Sneak of the Week: Horizontal Brian, “Over We Go Lightly”

An off-kilter anthem from ‘80s underdogs you need to know better.

The arch, inventive bursts of oddball energy that emerged from Horizontal Brian in the early ‘80s would slot them snugly into a spot somewhere between Squeeze and XTC. The British foursome possessed a blend of unerring pop instincts and left-field leanings analogous to those acts. And your humble scribe here might win a spot on the Mount Rushmore of music journalism if he can complete this article without resorting to the term “quirky.” But the band fell through the cracks too quickly, leaving only one album behind. Fortunately, it’s a bit of a banger.

Like a lot of their New Wave contemporaries, the boys from Horizontal Brian started out as art rockers in the mid ‘70s. Singer/bassist Tony Phillips, guitarist Ian Peppercorn, keyboardist Brian Rudd, and drummer John Butters were all part of Gypp. The band gigged and recorded for several years, but only released one 45, and is best known today for having included Martin Newell of Cleaners from Venus fame as a frontman.

By 1980, after burning through a couple of different singers, they decided to reinvent themselves as the quartet Horizontal Brian, sanding off the proggy tendencies in favor of a sharper, more modernistic approach, with Phillips handling singer/songwriter chores.

Nabbing a deal with music-biz macher Danny Goldberg’s A&M-distributed Gold Mountain Records, the band released its only LP, Vertical, an explosion of slightly skewed creativity festooned with hooks and unexpected turns. Legendary songwriter Graham Gouldman of 10cc was the mixing engineer.

The single off the album was the perky, poppy “Practicing First Aid.” But perhaps even more irresistible is “Over We Go Lightly.” With its herky-jerky, ska-adjacent rhythm, football-chant chorus, and odd timing, it feels like it could be the soundtrack to either a screwball comedy or some subversively outré animated series. Especially during the instrumental break, where Rudd’s keyboards and Peppercorn’s guitar sound like they’re chasing each other around Pee Wee’s Playhouse.

It’s the kind of thing that can make you wistful for the days of Split Enz and Oingo Boingo. But it wasn’t meant to last—lack of traction soon led to a band breakup. Phillips found fabulous success as an engineer for a jaw-dropping array of artists, including Pete Townshend, Seal, Joni Mitchell, Nick Lowe, Tom Jones, and countless others, not to mention composing soundtrack music. Peppercorn and Rudd, who had been a team in the unfortunately named Lord Bernard’s Baby Brown Bash Band, worked together and individually in a number of other bands, eventually starting the duo Trash Humanica, which remains active today. Their latest album, Hiding from Da Vinci, appeared just last year.

And as for “Over We Go Lightly,” it’s not insignificant that just last year, when Phillips, who never abandoned his musician hat, put out the solo album Backward Glance (another ‘25 release), that song was one of the two Vertical tracks he reworked. Turns out the tune still has legs 40-plus years later.

-Jim Allen

Fair use image of Horizontal Brian, Vertical