The somewhat unexpected return of The Adventures is the kind of good news that 2025 could well do with. Although there have been a couple of reformations for gigs in their native Belfast in the intervening years, the band’s last album was 1993’s hugely underrated Lions And Tigers And Bears, a record which showcased the ‘quality not quantity’ approach of the group. It ended with the devastating ‘Say I’m Sorry’ and the jaunty closer ‘Perfect Day’, which married some quite melancholy lyrics with obstensibly sunny music, something of an Adventures trademark and really the ideal swansong, if that was indeed what it came to be.
So, to The Adventures (2025 version) – and we still have Pat Gribben (guitarist and main songwriter, but also handling pretty much all of the music these days), and two fine vocalists in Terry Sharpe and Eileen Gribben. Bassist Tony Ayre, the other member of the previous incarnation, sadly passed away in 2009. And when the album starts with the upbeat ‘My Imaginary Girlfriend’, those last three decades fall away and reveal a revitalised outfit. Sharpe’s vocals have a slightly more lived-in feel these days than the almost angelic sound of those 80s and 90s days, but he can still soar like the best of them. As before, he takes lead vocal duties on the whole, but Eileen Gribben takes centre stage for the first time on an Adventures album track, on the very touching L.U.C.Y. (a song written in memory of niece Lucy McIlhatton). It brings another dimension to the band’s feel and if heard in isolation, would not really sound like an Adventures song, However, it fits in nicely at the centre of the album and after a few listens, it’s hard to imagine the new record without it. The song is actually a co-write with Cathy Dennis that was originally intended for S Club 7, as unlikely as that may seem!
‘With The Cats’ is another highlight and has a really Summery Beach Boys feel (I played it loud in the car on one of the first sunny days of the year and imagined I was driving down Route 66, although in reality I was driving to B&M to buy some plastic boxes). The key changes at the end are lovely, and knowing from the sleeve notes that the album was born in lockdown, the lyrics potentially point to that odd time (“Me and you / In the back yard / With the cats / All that Summer me and you”). ‘When The Sun Goes Down’ is another faster-than-usual one for them, built around Gribben’s acoustic guitar and those backing vocals again apply a sweetness to the sound. ‘Love Talk’ is another track that sounds like a single – they actually all do – and keeps with the more uptempo feel of the record.
Pat Gribben has revealed that the first song to come for the album was ‘The Hanging Tree’ and described the process of writing it as ‘running the rusty water until the clear stuff flows’ – if that makes it sound like the weakest track on the album, then in honesty it is just that. It’s not that it’s a bad song, but sounds more like something that The La’s might have come up with and sounds a bit out of place on this record.
For me, the band’s forte is in sparkling, sophisticated pop music – it’s still staggering that singles like ‘Feel The Raindrops’ and ‘Send My Heart’ from 1985’s wonderful debut Theodore and Friends weren’t massive hits (in the same way that Prefab Sprout, Talk Talk and The Blue Nile routinely missed the Top 40 around the same time with classic songs), and Once More With Feeling has a lot of those great, classic Adventures moments. As the album closes out with the excellent ‘To Whom It Concerns’, it is to be hoped that it isn’t 32 years until the next one!
Once More With Feeling is released on Cherry Red on 28th March 2025.
