A 2024 Catalogue Single That Sets Mervyn Peake’s Anti-Hero Against a Dance Groove
Steerpike opens on a piano synth that is tender and piercing at once, then hands the song to skittering percussion. Vernons Future released Steerpike on 5 April 2024. The band call the result gothic disco, and the tag holds up. The lyric follows a schemer through Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast while the rhythm section keeps the floor moving.
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The Wave Vernons Future Came Out Of
The band are not new. Originally, they started in Liverpool in the 1980s as The Vernons, and Probe Plus released their debut album Smithdown Road in 1990. Then they stopped. That is the ordinary shape for British guitar bands of that period. A record, a scene, a decade. Then everyone gets a job.
The second half is less ordinary. The group reformed in 2015 as Vernons Future. Original members Simon Burchill, Andy Harding, Jon Fiber and Tom Le Bas returned, joined by Burchill’s lifelong friend Simon “Hoops” Hooper. A second album, Aquaplaning, followed in 2022, and Steerpike and Waxwings came out as singles in 2024. The catalogue now spans more than thirty years and is still being added to.
That history shapes how the record sounds. Bands who came up in the late 1980s built songs around a keyboard figure and a bassline rather than a wall of guitar. This one is tracked that way. The synth carries the melody. The percussion does the heavy lifting. The guitars sit further back than a rock listener might expect, colouring rather than driving.
What Gothic Disco Means on Vernons Future Steerpike
The phrase could easily be a marketing tag. In fact, it is not. Reviewing the single for Dancing About Architecture, Dave Franklin called it a “gothic-pop-dance groover” full of “psychedelic seductions and skittering percussion”, and landed on the contrast as the point: a “blend of darkness and disco, intrigue and energy, visual light and sonic shade”.
Meanwhile, the track runs five minutes and thirteen seconds. That is long for a single, and it is the other clue. It shifts. A surge of synth arrives partway through and changes the temperature. Covering the release, Dulaxi picked out the same piano synth, tender and piercing, and a vocal delivered with understated elegance, relaxed rather than declamatory. That restraint is what lets the darker material sit inside a dance arrangement without turning heavy-handed.
The video does the same trick in reverse. Franklin noted it answers the gothic lyric with sun-kissed images, coastal seascapes and bouncing disco denizens, which is the opposite of what the words describe.
Where Steerpike Sits, and the Acts Next to It
Steerpike, the character, is the low-born kitchen boy who claws his way up through Mervyn Peake’s castle. Simon Burchill has said the lyrics were influenced by the Gormenghast trilogy, and that the difficult rhythms and beats reflect the complicated layers of that anti-hero. Set that against a groove and you get the tension the band are after.
For placement, the reference points the band point at are earned rather than borrowed. Echo & the Bunnymen is the closest for mood, that particular English combination of grandeur and gloom carried on a clean, ringing arrangement. The Lightning Seeds covers the pop end, the instinct to keep a hook bright even when the subject is not. Richard Hawley is the third marker, for a voice that stays low and unhurried while the music does the reaching.
Those names describe a lane rather than a revival. They are not all from one decade or one city. So the honest way to place this record is simple. This is not a band replaying 1990. Instead, it is a band that never stopped writing, with its ear on a kind of English pop that was always slightly out of step with whatever was selling.
The RockRevival.News curator team: “The interesting decision here is the tempo. A song about a manipulative climber could easily have been slow and grim. Putting it on a dance rhythm makes the character sound charming, which is exactly what makes him dangerous in the books. The arrangement is doing the characterisation.”
Where to Hear Vernons Future Steerpike Across Platforms
The band’s catalogue sits on Apple Music, and the 2024 sibling single Waxwings is on Spotify with its Absynthpop mix available to buy from Bandcamp.
Follow Vernons Future across platforms: Instagram, Facebook, Threads, TikTok, X, and their YouTube channel.
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