Review: Adrian Borland's "Last Days of the Rainmachine"

Adrian Borland (6 December 1957 – 26 April 1999) was a musician best known as the frontman of the post-punk band and Korova Bunnymen label-mates, The Sound. What's lesser known is his extensive catalogue of side projects and solo albums. Today, I'll be reviewing one of the highlights of Borland's career, "Last Days of the Rainmachine".

Take a Life in All its Glory

First, a little background. Adrian Borland suffered from schizoaffective disorder. SZA, as it is commonly contracted to, is a rare mental condition that I would describe as the unholy hell-spawn of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Sufferers experience affective episodes comparable to those seen in bipolar I, with soaring, grandiose, paranoiac, haywire manic episodes, excitable and disinhibited hypomanic episodes, and crushed, stagnant, nauseous, and in extremity catatonic depressive episodes, along with the manic depressive's holy grail - "euthymia", the state of normal mood.

However, the defining characteristic of SZA, distinguishing it from bipolar I, is psychosis regardless of mood episodes. People with bipolar I only experience hallucinations and delusions when in a manic episode. For schizoaffectives, unreal experiences can invade life at any time - even during euthymia.

When Adrian Borland writes about his SZA, he writes about the mood symptoms, and only rarely alludes to the psychosis side of town. He seemed to have held these things more private. That isn't to say he took them deadly seriously - he once wrote a friend a Christmas card reading, "have a schizo Christmas!".

The Album

Last Days of the Rainmachine is a challenging album to those of us going into it without the Samaritans on speed dial. It is quite possibly the darkest album I know. Joy Division, Rudimentary Peni, the Manics' Holy Bible, Steven Jesse Bernstein, even Barrett at his most abject - I feel the glimmers of light in their work, having listened to Rainmachine. I feel that this music has something universally affecting that can force anyone in a mental flicker to near despair. Shortly after discovering this album, and spending a good ten minutes curled up on my bed trying to process the monolithic nature of the album, I played it to my father. He asked me to turn it off after five tracks, warning me that I might not have the mental fortitude to listen to such music - commenting that he certainly didn't. I may indeed not have the mental fortitude to be unaffected by Rainmachine. But art is there to affect us, to make us grimace and twist and cry and feel heart-sick and in the interstitial bokeh of it all scream with laughter and fly with the curvature of the earth. 

When I first heard Borland's voice, in the album's opener Walking in the Opposite Direction, the first words that came to my mind were those of Psalm 130: "de profundis clamavi ad te, Domine". Borland pulls his voice from the deepest of depths as he proclaims: "my spirit's free, you won't get me/into the box your life is locked in". The clamour of the wishes of the masses "scream at [him] from flashing screens ... hassle [him] from city walls". Borland accuses us of forgetting why we are devoted to our idols: "I think you've lost the reason why, but you still carry out the motion". The anthemic chorus of the song tells us, "every day the things [we] crave make a play for [his] affection ... but ... [he's] walking in the opposite direction".

Walking is followed by the tearing threnody for volition that is Inbetween Dreams. The song addresses a person, apparently in a depressive episode, who, like Kasper Hauser in Herzog's film, only finds satisfaction in sleep. The song's rhythmic refrain - "breathing out, breathing in" - mirrors the monotony of the depressive state. Towards the end of the song, the words, "now you think that dreams are all you need", tear their way out of Borland's mouth, threatening to break his vocal register. That moment, the end of the phrase "all you need", is my highlight of the album.

The title track, "Last Days of the Rainmachine", likens the artist to a rain machine, made to produce tears. It is a rebellious song - "the last days of the rain machine, the last tears you'll see me cry". It is the album's Invictus moment - Borland is the captain of his soul; he may have been born to cry, but he can control the end of his tears. Musically, with the susurrating chloroform tone of the chorus contrasting with its declaiming power, it is the high point of the album.

Borland took his own life on the 26th April, 1999. Once I found this out, I could never listen to one of the album's latter tracks, Love is Such a Foreign Land, again. The song, describing repeated failures to sustain a relationship with an unseen partner, contains the lines: "the angels packed and left/And  they winked at me and said/"Hey, Adrian, why don't you give it up?"/There's a thousand ways to live/There's a million ways to give/You've got to learn when you've taken enough". This song, at first glance one of the less unrelenting of the album, towards the end of its initial impact, hits us all hard. Suicide is perhaps an over-analysed topic in rock, but, coming from a man like Adrian Borland, these lines plumb the depths of ideation.

Was I Hallucinating You?

I have some things in common with Adrian Borland. For one, I also suffer from schizoaffective disorder. I am well-medicated, but it does affect my life in various ways. Its various complications and comorbidities stretch out like a road map to tardive dyskinesia. When I listen to Borland's work, I feel as though somebody is sympathising with me. I derive catharsis from listening to his words. On another record, 5:00AM, the lyrics of the song Redemption's Knees describe perfectly the guilt I feel around my condition. The such moments on Rainmachine are too numerous to count. Adrian Borland will always mean a lot to me. I'm very glad that I found him. I hope there is no afterlife, no new substrate for torment. I hope Adrian Borland found peace.

Listen to and buy "Adrian Borland - Last Days of the Rainmachine" here

Review: Tilly Foulkes's "disorder"

Tilly Foulkes is a young poet from a remote outpost of Wales. She commits her thoughts on herself and the world around her to paper with a shattering detached acuity.

Foulkes’ most recent work, disorder, is an autobiographical look at the resolve to overcome mental health difficulties. Rather than employing the confessional style classic in the form of mental health poetry, Foulkes is here assertive, rebellious.

Foulkes’ verse has a kick, a self-conscious revolt. She “died when she was thirteen”, for the “rusty torn shell” of emaciation and self-abnegation. She is “freezing” under her downy lanugo, despite her place “in Hell”. This is a hell of her own design, she declares. She “earned” it. She was the architect of her own brutalist body. She only gives up her place presiding over an intrapersonal empire of bones because of inability to continue: she found herself “kicked out” by the headspace that allowed for it. She has been locked out of the palace that was her leprous etiolation.


Foulkes realizes in the final lines of the piece that she must relinquish her desire to return to the ivory tower in order to come once more to life. Like a plant which has for too long gone without nourishment, she releases herself to return to the ground and to grow. As the poem ends, there comes an pounding iambic, gunfire-like manifesto, a statement of psychological ideology, a statement of intent to prevail. And I’m sure that Tilly Foulkes will prevail, both as a living person and as a poet. She deserves to be recognized for her uncommon mastery of the difficult medium that is poetry.