Luxuria

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For the italian showwoman and politician, see Vladimir Luxuria

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Luxuria is also a genus of jumping spiders.

Howard Devoto's most significant musical contribution since the break-up of Magazine in 1981, Luxuria saw him pairing his sharp wit and tuneless vocals with Liverpudlian multi-instrumentalist Noko. Though sounding rather Japanese, this name is a local take on "Norman", his full name being Norman Fisher-Jones. They met through Pete Shelley, supposedly bonding over a competition to read Marcel Proust (Noko won).

The result was explicitly manifest in the song Mlle, which opens with a reading (in French) from A L'Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs. Not exactly rock'n'roll perhaps, but with Luxuria this pair found an exciting blend of riff-based rock, prog structures, snarling world-weary punk cynicism, and sweeping arrangements. Of course this laid them open to charges of pretension, even if Devoto anticipates and possibly defuses them when he declares "I'm no place for pretence or protocol" in "Public Highway" and even more tongue-in-cheekily "I lay it on pretty thick, you spread yourself pretty thin" in "Mlle". Still, lines like "good evening, I am the madman in love with your daughter" live on long after the reactionary critical ink has faded.

Redneck, released as a single in 1988, was an ego-fuelled rant in the same vein as some of the better Magazine material. "It'll be too late by the time they put me on TV", he fumed. So it was perhaps appropriate (paradox being his stock-in-trade) that this song coincided with a Luxuria music video, shot simply on stage as if in live performance. Devoto's physical presence is searing. "I make no use of effects, no use of clever counterbalancing acts." Nor does he need them.

A memorable track from the album Unanswerable Lust is Celebrity, a song which captures the paranoia of stardom. Lines like "tell me will there be a dressing room, and will there be shadows at the aeroport" are accompanied by rousing guitar riffs and an energy both nasty and groovy.

The second album, 1990's Beast Box, was confusingly preceded by a single with similar title, The Beast Box Is Dreaming, versions of which bracket the remainder of the album, and had each of its tracks rendered also as music videos that were released together with the box set. Here the boundary between silly and profound slides a little much to the former, and the sound gets a bit too close to danceteria for some tastes. But there is still a marked dread, and musical innovations are thick on the ground. Against The Past is an exercise in post-punk restraint until the guitar soars free; Ticket is a warped ballad (starting with the line "oh brutal bimbo beauty", and yes, Howard, we know what you mean); Dirty Beating Heart and Smoking Mirror infuse cabaret into the proceedings; and Karezza is a hymn to the atomic.

The CD version of the album includes a cover of Jezebel, lifted from the final Luxuria release. Other significant non-album tracks include a cover of Bob Dylan's She's Your Lover Now, at that time available only on bootlegs. This take has lyrics reformulated and re-invented by a singer not afraid to risk blasphemy.

After all, Luxuria is a sin, one of "self-indulgent sexual desire". Appropriately named then, this collaboration stands as one of the high points of pop music in the nineties.

The further activities of the band members can be found in their respective biographies: