Smooth, suave, debonair ... the MonoSet were always a classic example of being admired through being misunderstood, Jean Cocteau's definition of the artist's greatest tragedy. The implicit threat in Bid's persona was never acknowledged as it should have been, but nevertheless what makes Wallflower so enjoyable is its bright-eyed-and-bushy-tailed quality, pop music as joyous as it can get without turning obnoxious in the process. There's nothing much to it - essentially one of Bid's commentaries on an attractive but fatally self-centred middle-class girl working her way through London life, it's more classically melodic than most of their work, but the great thing about it is the way it's put over, Bid's genuine sympathy for his subject, the timing of each chord-change ... it sounds like a band at ease with itself, and a record you couldn't stop yourself loving if you tried.
A classic of poise, Wallflower incarnates the virtues that British indie-rock was forgetting at the time in its solidly anti-Thatcher slant and fundamentalist rockism, right up to a concluding guitar-and-harmony fade-out which sounds like a particularly idyllic mid-afternoon in London (the image of the Thames TV skyline comes to mind, strangely). Ten years later, we'd overdose on those qualities with loungecore, but we needed them like never before or since in 1985, and the perfect timing and seduction in Bid's voice was never more enticing.
Robin Carmody, 13th August 2000
http://www.elidor.freeserve.co.uk/80s.htm