Waiting for the Floods by The Armoury Show

Waiting for the Floods, released in September 1985, was the first and only studio album from the Armoury Show, a British new wave outfit built from pedigreed parts: singer Richard Jobson and bassist Russell Webb had come from the Skids, guitarist John McGeoch and drummer John Doyle from Magazine, and McGeoch had done time in Siouxsie and the Banshees too. Webb later said they meant to be less a band than a loose songwriting collective.

Nick Launay produced it for EMI America, and it's all widescreen drama: McGeoch's guitar ringing and slashing, Doyle driving hard, Jobson declaiming like a man on a windswept battlement. It barely scraped the UK chart at 57 and slipped by mostly unnoticed, yet AllMusic's Dan LeRoy later rated its anthemic punch above Big Country's and nearly every big-guitar band's but U2's. A two-disc reissue arrived in 2013. "Castles in Spain" is the one that stuck.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.