The record
At a glance
- Artist
- The Pretty Things
- Released
- 9 March 1999
- Album
- First new band studio album since Cross Talk
- Original tracks
- Fourteen
- Label
- Snapper SMACD 814
- Duration
- Approximately sixty-four minutes
Why it matters
A comeback that refuses to sound like a museum exhibit
Rage Before Beauty is the first new Pretty Things studio album since Cross Talk in 1980, but it is not the result of one neat reunion session. Dick Taylor described the record as assembled over years with a long interruption.
That chronology explains its range. Passion of Love and Vivian Prince attack immediately, while Love Keeps Hanging On stretches toward nine minutes and the second half turns increasingly reflective.
The performing centre joins Phil May and Taylor with Wally Waller, Jon Povey and Skip Alan. Frank Holland adds a second guitar voice and becomes part of the May-Holland-St. John writing network.
The album is mostly original material but deliberately opens its lineage through three covers: P. F. Sloan's Eve of Destruction, Play with Fire from the Jagger-Richards catalogue, and Mony Mony.
Guests are specific rather than general. David Gilmour plays guitar on Love Keeps Hanging On, and Ronnie Spector contributes vocals to Mony Mony.
Vivian Prince looks back at the band's most volatile early drummer through a Bo Diddley-derived rhythmic language. Memory becomes performance rather than solemn biography.
The fourteen tracks last more than an hour, giving the comeback room for excess, unevenness and multiple production eras. Those qualities are historical evidence, not defects to conceal.
The album established a viable final phase. Balboa Island and The Sweet Pretty Things would follow, proving that the 1999 return was more than a one-off anniversary.
1980–99
Nineteen years of interruption inside one album
Cross Talk appeared in 1980 and was followed by another break in regular studio activity. May and Taylor continued performing in changing configurations during the following years.
Work that eventually fed Rage Before Beauty began long before its release. Taylor recalled an early period, a large gap and renewed recording with manager-producer Mark St. John roughly a decade later.
The group also spent time pursuing control of its earlier recordings, making catalogue history part of the practical background to the comeback.
By the 1990s, May and Taylor were again working with Waller, Povey and Alan. Frank Holland joined the guitar lineup and contributed substantially to the new writing.
In 1998 the band staged S.F. Sorrow live at Abbey Road with guests including David Gilmour and Arthur Brown. Rage Before Beauty followed amid that renewed public attention.
Snapper released the album on 9 March 1999 as SMACD 814. The original compact disc contains fourteen tracks and lasts 64:27.
Mark St. John and Dave Garland hold production credits. The documented recording location includes 145 Wardour Street in Soho.
The exact year of every individual backing track is not consistently documented. The guide therefore treats the album as a multi-period assembly without inventing a track-by-track calendar.
The returning ensemble
Classic members, Frank Holland and precisely bounded guests
May sounds less interested in disguising age than in turning it into dramatic material. Defiance, weariness and humour occupy different parts of the same voice.
Taylor reconnects the album to the band's earliest guitar identity, especially when Play with Fire places him beside a song from the group he joined before The Pretty Things.
Holland is not decorative reinforcement. His writing with May and St. John helps define the contemporary material, while two lead guitars allow attack and texture to coexist.
Waller's bass and harmony voice restore a relationship central to Emotions, S.F. Sorrow and Parachute. His presence makes the comeback genealogically broad.
Povey's keyboards supply darkness, lift and harmonic framing. Goodbye, Goodbye also gives him a direct writing role with May.
Alan's drums connect the 1960s and 1990s lineups without forcing the record into period imitation. His attack makes Vivian Prince tribute rather than reenactment.
St. John and Garland help organize recordings made over time into one released programme. Production continuity is constructed at album level.
Gilmour and Spector appear on named tracks only. Their high-profile contributions should not be generalized into an album-wide guest collaboration.
Rage and endurance
Garage attack, long-form drama and reflective weight
Passion of Love opens with bright guitar attack and forward rhythm, establishing that return does not require a slow historical preface. Vivian Prince uses a Bo Diddley pulse, minor-key colour and ensemble force to evoke character through movement. Everlasting Flame darkens the palette with insistent riff and sustained vocal pressure, turning endurance into heat rather than comfort.
Love Keeps Hanging On expands toward nine minutes. Gilmour's guitar enters a large, patient arrangement shaped by persistence and accumulated weight.
Eve of Destruction compresses a 1960s protest standard into the older band's present tense. Its familiarity becomes a test of whether alarm has expired.
Not Givin' In states the album's survival ethic directly, using repetition and sturdy rhythm instead of nostalgia.
Pure Cold Stone slows into a darker May-Taylor landscape. Space around guitars gives emotional hardness a physical surface.
Blue Turns to Red makes transformation chromatic and volatile. Holland and May use colour as movement rather than decoration.
Goodbye, Goodbye is concise and reflective, allowing Povey's harmonic instincts to frame departure without melodrama.
Goin' Downhill couples decline with force. The Tolson co-write turns downward motion into one of the album's hardest guitar statements.
Play with Fire becomes slower and heavier, emphasizing threat over the original's social poise.
Fly Away creates distance after that menace. Its broader vocal line treats escape as longing rather than achieved freedom.
Mony Mony uses Ronnie Spector's presence to turn a familiar party song into crowded, unruly release.
God Give Me the Strength closes in extended supplication. The title admits exhaustion, but the six-minute performance makes endurance collective.
Track guide
Fourteen songs across old and new time
Passion of Love
May and St. John begin with a compact guitar-driven declaration. The arrangement refuses ceremonial comeback language: voices and strings move as if the band has entered mid-stride. Love appears as energy before later tracks test its durability.
Vivian Prince
May, Holland and Povey remember the former drummer through a pounding Bo Diddley framework. The rhythm communicates volatility more effectively than a chronological biography could. Tribute becomes an active character sketch.
Everlasting Flame
May, Holland and St. John turn persistence into controlled burn. Guitar layers and Alan's weight keep the metaphor physical, while the vocal avoids easy triumph. Survival already carries cost.
Love Keeps Hanging On
May's longest statement unfolds with patience unusual for the opening run. David Gilmour's documented guitar contribution belongs to a spacious arrangement where continuation is both burden and gift. Love persists because it cannot conclude.
Eve of Destruction
The band revisits P. F. Sloan's protest song without pretending the 1960s can be restored. A harder, older voice tests the warning against decades of subsequent history. The cover functions as argument, not period costume.
Not Givin' In
May reduces the comeback ethic to a direct refusal. Repetition, guitar and a firm beat make endurance practical after the grand scale of Love Keeps Hanging On. The wording is simple because the act has already been difficult.
Pure Cold Stone
May and Taylor bring the founding pair into a dark, spacious song. Guitar texture gives hardness temperature and mass, while the vocal examines emotional closure from inside. The performance closes the first half without release.
Blue Turns to Red
May and Holland begin the latter half with colour changing under pressure. The arrangement moves from cool restraint toward heat, making transformation audible. It supplies a new-writing counterweight to the older partnerships around it.
Goodbye, Goodbye
May and Povey give departure a short harmonic frame. Repeated farewell does not explain the separation; voices make the act itself the subject. Its economy prepares the harsher descent that follows.
Goin' Downhill
May's co-write with former guitarist Pete Tolson links the album to the 1970s lineup. Hard guitar makes decline accelerate rather than sag. The song converts a negative direction into renewed physical momentum.
Play with Fire
The Jagger-Richards song returns Dick Taylor to material adjacent to his pre-Pretty Things history. The band slows and darkens the warning, replacing youthful social danger with accumulated menace. It is memory transformed by age.
Fly Away
May follows threat with a desire for distance. A wide vocal line and patient accompaniment keep flight aspirational; nothing confirms escape. The song opens emotional air before the final pair.
Mony Mony
Ronnie Spector joins the band for the album's most openly communal cover. Voices and a heavy beat turn repetition into release after the reflective sequence. The performance celebrates survival without requiring refinement.
God Give Me the Strength (To Carry On)
May and St. John end with a request rather than a victory claim. Six minutes of rising ensemble weight make private fatigue public. The record closes by defining endurance as something still needed, not something already secured.
Looking back, carrying on
Survival, memory, decline and persistence
Rage Before Beauty has no continuous plot. Its unity comes from survival viewed as desire, memory, anger, decline, prayer and noisy pleasure.
Passion of Love, Everlasting Flame and Love Keeps Hanging On imagine persistence through three different metaphors: appetite, heat and attachment. Vivian Prince converts band history into character, while Play with Fire and Eve of Destruction revisit the wider repertoire of the group's youth.
Not Givin' In and God Give Me the Strength frame endurance from opposite positions. One declares; the other asks.
Pure Cold Stone, Blue Turns to Red and Goin' Downhill make inner change physical through material, colour and direction.
Goodbye, Goodbye and Fly Away consider departure without confirming freedom. Repetition reveals how difficult leaving can be.
Mony Mony interrupts late-album gravity with collective pleasure. Its placement prevents survival from becoming exclusively solemn.
The title reverses a familiar phrase. Rage is not the opposite of late beauty here; it is the energy required to reach it.
Snapper SMACD 814
A CD-length statement rather than a reconstructed LP
Snapper issued SMACD 814 as a compact disc in 1999. Its fourteen-track, sixty-four-minute scale belongs to the CD era rather than a hidden two-side LP plan.
The title places conflict before appearance, matching music that foregrounds age, strain and attack instead of polishing them away.
Because recordings accumulated across time, the released sequence is the primary album architecture. Speculative session groupings should not replace it.
The guest names attract attention, but the package credits define Gilmour and Spector as contributors to individual performances.
Later reissues preserve the same fourteen-song core. No bonus track is needed to complete the original statement.
9 March 1999
March 1999: return alongside Sorrow's resurrection
Rage Before Beauty was released on 9 March 1999, during a period of renewed attention generated by catalogue reissues and the live S.F. Sorrow project.
AllMusic described it as the band's first studio recording in nineteen years and emphasized the tension between forceful new originals and several covers. Contemporary live coverage found May and Taylor still effective as an R&B front line rather than treating the return as purely archival. Critical responses differed over the long ballad scale and familiar cover choices, but the album's energy and Vivian Prince tribute were repeatedly singled out.
The record did not depend on chart success to justify the reunion. It provided new material for a working band and demonstrated that its catalogue identity could continue.
Its release on Snapper also sat alongside a systematic recovery of the earlier albums, allowing comeback and historical reassessment to reinforce each other.
The comeback album
The foundation of the final creative period
Rage Before Beauty established the six-person May-Taylor-Holland-Waller-Povey-Alan formation as a credible studio unit. Frank Holland's writing and guitar made the late period additive rather than a reconstruction of one classic lineup.
The album's multi-year origin is now one of its most revealing features. Different production eras become part of the sound of persistence.
Vivian Prince demonstrates how the band could revisit its history through rhythm and humour instead of documentary solemnity. The three covers map distinct relationships to the 1960s: protest, menace and communal release. The originals supply the future-facing centre, especially Passion of Love, Pure Cold Stone and the closing prayer. Balboa Island later developed the heavier, blues-rooted side of this return, while subsequent work continued the group's refusal to become a tribute act.
The album's legacy is not flawless consistency. It is the proof that interruption, age and accumulated history could still produce a substantial new Pretty Things record.
Original programme
One long programme with three covers
The original album contains fourteen tracks and lasts 64:27. It was assembled across multiple recording periods rather than cut in one continuous 1998–99 session. Eve of Destruction, Play with Fire and Mony Mony are the three outside compositions. David Gilmour's guitar credit is bounded to Love Keeps Hanging On.
Ronnie Spector's vocal credit is bounded to Mony Mony. Pete Tolson is a co-writer of Goin' Downhill, not a member of the principal 1999 performing lineup. The released order is the safest listening chronology because exact dates for every track are not consistently documented. Later issues retain the fourteen-track boundary rather than appending a separate archival programme.
A listening path
Hear the chronology without forcing it smooth
- Take Passion of Love, Vivian Prince and Everlasting Flame as three distinct forms of renewed attack.
- Give Love Keeps Hanging On its full scale before the compressed protest and defiance pair.
- Use Pure Cold Stone as the dark midpoint.
- Follow colour, farewell and descent through tracks eight to ten.
- Hear Play with Fire as transformed history rather than a routine cover.
- Let Fly Away open space before Mony Mony's crowded release.
- End with the closing prayer, which makes survival a continuing task.
Research trail
Sources and further reading
- Rage Before Beauty album, credits and review — AllMusic
- Official-label fourteen-track programme — Madfish Music
- Current digital album record — Apple Music
- Dick Taylor interview on the album's long assembly — Perfect Sound Forever
- Contemporary live return review — The Guardian
- Complete studio-album historical review — Uncut