Deaf School's first album had not been easy to make. It had involved the rebellion of an entirely inexperienced band against their label-appointed producer, a man with rather more chart success to his name than they had. Even after a change of producer, 2nd Honeymoon was not the sound that most band members still longed to hear. But that was by the by. What mattered now was the opinion of the outside world.

As usual, the first public response was from the weekly music press, which in 1976 was at the historic height of its prestige. Just before the album's release, Melody Maker again put Deaf School on its cover, trailing an arguably premature piece on Liverpool's resurgence as a musical powerhouse. (While Toxteth soulsters the Real Thing were breaking big, the Eric's generation was as yet unborn; Deaf School's art school colleagues Nasty Pop, namechecked on the 2nd Honeymoon cover, had signed with Island but to no great success.) The paper was quick to remind its readers that Deaf School were the winners of the previous year's Rock and Folk contest. But that was then and this was 1976; ‘Ramones Are Rubbish’ went a reader's letter on the back page, typical of the controversies now raging in rock. (Curiously, its author was a future production client of Clive Langer, one ‘Steve Morrissey’ of Stretford, Manchester. Touchingly, he was declared an ‘LP Winner’.)

The Maker 's actual review appeared a few weeks later and was moderately encouraging: ‘A successful and entertaining debut,’ it concluded. Barbara Charone, writing in Sounds the same week, took the praise up a few notches: ‘Easily one of the most impressive first albums I've heard in a long time.’ Few magazines used star ratings in those days, but Sounds did. She gave it five, the maximum.

Rather ominously, the most influential and by now biggest-selling paper of all, the NME, didn't get around to Deaf School for another month. The review was assigned to an older freelancer, Bob Edmands, an entertaining writer but quite outside the paper's central committee of taste-makers.