It's New To Me: Positively George Street by Sneaky Feelings (1999)

Photo of Pablo Picasso from LIFE Magazine by Gjon Mili, 1949

When I watched Heavenly Pop Hits, the documentary on the Flying Nun/Dunedin music scene of New Zealand in the '80s, I realized there was a major player in the scene that I'd never heard of. I've been a fan of the Flying Nun scene for a while, and I really enjoy the Clean, the Chills, the Bats, Bailter Space, and the Tall Dwarfs. I'd buy the Verlaines albums if they were in print. But who are Sneaky Feelings? The description and snippets in the documentary pressed all the right buttons - wussy, jangly, lyrical, overlooked. I went out and tracked down the only CD the band has in print, Positively George Street, an expansive best-of disc that covers the three albums and assorted singles they released between 1982 and 1988.

They turned out to be a harder sell than I thought. For one thing, I was not prepared for the blue-eyed soul approach that is a big part of their songwriting - it's not exactly Rick Astley or Hall & Oates, but it reminds me of bad '80s radio a little more than I'm used to. Also, I find that it's hard to get a handle on the Sneakys because there were four songwriters in the band. All of them had noteworthy entries in the band's oeuvre, but Matthew Bannister and David Pine wrote the lion's share of the band's songs. Bannister wrote the band's catchiest songs, including their sole charting single, "Husband House", but he wasn't really a natural frontman. Pine, apparently, was the charismatic natural leader of the group but shied away from the role, possibly because he perceived Bannister as the superior talent. The result of this situation is a set of songs that are a little tentative and not terribly cohesive.

But Sneaky Feelings (a reference to the Elvis Costello song) is a good choice of name for this band because the songs did sneak up on me. And it really is all about the feelings communicated in the songs with these guys. NZ musician Graeme Downes, who worked with the Sneakys, famously said, "To like the Sneakys you had to appreciate the songs first and foremost, and had to be prepared to forego all the other aspects that are usually the hallmark of the successful rock and roll package." They were concerned with mundane relationships in a decidedly non-rock-n-roll way - three of their best songs deal with the feelings surrounding getting married ("Hard Love", "Better Than Before", and their hit "Husband House".) "Better Than Before" is a good example of the Sneakys approach to lyric-oriented pop, creating a sketch of a couple with mundane problems and commitment issues. He describes the moment of new awareness of a relationship's problems as waking up from a dream, but it's his decision of what to do in that moment that is interesting. "I looked around, went back to sleep. Now I don't know why, but it's better than it was before."

"Better Than Before" by Sneaky Feelings