Burning Bushes And Burning Bridges

Back in the early 90s I spent a couple of years living in a town called Southend On Sea. I moved there a month before I turned 17, and I never really felt at home there, but I did get kinda lucky as it did have a pretty good skateboard and music scene back then. Southend is a fairly small place and in a pretty dead end location, but back in 1993 it was home to a group of kids who started a couple of bands and made a huge impact on the UK hardcore scene. The most successful of these bands was Understand. In a short space of time, Understand got signed by a major label, and opened for pretty much every big US hardcore band that came over to the UK, including Farside, Sick Of It All, and Helmet. For a UK band at that time, they did pretty well, playing some shows in the States, and recording an EP 7" with Don Fury that got released by Equal Vision Records as well as the major label. The culmination of their efforts was a full length, 'Burning Bushes And Burning Bridges', which came out on EastWest Records on CD only back in 1995.

Well, during the early stages of lockdown back in April I was listening to their album whilst fannying about with some dumbbells, and I posted something on instagram to say '25 years later and I'm still hoping this may still come out on vinyl at some point'. And then by coincidence, a couple of days later, it was announced that it was going to be put out on vinyl for the fist time ever by a German label called Thirty Something Records. I placed an order quick smart and this week it showed up.

This was put out as a small run of 300 copies, with two different colours of vinyl. The first is clear orange with black marble, limited to 150.

The second colour is clear with black marble (although looks more like a clear brown), and is also limited to 150 copies.

Here's a pic showing both copies next to each other. I like that the colours nicely match the cover, although it would have been nice to see two colours that weren't so similar.

The record also comes in a printed inner sleeve with lyrics, and there's a separate insert with other photos and artwork from the original CD layout.

I was always a big fan of this band. At such a young age and it was cool to see a bunch of local kids achieve so much. At the time it felt like US bands were miles ahead of UK bands, but Understand were one of a small number of bands who I thought were on the par with what was coming out of the States at the time. They were always compared to Quicksand and Fugazi, which to this day still seems fair. But for some reason they didn't seem to make it as big as they perhaps should have done. I think they just didn't quite fit into any scene so left some people confused. They probably weren't 'hardcore' enough for the straight edge hardcore kids, but by contrast were too hardcore for the post hardcore / alternative rock scene, and too melodic for the metal kids. But musically they were incredibly good, and at the time I was just blown away by how good a UK band could be. However, after a successful and exciting couple of years from 93-95 that culminated with this LP being released, things went a bit quieter. I think they kicked around for a couple of years but didn't release much else, and then ended up breaking up. I don't really know or remember when or how they called it quits, but it seemed like they just faded away. It may have been something to do with the major label, but I just don't know.

A couple of the members have gone on to have pretty cool careers in the music industry. Dom (the singer) became tour manager for Muse, who play stadium shows and huge festivals and generally do pretty well, and Rob (guitarist) became the lighting manager for Iron Maiden. Not bad for band from a small seaside town.