Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
For the best part of a decade Magnum had been considered one of the finest melodic/progressive rock bands that had come out of Britain during that period and especially one of the best to ever come out of the Midlands area by the time Wings of Heaven came out in July 1988.
Wings of Heaven sits well within the pantheon of Magnum albums, so much so that it could be considered as part of a cornucopia of great releases, a trilogy of excellence that started with the impressive and often quoted as the best Magnum album of all time, On A Storyteller’s Night, the 1986 Vigilante follow up and then in 1988 the album that spawned three singles and two of the great anthems of the era in Days Of No Trust, Don’t Wake The Lion (Too Old To Die Young). In fact so loved are these songs that to attend a Magnum gig, to watch Tony Clarkin, Bob Catley and Mark Stanway, the three remaining members who played on those three albums, perform them with the likes of Les Morts Dansant, Kingdom of Madness and Just Like An Arrow makes the gigs come alive and mixes the two definitive periods of the band’s history so well that at times you cannot see the join.
What makes Wings Of Heaven stand out though, as with every album the band have produced, is the pairing up of Tony Clarkin’s fantastic lyric writing and the flamboyant and invigorating style of Bob Catley delivering Tony’s vision. If two men can complement each other so much as the pairing of Clarkin and Catley do throughout their career then it would lead surely to a group having great success.
The album, the seventh release by the group, opens up with the fantastic Days of No Trust, of which even 25 years after the album stormed up the charts is an all too familiar, a constant refrain in a world that seems to becoming more fractured and divided. Instead of concentrating on what binds us, more and more we seem to lose faith in one another, the hatred seeps through and then all too soon the spectre of ideological war takes grip. Days Of No Trust is a great rallying call to abandon this way of life and to not listen to those that act as aggressors or those that ask you to hate someone for their belief, whether religious, based on an idea or what it normally comes down to is jealousy. Life is certainly far too short not to trust.
One of the most original songs on the album is the tantalising It Must Have Been Love. A track that tries to do something not really attempted by other rock groups and see the fall out of a relationship, of the one night stand, from the fragility of a woman’s point of view. So many rock groups at the time used the position that they found themselves in too talking about sex in such a way, whether in their lyrics or in interviews as if the last bastion, the final hurdle of what they had to achieve was to talk about who they had slept with as if prizes were being handed out for their supposed virility. In much the same way that footballers of the 21st Century have become synonymous with the idea of having their lives and those they come across plastered all over the pages of the tabloid press, then at one point rock also had its fair share of newspaper headlines.
How this affects the woman though is discussed by Tony Clarkin; the imagery of the woman treading a lonely road as she tries to find love in what can only be thought of as in the wrong places. There is the constant phrasing of the tracks title that is strewn all the way through the song as if suggesting that each time it happened the woman was making more excuses for herself, that she was only being used for one purpose ultimately made her sink into despair. It is a rare song that can be both sexually chilling and at the same time sound as if the music is relishing in its upbeat tone, a wonder of a track and one that too this day still stands out live.
The final track on the album is perhaps arguably the finest song on the album and one that at a Magnum gig gets the blood racing and the drum beat searing into those attending hearts. Don’t Wake The Lion (Too Old To Die Young) is a stirring song that is full of passion and in a career that stretches back some 35 years remains one of the best songs written by Tony Clarkin. Only Les Morts Dansant and On A Story Tellers Night have more imagery attached to the lyrics than Don’t Wake The Lion. The title of the track seems to suggest dichotomy of feeling. From one perspective the words, Don’t Wake The Lion, suggests that if you do stir the slumbering beast then the pain inflicted in retaliation will be of the kind in which nature epics are formed from, the big fight from the big cat and in which there can be only one winner. However the title also suggests that even if you do rouse the beast, there will be a thought in the back of the lion’s head which suggests the rage will be averted, that it knows the fight will be futile and ineffective. Live, as in the studio, it is a thing of beauty, of bestial virtue and one of the finest finishes to a record that the group ever laid down.
Wings Of Heaven remains the highest placed album in the U.K. charts to date with a huge top ten position. No small wonder with the great songs that infuse themselves into the recording. Out of the array of albums that the album released in their first great period and before they called it a day, for the time being, Wings Of Heaven sits comfortably in the top three albums released by the band between 1978 and 1994 with only the dramatic On A Storyteller’s Night and Vigilante being ahead of it in terms of scope and writing.
A superb album that doesn’t get the appreciation away from the millions of fans that the band have, the critics may not be kind but to this day Tony Clarkin deserves more credit from them for his agile and tremendous writing skill than he probably will ever receive. Not bad for a man who trained as a hair dresser in his youth.
Ian D. Hall