CLOSE-UP : THE CINERAMA SINGLES (Part 3)

A GUEST SERIES by STRANGEWAYS

Close Up: The Cinerama Singles #3 : The pre-Disco Volante singles

After the singles around Cinerama’s 1998 debut LP Va Va Voom, 1999 saw just one release, the double A-sided seven-inch Pacific/King’s Cross.

Released on the mighty Spanish indie Elefant, this was pressed up on beautiful pink vinyl. Its sleeve, also in tones of pink and lilac, complemented the disc, whilst its cropped image of a woman filing her fingernails against a large pink emery board might have been one for Freudian scholars.

mp3: Cinerama – Pacific

Pacific had Cinerama further establishing a sound several fathoms from The Wedding Present. This track saw Sally Murrell taking the lead, her ultra-soft – sometimes sung, sometimes spoken – vocal was a terrific match for an equally languid musical bed of keyboard, strings and flute. In summation: Brassneck it wasn’t.

mp3: Cinerama – King’s Cross

Preferable, to me, was the flip. King’s Cross moves the dial a bit closer to David Gedge’s previous band. Here, strings are high in the mix too, but where Pacific’s lyrics are quite slight – describing in very few lines a couple’s lazy day by the eponymous ocean – at King’s Cross the setting is urban, the situation more familiar.

Here, there’s talk of phone boxes and betrayal, and of a fleeting entrance and exit summed up in the line I crashed into your life without asking, then suddenly I was gone… As comforting as that was to WP traditionalists, King’s Cross was 100% Cinerama though: carried by those shimmering strings, and ending on a last-minute harmony. I’ve always had a soft spot for this song, and it’s well recommended if you don’t know of it.

With previous label Cooking Vinyl out of the picture, Cinerama’s records would now be self-released on the band’s newly founded own label, Scopitones, named for, and I’ll just quote from Wikipedia …a type of jukebox featuring a 16 mm film component. Scopitone films were a forerunner of music videos.

This was a move that emulated early Wedding Present days, when that band’s formative releases began going out on the Weddoes’ own Reception Records. Its Middleton – Bramley – Gateshead – Hassocks line poked fun at the dazzling geographies trumpeted by the likes of high-fashion houses and big-name publishers.

First out of the traps, and given the catalogue number TONE001, came in February 2000:-

mp3: Cinerama – Manhattan

This seemed then, and still does now, a big production with lots going on in it, including a novel spoken-word section. There, we were ostensibly listening in on a bar conversation in which a group of female friends discuss one of their latest – and most perplexing – romantic entanglements. That makes the device sound creepy, but it’s innocent enough, slots effortlessly into the song and gives Manhattan a bigger, more interesting story.  In conclusion, it was a very fine A-side with which to launch the new label.

mp3: Cinerama – Film

Flips here were Film – a speedy, organy number that cleverly likens a real-life obsession with an imagined film incessantly playing in the protagonist’s head.

mp3: Cinerama – London

London is a cover of the Smiths B-side and was a real curveball. It’s murderously slow and at just over four minutes long is almost twice the length of the original.

The song’s duration is due not only to the overall pace and delivery, but also to some odd-sounding effects/soundscapes that close the cover. By way of explanation, liner notes state that The short wave radio transmissions on “London” were recorded for The Conet Project and are included here with the kind consent of Irdial Discs.

I looked this Conet Project up and it’s quite intriguing: thought to be concerned with spies – and specifically with communicating with these agents via short wave radio stations. London’s fine – and it would of course have been a snap for David Gedge, a person intimately acquainted with a fast guitar – to go the other way and accelerate the already thrashy original.

While we’re here, this take of London appeared also on the 2011 American Laundromat Records LP Please Please Please: a Tribute to The Smiths, alongside The Wedding Present’s cover of Hand in Glove. The single’s sleeve notes speak of London’s inclusion on a tribute LP named I Know It’s Over on The First Time Records of Michigan. But I draw a blank on any further evidence of this record.

At this juncture, anyone looking to acquire the full set of singles and B-sides up to this point will find them on the This Is Cinerama compilation. The Wedding Present is one of the most anthologised bands I know of, and Cinerama would carry this on.

Next up, the singles connected with the band’s second LP, Disco Volante. Would this be the point at which the Cinerama sound reached perfection?

Thanks, as ever, for the space, go to JC, and to those reading.

strangeways