Circus Maximus

""Circus Maximus" is nine songs long and a hundred miles high. It was born a second ago but remembers everything. The words shake Ancient Rome against the NHS, savour sounds like "entirely sexless head" , and come out like a gospel. There are suggestions of early Prefab Sprout but whereas MacAloon's visions never really did more than cut fleetingly across the pop landscape, Momus celebrates an absurdity at the core of its language. There's a timelessness spawned by the straddling of two thousand years which, in Nicholas' case, is relevant to the last three generations of his family but which can also be as important to Julius Caesar or Duran Duran." - Melody Maker (1986)