| Track | Album |
|---|---|
| Catch The Sun | Lost Souls |
| There Goes The Fear | The Last Broadcast |
| Pounding | The Last Broadcast |
| Sky Starts Falling | Some Cities |
| Black And White Town | Some Cities |
| Kingdom Of Rust | Kingdom Of Rust |
| Winter Hill | Kingdom Of Rust |
| Prisoners | The Universal Want |
| A Drop In The Ocean | Constellations For The Lonely |
| The Cedar Room | Lost Souls |
l-r Jez Williams, Jimi Goodwin, Andy Williams (Photo Gie Knaeps)
Doves celebrated their 25th anniversary in 2025 with a new album, a new compilation and a tour. A quarter of a century of epic landscapes and introspection, pounding beats and soul-searching questions.
Twenty-five years is a huge achievement but they feel like they’ve been around longer and in a sense they have; Sub Sub with the same line-up through the 90s preceded Doves by seven years and a few hits. Doves feel like they have grown out of Britpop – in both senses of that phrase. A studio fire forced a re-set and a reinvention as a guitar band but they didn’t sound like those who went before (say, Oasis) or those who came after like the Arctic Monkeys.
Perhaps their closest peers are their friends Elbow, another band who took a long time and many setbacks to break through. But Doves are more hypnotic. Their signature sound retains an element of the loops and beats that characterised their work as Sub Sub so there is euphoria at the heart of their best songs.
Euphoria but not always optimism.
Catch The Sun is a good example. Superficially it could be a souped-up Dodgy song until you hear the lyrics: “Here it comes, up in smoke and gone”. Not a feel-good hit of the summer but a song about parting, fleeting moments and managing expectations.
A lot of Doves songs are about trying to be grounded in a world that’s speeding past, where people and places are left behind or out of reach. There Goes The Fear – “Let it go. You turned around and life’s passed you by”. It’s not Frozen that’s for sure. And nor is Pounding, Dead Poet’s Society: “It won’t last forever/seize the time/It’s now or never baby”.
Much more urgent and a bit more bleak. Relationships have gaps and absences even when you want there to be connection – “if you see her again be sure to say hello” (Sky Starts Falling). They could be the most depressing band but there’s a sense of coping and making good in what they do. The great hooks and melodies help a lot.
Sometimes hopes and dreams are washed out by the nothingness of your surroundings. Doves are far from being the first band to want to escape from satellite towns (Black And White Town) or a post-industrial Kingdom Of Rust.
In Doves songs the interior landscape of the mind merges with the bleak exterior. Landscapes go on seemingly forever until you get lost or meet an obstacle. Sometimes the landscapes can be pinpointed – Winter Hill most obviously. This is place that has inspired other bands to trek there too. A Certain Ratio got there first in 1981.
In lockdown, travel was restricted. So, Prisoners was released in 2020 and seems to be about the perennial Doves theme of being trapped in one’s own thoughts and behaviour. It was on the first Doves album in eleven years, though sounding very much as they’d left off.
Last year, Constellations For The Lonely was released to some of their best ever reviews. A Drop In The Ocean was one of the key singles from the record. Sadly, singer Jimi Goodwin was not well enough to undertake the accompanying tour and the band were fully open about the circumstances, every bit as honest and mature as their music.
Discussion of mental health, and especially men’s mental health, has come on a long way in the twenty-five years in which Doves have been making music. In their own way, they’ve helped listeners feel less alone and more understood and their own honesty grows out of that. In The Cedar Room, from the first album, perhaps their best song of all, “it’s a crime to feel”. Every Doves song proves the opposite. Here’s to the next twenty-five years.
No.3 in the UK Singles Chart in April 2002
Third single from ‘Some Cities’ (UK No.45)
Doves studio albums to date: Lost Souls (2000), The Last Broadcast (2002), Some Cities (2005), Kingdom Of Rust (2009), The Universal Want (2020), Constellations For The Lonely (2025)
Chris Butcher has been a music fan since hearing Mott The Hoople on the radio in 1973. A regular gig-goer and record buyer he’s as likely to be listening to Beethoven as Big Special. He’s usually found writing policy papers for charities, currently on adult education and previously on arts, health, the environment and local government. This is his first Toppermost. You can find Chris occasionally posting, mostly about music, on Bluesky.
TopperPost #1,189
Peter Case
Submit a Comment