Express at forty: Love and Rockets find their line

Released through Beggars Banquet on 15 September 1986 and produced by John A. Rivers, the second album crystallised the trio’s post?Bauhaus sound for the rest of the decade — and this anniversary arrives without a reissue or a tour.

Love and Rockets’ second album, Express, reached its fortieth anniversary on 15 September. It was released on 15 September 1986 through Beggars Banquet, produced by John A. Rivers at Woodbine Street in Leamington Spa. Coverage of the milestone has treated the record as the point at which the trio settled the sound they carried through the rest of the decade. No reissue or tour tied to the anniversary has been announced.

The band formed in 1985 when three former members of Bauhaus — Daniel Ash, David J and Kevin Haskins — regrouped after Bauhaus split in 1983. Ash and Haskins had already recorded and performed together in Tones on Tail between 1982 and 1984. Love and Rockets represented a clear break in name and framing, yet retained the same three players: guitar, bass and drums, who wrote and arranged as a unit.

From first album to Express

The early catalogue moved quickly. Ball of Confusion and If There’s a Heaven Above appeared as singles in 1985, and the debut album Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven followed the same year. Express came twelve months later. From it the band took Kundalini Express and Yin and Yang (The Flowerpot Man) as singles — titles that still mark the record in the minds of listeners who followed the Beggars Banquet years.

Anniversary writing has cast Express as the settled statement of the post?Bauhaus saga: less a radical departure than the moment the new group’s identity crystallised. Earth Sun Moon arrived in 1987 and continued the run. The 1990s brought Hot Trip to Heaven and the This Heaven EP in 1994, then Sweet F.A. in 1996. Compilation sets Sorted! The Best Of Love and Rockets and Assorted! followed in 2002 and 2003. The line from Express through those later albums is the story of a band that outlived the gothic frame of its previous incarnation without discarding the melodic charge that made the early singles land.

A catalogue that did not close

Love and Rockets have not treated their past as a sealed chapter. The band have a history of reforming, and they toured in 2023 and 2024. The same period produced My Dark Twin, an album issued in 2023, and a Doppelgänger Mix single of the title track. That recent activity sits beside the anniversary rather than as a direct celebration of it: the work continues, while Express remains the fixed mid?1980s point of reference.

What the fortieth year has not delivered is a dedicated package or a run of dates built around the album itself. For a record often framed as the trio’s defining turn after Bauhaus, the absence of a fresh campaign is itself part of the picture. Express does not need a new sleeve to hold its place. It is still the album on which Ash, David J and Haskins found the line they would keep working — guitar?led, open and melodic, and distinct from the band they had left behind.

Listeners who came to Love and Rockets through Bauhaus still meet Express as the bridge into a body of work that stood on its own. Those who found the group later meet it as the centre of the 1980s catalogue. Forty years on, with no anniversary reissue announced and no tour tied to the date, the record’s standing rests on the music and on the run that followed it, from Earth Sun Moon through the 1990s sets and on to the activity of 2023 and 2024. That is where the milestone leaves them: a landmark album still carrying its weight, and a band whose history did not stop when the decade closed.