A guest posting by Fraser Pettigrew
By the beginning of the 1990s I had all but lost touch with contemporary rock and pop. As the bold experiments of the early 1980s faded into history to be replaced by pop-pastiche glazed with varying degrees of post-modern irony, my interest levels faded too. Several of my former favourites were still making music, but the likes of New Order, the Banshees and Cabaret Voltaire failed to hold my attention as their focus changed, and others like Paul Weller’s Style Council and A Certain Ratio simply vanished from view.
The late 1980s had ushered in acid house and techno, the baggy-Madchester scene and shoegaze, but none of these new styles captured my imagination. Most of the house and techno that reached my ears was the lowest common denominator stuff in the charts, the Madchester shufflebeat sounded like retro late-60s revivalism to me, and if shoegaze ever crossed my path I must have mistaken it for some radio static rather than music.
I barely listened to John Peel any more as the BBC perpetually shifted and reduced his schedules, and I had long ago given up on reading the NME for fear of disappearing up the same smug, self-congratulatory arsehole. My sources of information were therefore much reduced and as my judgements above clearly indicate, I wasn’t really looking too hard for vital signs at the same time as pronouncing the patient deceased.
Instead, I had turned my ears in a more folksy and world music direction. My record collection swelled with the addition of albums by Hungarian troupe Musikas, the Hannibal label Balkana compilation, and Serbo-Croat music by Vujicsics. I went to the Junction in Cambridge to see Cajun legends D.L. Menard and Eddie LeJeune, and the unforgettable Ivo Papasov and his Bulgarian Wedding Band. Legendary, unforgettable and sometimes pronounceable.
mp3: Ivo Papasov and His Bulgarian Wedding Band – Mamo Marie Mamo
Fun as this was for a while, I knew there was something missing, but I just didn’t know where to look. I dabbled in grunge but most of it felt too close to metal for my liking. A few friends introduced me to a couple of acts that held promise of life after death of the new wave. The New Fast Automatic Daffodils briefly built a bridge between Madchester and a paisley-free universe, despite their terminally stupid name. Fatima Mansions came to town and ripped Cambridge a new one in a most satisfactory fashion, adding Viva Dead Ponies, plus mini-albums Against Nature and Bertie’s Brochures to my record shelves.
mp3: New Fast Automatic Daffodils – Big
mp3: Fatima Mansions – Mr. Baby
It was in 1992 that I chanced upon a couple of recommendations that really restored my faith that there was contemporary music out there worth listening to and set me on paths of discovery that required greatly increased record storage by the time the decade was out. The first came from a review in The Guardian that opened with a line something like “the list of Great British Techno Albums is a short one.” I wanted to find some great techno. I knew there had to be some that fulfilled the promise of Giorgio Moroder, Kraftwerk, DAF and early New Order, I Feel Love, Number One in Heaven, Everything’s Gone Green, Der Mussolini… Everyone said these were the ancestors of techno, where were the descendants?
The album was BFORD9 by Baby Ford. I’d never heard of Peter ‘Baby’ Ford even though this was his third LP. I swiftly located it in Cambridge’s Parrot Records. It looked lovely, the whole sleeve depicted a thick, formless impasto of shiny black acrylic paint, with the title and credits in big, bold modern type. I got it home and slapped it on my turntable.
Oh Christ. I’ve made a terrible mistake, I thought. Luckily there was no one else in the house as my stereo cranked out the first two tracks of nosebleeding hardcore ravey-davey gash. No wonder everyone’s on drugs when they listen to this shite… Track three however shifted into a quite different register, thank god. Move-On had a more laid-back soul groove with a sweet rising chord progression. The rest of this might be listenable after all.
mp3: Baby Ford – Move- On
And so it proved, in spades. Even though the album demonstrates the common house/techno trait of offering multiple versions of the same tracks on the same disc, the variations are sufficiently diverse and craftily arranged to make it feel more like a suite than a remix compilation. To be fair, most of it is hardly what you’d call techno at all. The more hardcore tracks are an immeasurable improvement on the two openers (one of them a remix of aforesaid gash), but the downbeat, loungey instrumental ‘20 Park Drive’ sounds like one of Isaac Hayes’s extended grooves. The glorious ‘Sashay Round the Fuzzbox’ is a techno-funk classic that would make you believe Booker T and the MGs had been reincarnated and a few eckies slipped into their bourbon.
mp3: Baby Ford – 20 Park Drive
mp3: Baby Ford – Sashay Around The Fuzzbox
Sadly, BFORD9 did not prove to be a springboard for further Baby Ford releases, which have been sporadic ever since. Nevertheless, this slice of (mostly) genius gave me the confidence to embrace other dance music artists in the coming years, albeit the more mainstream ones, but without BFORD9 I probably wouldn’t have gone looking for the likes of Orbital, Fluke, Underworld, Future Sound of London, Leftfield, The Shamen and Finitribe. Thankfully I did.
The second album that turned things around for me in 1992 was found through Q magazine. First The Guardian, now Q, ageing young rebel or what? I’d started dipping into Q in a conscious search for some direction and had already bought a couple of things on the strength of their album reviews, but neither Rev by Ultra Vivid Scene, nor the debut CD by a short-lived band called Miss World really set my heather on fire.
Then I read a review of an LP called Peng! by a band called Stereolab. Sounded interesting, so I dug it out on my next visit to Parrot Records.
Eye-boggling orange on yellow sleeve design. Ouch. Just possible to read lyric excerpts hinting at radical politics and philosophy. So far so good… Onto the deck, and …play. Ohhhhh yesssssss. From the first drone of dreamy fuzz guitar and keyboard overlaid with an alluring female French pop vocal I was a fan. Tracks, with arresting titles like ‘Orgiastic’, ‘Perversion’ and ‘You Little Shits’, alternated between mellow, downbeat numbers and faster guitar-heavy, squealing organ thrashes that immediately evoked the Velvet Underground of 1969: Live, the frantic pickup-scrubbing versions of ‘What Goes On’ and ‘Rock and Roll’.
mp3: Stereolab – Orgiastic
mp3: Stereolab – Perversion
mp3: Stereolab – You Little Shits
The Velvet Underground was the reference point in the Q review that piqued my interest and it’s interesting that neither Q nor my own first impressions called to mind the krautrock influences of Neu! and Faust that came to define Stereolab later. No one mentions the Velvets when talking about Stereolab now, but the force was strong on Peng! It might be argued that the retro vibes I derided in the Madchester sound and the droning fuzz of shoegaze were both prominent here so what the fuck was my problem? I would argue back that, apart from my earlier judgement being defective, those elements are absorbed and remoulded and not slavishly imitated. Stereolab reminded you of something, but they didn’t exactly sound like anyone else. Like all the best bands, I would say that Stereolab tip their hat to their influences but don’t play dress-up all the way down to their pointy shoes.
Thankfully I caught Stereolab right at the beginning and was able to follow them faithfully through the rest of the 1990s, and their devotion to vinyl further cemented them in my affection. And while they are notable for not being part of any ‘scene’ or sub-genre or media-concocted movement, the successful fact of having matched up my interpretation of a magazine review with something I really liked opened a door for me to trust my intuition and take a punt on what else was going on around me.
They don’t fall into the same category-of-one as Stereolab, but acts like Suede, PJ Harvey, Seefeel, Spiritualized, Boo Radleys and bands of the later 90s flushed out by the ‘Britpop’ scene such as Mansun, Super Furry Animals and The Bluetones might have passed me by if Peng! hadn’t woken me up.
For me, BFORD9 and Peng! were a kind of ‘sliding doors’ moment. What might have been? Might I have continued ploughing the folky furrow, finding myself years thence, at another identical Christy Moore performance? I’ve seen him twice, which was at least once too many. Or yet another Fairport Convention reunion? No, I’ve been stuck in a park at the Cambridge Folk Festival with no way of escaping them once, and if that had been my fate I’m sure I would have come to my senses and rushed out to purge myself in the entire back-catalogue of Atari Teenage Riot. I have The Guardian and Q magazine and Stereolab and Baby Ford to thank for making such a drastic remedy unnecessary. And you know, to remind you what Louis Armstrong said, it’s all folk, cause horses don’t sing.
THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN 