Cheersquad Records & Tapes are beyond thrilled to announce a reissue of the much-loved 1988 album Lovetown by the iconic Melbourne singer and songwriter Stephen Cummings.

Lovetown was Stephen’s third solo album and was originally released on the indie label Rampant. The album was recorded on an 8-track studio in Hawthorn owned by John Rees from Men At Work and it was the first time that Stephen recorded with longtime collaborators, guitarist Shane O’Mara and vocalist Rebecca Barnard. Steve Hadley played double bass, Peter Luscombe contributed “drum sounds” and Andrew Pendlebury, Stephen’s long-time writing partner and fellow ex-member of Sports, played most of the guitars and co-wrote most of the songs.

“I was aiming at a sound like John Martyn on his classic ’70s album Solid Air,” Stephen later said. “Because we were limited to eight tracks, the songs had to be methodically worked out ahead of the recording. For some unfathomable reason, I was also interested in the idea of using a basic drum machine against the acoustic guitars.”

“Lovetown had a good feeling to it. It was done for the right reasons and motives. I just wanted to make that record. I wasn’t thinking it was gonna be a big success or anything. It was more like I had the idea of that sound, that sort of sound I thought was like me.”

The album featured the single “Some Prayers Are Answered” which was picked up by commercial radio, and the album itself was universally praised by critics. It ended up topping the Rolling Stone “critics’ picks”, and later, in Australian Rolling Stone’s list of the Top 100 albums of the ’80s, Lovetown was listed at #38.

Showing how well it aged, Lovetown came in at #40 in Craig Mathieson, John O’Donnell, and Toby Creswell’s 2010 book 100 Best Australian Albums. In a 2008 “50 Best Australian Albums of the Last 50 Years” feature in Melbourne’s The Age it also appeared at #40, with Jeff Jenkins saying “Lovetown is the sound of Melbourne melancholia; “everything that you see is just a memory”, Cummings sings. He’s never made a bad album, but this is his masterpiece.”

Lovetown will be available on limited edition purple 12″ vinyl (100 only), black 12″ vinyl and digitally via Bandcamp. It is available to pre-order now.