LP #12 The Kane Gang – Miracle (1987)

While the Kane Gang wasn’t the best 1980s blue-eyed British soul outfit (think Style Council), and certainly not the most successful (think Simply Red), their second and final album stands out for both its music and lyrics, despite production that’s a bit on the slick side. Their Thatcher-era social consciousness is most obvious on “A Finer Place” (which could have made a great anthem for a variety of marches/demonstrations), but it comes out one way or another in the lyrics to most of the tracks here, from the boy and girl in “Closest Thing To Heaven” (“Lonely with no money to spend”) through the motifs in “King Street Rain” (“Good luck is just passing through on the way to somewhere else”) and “Looking For Gold” (“The place I was born in is fading from the map”). My personal favorite, though, is from “Motortown”, which is the closest they had to a hit in the U.S. (reached #36 on the Billboard Hot 100):

 

The cash may have gone

But there’s hope on loan.

 

Favorite tracks:

Motortown

Closest Thing To Heaven

Looking For Gold

A Finer Place

King Street Rain