John McGeoch’s career is pretty well-documented at this point – any resume with Magazine, Siouxsie & The Banshees, Visage, and Public Image Limited certainly has its own luminosity – but one chapter that frequently gets overlooked is as a founding member of short-lived ’80s supergroup The Armoury Show.

Okay, “supergroup” might be overstating it, but when they formed in 1983 their own credentials – McGeoch and John Doyle from Magazine, and vocalist Richard Jobson and bassist Russell Webb from Scottish punks The Skids – certainly caught peoples’ notice, particularly since this was McGeoch’s first project since departing The Banshees under messy circumstances the year before.

Named for a famous modern art show held in New York in 1913 (though adjusted for British spelling), The Armoury Show released one album of slick, New Wave pop – 1985’s Waiting For The Floods – before both McGeoch and Doyle left the band in 1986, with the former going on to join PiL. Jobson attempted to carry on, but sessions for a second album stalled and were repurposed into Jobson’s 1988 solo record Badman. Jobson would resurrect the band name in 2019 and released a new album in Dead Souls earlier this year.

You’ll find the new record on streaming services, though you’ll need to search for the American spelling of the word as that’s how the band is now credited, but not Floods, which exists nowhere on streaming. If you want to hear it without tracking down a physical copy – it only got its first CD release in 2001 with a deluxe reissue in 2013 – you’ve got YouTube and… well, YouTube.

Should you make the effort? Maybe. It’s very ’80s, so your perspective may change depending on how you feel about production values from the era, but from a songwriting point of view, it’s good to very good and McGeoch’s guitarwork is stellar as always, if not quite as too the fore or visceral as his Banshees or Magazine work. Opening track and lead single “Castles In Spain” is the album’s high point, but if it does it for you, the rest of the album should as well. If nothing else, it’s an opportunity to hear John McGeoch’s playing in a pure pop context.

In addition to the official video, which exists only in poorly-ripped form above, there’s a live performance from 1984 on The Tube:

Avowed McGeoch fan Adrian at Anyone Can Play Guitar offered up a guitar lesson for the song when the McGeoch biography came out a couple years ago: