Chameleons

Certain sonic vertigos are not content to graze the ear distractedly: they demand a carnal toll, a tribute of blood, nerves and memory that very few bands in the history of British rock have known how to exact with the romantic ferocity of the Chameleons.
It's precisely in the twilight of 1986 that this tension reaches its absolute paroxysm with the release of "Strange Times", a work that isn't simply an album but an emotional black hole disguised as a masterpiece. To map the coordinates of this dark gem, one must plunge into the Manchester of the mid-Eighties, a leaden industrial ecosystem that had already spawned the epitaph of Joy Division and cradled the bittersweet indie-pop of the Smiths, yet leaving Mark Burgess and co. in a no man's land: eternal outsiders, too complex for the nascent chart-pop of the day, too muscular for the more decadent strains of gothic rock, and perpetually plagued by an endemic bad luck that would culminate, not long after, in the tragic and untimely death of their manager and mentor Tony Fletcher — an event that would mark the band's collapse right at the peak of their creative splendour.

Signed to the unlikely major label Geffen, "Strange Times" is the third and final piece of their classic trilogy (following the feats of the milestone Script Of The Bridge and of "What Does Anything Mean? Basically"), a record that defies the laws of record-industry gravity by refusing every commercial compromise, raising instead a conceptual and sonic edifice of frightening density — a genuine existential testament in which the malaise of an entire generation is dissected under the microscope. Technically, the album's architecture rests on a groundbreaking acoustic miracle: the guitar dualism between Dave Fielding and Reg Smithies, who dismantle the very idea of the riff to weave webs of interlocking arpeggios, flooding their pick-ups with waves of analogue chorus, flanger and delay that chase each other in a perpetual counter-melody, building cathedrals of reverb on which the rhythm section crashes down like a storm; John Lever's drumming is tribal, telluric, a hammering vital pulse that counterbalances the liquidity of the guitars, while Burgess's bass simultaneously serves as the backbone for compositions that stretch traditional sound until it brushes against dark psychedelia. It is within this monumental wall of sound that Mark Burgess's voice stands out — a lacerated, feverish baritone, capable of declaiming his verses with the fervour of a preacher lost in a crumbling metropolis, delivering lyrics that are genuine razor-cuts of urban poetry.

The emotional analysis of the record reaches heights of unbearable clarity in manifesto-tracks like "Soul in Isolation", a claustrophobic nightmare in which the guitars paint deranged geometries and Burgess howls his disconnection from the world: "I'm alive in here/ But is there anyone out there?" — which, translated into the raw language of our own experience, resounds like a desperate "Sono vivo qui dentro/ Ma c'è qualcuno là fuori?" — a line that alone sums up the dramatic rift between the thinking individual and the alienation of a cold, consumerist society, turning incommunicability into a stadium anthem sung in an empty cathedral.
The absolute peak of this tension between ecstasy and abyss, however, materialises in the seven minutes of "Swamp Thing", a masterpiece within the masterpiece, where a guitar riff that rings out like an alien music box opens the door to a devastating, unstoppable rhythmic crescendo, over which the author paints a merciless portrait of disillusionment with lines of piercing beauty: “And suddenly the storm comes/ Or is it just another shower?/ And the storm breaks/ I thought it would last for hours”, words that translate as “E all’improvviso arriva la tempesta/ O è soltanto l’ennesimo acquazzone?/ E la tempesta scoppia/ Pensavo sarebbe durata per ore”. In that question lies the whole neurosis of post-punk, the poetic transposition of an apocalyptic wait, of an epochal change both longed for and feared, which resolves tragically into the mediocrity and deceit of a passing storm — a brilliant metaphor for a plastic-coated decade that betrayed the promises of rebellion.

"Strange Times" is a mosaic of these dazzling insights, a record steeped in nostalgia for a lost innocence — beautifully evoked in the acoustic textures of "Tears" and "Childhood" — and permeated by the awareness of having to inhabit strange times indeed, where the collapse of ideologies leaves man alone before the distorting mirror of his own psyche. Conceived with an almost obsessive musicological rigour and lived out with a sincerity bordering on masochism, this swan song of the Chameleons survives today not only as an unavoidable monolith of the Eighties, but as a lifeboat for all those souls who, isolated in the storm, seek in the purity of sound the only true, possible catharsis.

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13/09/2026