Ireland In 50 Albums, No 19: Sacred Heart Hotel, by the Stars of Heaven
The Stars of Heaven's finest moment was Sacred Heart Hotel.
In Rough Trade: Labels Unlimited, Rob Young writes that the records released by the Stars of Heaven on the famed record label, “displayed crafted songwriting in a gentle, Celtic country mode that echoed the pastoral side of The Byrds.”
As Young’s description suggests, the Stars of Heaven sounded nothing like other Irish bands in the mid-1980s. They shared a love of Big Star, Emmylou Harris and Gram Parsons. They had listened to Almost Blue, Elvis Costello’s covers album of country music songs, and wanted to emulate it.
The Stars of Heaven were Stephen Ryan on vocals and guitar, Stan Erraught on guitar, Peter O’Sullivan on bass guitar and Bernard Walsh on drums. Stephen and Stan both wrote songs and Stephen sang them. Sacred Heart Hotel, the band’s first album, was released by Rough Trade in September 1986, it reached No. 11 in the UK Indie Albums Chart. Its seven songs are just 21 minutes in duration – probably the shortest album in this series.
The band were formed in Dublin in 1983. “Our first gig was in Carlow which was pretty terrible and I think the next time we played was in what was then The Ivy Rooms, now Fibber McGees,” recalls Erraught.
“It was put together by someone from NCAD. It was a long bill of artists including My Bloody Valentine, that was when they were still very gothy.” They released their debut 7” single on Hotwire Records in 1985. John Peel, the famed BBC DJ, started playing the single on his show and one night as ‘Clothes of Pride’, the single’s A-Side, faded out Peel asked, “If any of the Stars of Heaven are listening I should like to know more about you.” Word reached the band and they were offered a BBC session for Peel’s programme.
“We did the Peel Session in January of 1986,” says Erraught. “Once the session went out we started getting some serious phone calls from people in record companies. One of the people who got in touch was Geoff Travis who said that he loved the session and that he just wanted to put it out as it was because he didn’t think we could do any better.”
Rough Trade’s Geoff Travis remembers the band: “I never thought of The Stars of Heaven as a commercial proposition, just a marvellous band.” The radio exposure led to gig offers for the Stars of Heaven. “We spent quite a lot of 1986 touring Britain, up and down the country,” says Erraught.
“We were always a bit ropey live but some of our best gigs were actually on those tours. We were always good in Bristol and we were always good in Manchester, or I’m just forgetting the bad ones. We never played a decent gig in London. We always managed to be at about half throttle when we had to do the serious work of impressing record companies.”
Travis remembers some of those London gigs. “Live I thought they let themselves down by not being able to project their singing voices in a convincing way above the music,” he says.
“Perhaps they were just cursed by not being at their best when I came to see them. But they were wonderful songwriters and I found their blissful melancholia really moving.”
Travis wanted to release the four songs from the Peel Session but the band had other ideas. “I think the idea originally was that we would do an EP on Rough Trade, we’d get a record out and that would give us time to negotiate something different, something better,” explains Erraught.
“We were writing a lot at this point, it was the one time when Stephen and I were both reasonably prolific and we had new songs and we asked if we could do a few more songs. We did those upstairs in Litton Lane with Chris O’Brien - who later went on to be the man who masterminded Irish pop.”
O’Brien would go on to produce records for Aslan, The Stunning, A House, Something Happens and countless others. “I hadn’t met the guys before the recording session, but I was aware of the Peel Session and the ‘Clothes of Pride’ single on Hotwire,” says O’Brien.
“The Flying Burrito Brothers and Don Dixon and Mitch Easter’s work with REM was in my head at the time and I remember the session being mainly recorded live in the small bedroom sized recording room. I loved the relaxed vibe and especially the guitar sounds and vocal melodies. The band had a very clear picture of what they wanted and also what they didn’t want - definitely not the crashing 80s drum sound of the time.”
O’Brien also saw The Stars of Heaven play in the Dame Street venue that hosted nearly every late-80s Dublin band. “I saw them live in the Underground once,” he remembers. “They were ploughing a different furrow than the bombastic and shiny nature of the rest of the posse.”
The Catalogue, the music trade magazine, alluded to that different furrow writing that The Stars of Heaven, “have been riding a crest of a wave around Dublin and London, infecting audiences with their highly charged blend of pop and country crackers.” Positive reviews flowed in. Music Week declared the album, “a stormer, from the first delicate chimes of the title track to the more full-blooded exercises on the second side it’s a winner, with its brevity only serving to tantalise for further playings.”
Sacred Heart Hotel was followed in March 1987 by the Holyhead EP, which reached No. 5 in the UK Indie Singles Chart, before the band started work on their second album, Speak Slowly. Those sessions were completed by Stephen Street, then best known for his work with Rough Trade’s biggest band - The Smiths.
“Rough Trade were straight to deal with, they told you the truth,” says Erraught. “Geoff was honest that he wanted to get rid of us, to move us on to another label. But he did undertake that if that didn’t work he’d put out another record, which he did. We spent too long on that record, we could have made it for half the price. I still have mixed feelings about that record.”
In late 1989 Chris O’Brien was back engineering a session for the band that was produced by REM producer Mitch Easter for a proposed third album on Mother Records. The release never happened and by early 1990 The Stars of Heaven broke up.
For many Sacred Heart Hotel is the purest representation of the band. “The album shows them in their rawest form with very little influence from outside producers,” says O’Brien. “It’s a true snapshot of the band at that time.” Erraught agrees.“I know Sacred Heart Hotel is only seven songs but I think it was a piece of work that sort of summed up the band.”
For Travis, it’s even simpler, “I really love the Stars of Heaven and still listen to them every now and again.”
- Paul McDermott’s podcast To Here Knows When – Great Irish Albums Revisited is available on all listening platforms. https://www.paulmcdermott.ie/podcast
- Stephen Ryan formed The Revenants and released two highly acclaimed albums: Horse of a Different Colour (1993) and Septober Nowonder (1999). In 2016 he released Look Away Down Collins Avenue with his latest band, The Drays.
- Stan Erraught joined The Sewing Room who also released two highly regarded albums: And Nico (1995) and Sympathy For the Dishevelled (1997). He is now a lecturer at the University of Leeds.
