advancing years, Every Happiness also carries the horrible, Larkinesque knowledge that time is passing; quietly, relentlessly. Rivers’ superannuated 3AM raver hits an unflattering epiphany on “Club Amnesia” (“Nobody nobody NOBODY knows who you are”), while middle age bites hard on the album’s gigantic centrepiece “Vagina Trees With Penis Leaves” (“my “Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands’”, says Rivers). Over an undulating accordion backing, the man in the mirror sees how “the ghosts of a thousand cooked breakfasts took on jellied human form”, and realises in a riveting torrent of memories and reflections that life is accelerating remorselessly away: old-school Chelsea fans, children, Britney Spears, the Spice Girls, Big Brother contestants and small-town high streets all destined for the same cosmic dumper.

However, if Every Happiness is grave-dark at times, the Bitter Springs always offer some redeeming hope. With its Playschool melody and day-glo kids chorus, the optimistic single “Stop The World” may be their “Shiny Happy People”, their “Come On Eileen”. Meanwhile, “Dark Force In The Wintertime” – Magazine by way of Jacques Brel – views everyday annoyances with the righteous certainty that all gloom is fleeting, Rivers concluding sagely: “You’d never have known what the good days meant without these to measure against.”

Whether that was a guiding ethos or a comforting white lie is hard to discern. Rivers’ songs are hard to pin down; scraps of stolen conversation, local paper puns, misleading asides and philosophical lighting strikes. His knockabout meditation on parenting, “Vlad The Inhaler”, is typically all over the place, home makeover show Ground Force entering into his concern about “raising would-be killers”, before he hits on his chilly fatherhood mantra: “To hold on, you let go.”

However, Every Happiness is not a record that releases old hurts quite so happily, its closing one-two representing some kind of Bitter Springs pinnacle. Rivers is wary of revealing too much about the wistful “Blimey! Drought Sky” (“I carry a lot of family sadness and this is one of those outpourings,” he explains). However, this wide-eyed survey of the ruins of a broken marriage is painfully vivid, Rivers’ disbelieving protagonist stunned at how love’s transcendent passion dissolved into unbridled hatred (“you broke my nose, I only broke your heart”). It is an all-consuming loss that leaves a timely death as the brightest thing on the horizon. “Only one thing to hope for,” Rivers concludes. “You go before the children.”

With closer “Dead Lions”, the Bitter Springs pan out from that micro-drama. A gaunt mood piece illuminated by Baker’s chilly washes of keyboards, it spins out of those semi-detached windows to survey England at its meanest. Rivers hints that it is a song about “the death of children”, but with its allusions to “mob rule UK”, it seems as much a portrayal of the mean-spiritedness of a world consumed by its own tiny tragedies. Scornful of the suffering of others, England’s proud lions are no longer sleeping; their hearts have turned permanently chilly.

Response to Suburban Crimes on its release was not much warmer. “Aside from a few discerning listeners, it died a death out there in the cold, cruel world,” Rivers remembers. “I don’t think one track was ever played on the radio. In fact, I think I had a bit of a proper breakdown after this one and it took another five years to get the next LP, That Sentimental Slush, finished.”

Given how much he had put into Suburban Crimes, Rivers’ was right to despair, but a record that belonged so tenuously to its own age remains substantially untouched by the passing years. It prefigures nothing and influenced no one, but in its tiny way, continues to resonate.

“Grayson Perry was on the box last night and he had people send him pictures of the view from their windows during lockdown,” Rivers reflected as COVID-19 washed over the UK. “They were all great, all different, and maybe that’s a good analogy for this LP. Anyone else wouldn’t be able to make it because, for all its merits and faults, it’s what I see out of the window.”

The view, needless to say, is something else.

JIM WIRTH, 2020