Wah! Heat : Better Scream
In February of 1980 the debut single by Pete Wylie's Wah! Heat, "Better Scream", received critical acclaim in the major music mags New Musical Express and Sounds, the latter awarding the song with "Single of the Week". Dave McCullough called "Better Scream"
"...a lissome hybrid of Barry McGuire's 'Eve of Destruction' and 'Don't Fear The Reaper', only it's more menacing and more sharply-focused then either. Tinny guitars, hunky vocals and spacey synths build up to a blazing inferno that is dramatic and awesome, but at the same time beautifully understated and reserved, with smatterings of The Doors' 'The End' and a glance at the power of 'Apocalypse Now' as underlying but effective reference points".
Wylie, a Liverpool musician who has once been in the short-lived Crucial Three with Julian Cope and Ian McCullough, told Sounds what the song was actually about:
I heard about this newspaper article where Howard Hughes wanted to get rid of Castro, but the CIA told him it was OK, they'd take care of it. They were going to announce the second coming of Christ, because Castro was denouncing Christianity at the time, and the CIA were going to say 'Here's God and he wants us to kill Castro'. I mean, they were going to get this guy with holes in is hands and wheel him across America! The sing's about how crazy people get over power and the lengths they'll go to."
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