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One of You
Life is So Hard / Faded Flowers - 7"
Scarab - 1981
Michael Panontin
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By rights, One of You's 'Life is So Hard', with its gloomy organ and equally depressive lyrics, should have been an underground favourite amongst the black-clad goth crowd back in the day. After all, it was issued in 1981, just as that angst-ridden subculture was starting to take shape.
From what little the internet gives up on this bizarre curio, it is the work of a Czech immigrant in Ottawa who appears shell-shocked at the impersonal society she has been thrust into and who, with the sort of end-of-the-world bleakness that the Eastern Europeans seem to possess in spades, decided to share that quasi-suicidal view with the rest of us.
'Life is So Hard' is a sombre six minutes of church organ and voice. So the most obvious touchstone would have to be Nico's trio of harmonium-laden LPs: The Marble Index, Desertshore and The End. If you can get past the ungrammatical and heavily accented English, 'Life is So Hard' is actually a powerful statement on being cast adrift in modern-day Canada, of the many immigrants trudging through life with their old-world baggage trundling along behind them. The b-side's 'Faded Flowers' is more of the same, beginning with cheery lines like "Long, long time ago / I got a beautiful dog / but it was stuck with pins". Need I say more?
An unplayed stock copy of 'Life is So Hard' sold in 2010 for just thirty bucks. My guess is that there is a box of these gathering dust in some cold, dark basement somewhere. (Oh, the injustice!). Copies rarely turn up, so for those who can't wait, Portland's Little Axe Records issued a strictly limited (500 copies) LP containing all three of One of You's singles and more.
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