The Lotus Eaters- Silentspace (2000) MP3 & FLAC

Cherry Red ~ 2008/2001

Tracklist/Info

Silentspace (Expanded)

Download in FLAC

Download in MP3 (320kbps)

The Associates- The Affectionate Punch (1980) / Fourth Drawer Down (1981) / The Affectionate Punch (1982) / Sulk (1982) / Perhaps (1985) / Glamour Chase (1989) / Wild and Lonely (1990) / Radio One Sessions (1994) MP3 & FLAC

"Don't be so sure of days in advance. They might never come, praise be to chance."

Originally calling themselves Mental Torture, vocalist Billy Mackenzie and multi-instrumentalist Alan Rankine formed what would eventually become The Associates in Dundee, Scotland in 1976, but it would take three years and a supreme act of hubris on the part of the young band to garner anything resembling commercial interest. This act came soon after the band's rechristening when Mackenzie and Rankine decided to record a cover of David Bowie's "Boys Keep Swinging," which they self-released in June 1979 despite the fact that Bowie's original version had just hit the U.K. top ten two months earlier. What could have just as easily permanently dampened The Associates' prospects for gaining exposure quickly turned into a coup, as their quirky stripped-down re-interpretation of Bowie's ironic foray into Post-Punk caught the attention of many, including the thin white duke himself. What quickly ensued was a recording contract with Friction Records and a string of singles that sonically set the band apart from most of their Post-Punk peers by demonstrating a masterful ability to assimilate an eclectic range of influences into a sound that, in managing to be both minimalistic and ornately melodramatic, was nothing if not highly distinctive. Billy Mackenzie: "I had my influences, like early Roxy Music, Sparks, the whole Philly sound and jazz as well. But there were also reasonable amounts of imaginative and surprise elements to the music. I am a very good technical player, so I would pick the chords and then Alan would work with them and embellish them within the chord structure, maybe with another chord that really didn't fit. It was more of a feel thing, but with Alan's musical expertise. So in that respect, I think what we were doing was fresh. And it really wasn't calculated."

Billy Mackenzie & Alan Rankine

Produced by Mike Hedges, who had previously worked with The Cure on Seventeen Seconds, The Associates' debut, the aptly-named The Affectionate Punch, proved to be a brilliant anomaly among early Post-Punk LPs due to Mackenzie's four-octave Scott Walker-meets-Russell Mael croon and Rankine's deceptively spare Hansa-period Eno-esque arrangements, which, taken together, helped create the blueprint for the much more commercially-minded and far less musically accomplished output of the New Romantic movement. This is why it was all the more ironic when, two years later, after signing with a major (WEA), Mackenzie and Rankine decided to remix and partially re-record the album, and in doing so, dressed The Affectionate Punch in the kind of glossy synth-pop textures (albeit still very dark) favored by the New Romantics. It was to be this direction that Mackenzie would continue to follow after Rankine exited the band in 1982 following the release of what is commonly considered The Associates' masterpiece, Sulk, an endlessly ambitious, brilliantly excessive tempest of an album that is arguably among the greatest forgotten gems of the eighties. The two-year interval between the release of their debut and the release of Sulk had seen The Associates take a very unconventional turn, as they issued a series of seven singles for WEA's indie offshoot, Situation Two, instead of releasing an album. Singles such as "White Car in Germany," "A Girl Named Property," and "Message Oblique Speech" (collected on Fourth Drawer Down) found the band further indulging their Berlin Trilogy fetish while pushing beyond the limits of Post-Punk, especially in terms of Mackenzie's acrobatic vocals and the experimental production, and collectively set the stage for what was supposed to be The Associates' jump to pop-stardom but turned out instead to be a very strange fifteen minutes at the top of the charts. Alan Rankine: "In the studio, we were obsessive to the point of manic [....] Everyday was like 19 hours of work. We only stopped when we'd run out of ideas. We knew it was going to sound dense. To us, holding back in the first verse or first chorus, we just thought, 'fuck that.' It's like having a wank and not coming: what's the point? It only lasts four minutes, It's not a symphony, let's just do the fucker. Here's the verse: full on. Here's the intro: full on. Here's the chorus: no difference. The only way you could make it go uphill was down to Bill's acrobatic vocals."

The finished product, the tellingly-titled Sulk, is probably one of the most emotionally and artistically daring albums to ever make an appearance at or near the top of the U.K. pop charts. While on the surface, Sulk utilizes the same type of synth-pop sheen that was applied to the remake of The Affectionate Punch, this is really the only concession it makes to, what almost certainly had to be, the pressures exerted on the band as a result of signing with a major such as WEA. Whereas expectations at the label were likely in the direction of The Associates joining the ranks of New Romantic money-makers such as Duran Duran and ABC, Sulk steadfastly refuses to succumb to the siren's call of commercialism, instead taking the minimalist tones of Post-Punk and forcibly wedding them to watery synth-pop textures and in doing so, creating a gloomy yet strangely poppy concoction. An obvious highlight is "Party Fears Two," a song which manages to literalize the loungiest aspects of Aladdin Sane, while Mackenzie's vocals ratchet up the melodrama significantly. And on the exceedingly dark "Bap De La Bap," Mackenzie and Rankine draw from The Walker Brothers' Nite Flights to create a claustrophobic, nightmarish context for one of Mackenzie's more ominous vocal performances. Despite the willful unconventionality of Sulk, the album, largely on the strength of its more accessible singles, was a commercial success, which caught the attention of Sire Records' Seymour Stein, who was convinced the band could be just as successful, if not more so, in the U.S. Rankine, however, in a dispute over the band's post-Sulk direction, decided to cut ties with Mackenzie on the eve of the Sulk tour, effectively ending The Associates' brief flirtation with mainstream success. While Mackenzie went on to record several albums under The Associates moniker, these efforts, while showcasing his peerless vocal ability and resistance to commercial concerns, suffered greatly from the absence of Rankine's distinct musical touch and from record label incompetence (one album, The Glamour Chase, was never even released). While it is tempting to remember The Associates as a stubbornly original band who were never able to live up to their considerable potential, according to Mackenzie, living up to the expectations of others was never of any interest to the band: "In 1982, after Sulk, me and Alan could have easily took the U2 route, and become extremely successful [....] I could espouse that type of rock element but it was distasteful [....] Also, there's something vulgar about success."

The Associates- "Those First Impressions" Video (1984)

One of the most unique bands to emerge out of the initial Post-Punk melee, this video catches The Associates in New Romantic mode, but Billy Mackenzie's voice is one for the ages no matter what the context. Everything you could ever want from this band is coming soon...

Scars- Author! Author! (1981) / Adult/ery/Horrorshow Single (1979) MP3 & FLAC

"Leave me in the autumn when darkness comes too soon and snow is on the way, but you'll be far, so far away, I'll think of you every day."

While fellow-Edinburgh natives Josef K are usually the first band mentioned when it comes to discussing the Scottish Post-Punk scene of the late-seventies and early-eighties, an argument can be made that Scars' all-too-brief journey from the art-punk abrasiveness of their early singles to the more textured and melodic (though still spiky) brand of Post-Punk found on their debut and swan-song, Author! Author!, represents a legacy just as compelling if not more so than their more commonly name-dropped counterparts. In fact, Josef K. lead singer Paul Haig has admitted that TV Art, an early version of his band, "were inspired by Scars." From their inception, Scars' unique sound was in evidence. Equal parts Glam attitude, Punk aggression, danceable rhythm, and arty ambition, early songs such as "Horrorshow," while clearly indebted to the U.K. Punk scene of the late-seventies, seemed eager to explore a sound marrying a more moody, pop-art-informed intellectual approach to Punk's raw emotional power. During their first three years together, Scars spent most of their time touring relentlessly (their gritty live performances are now legendary) and issuing occasional singles, which caught the attention of John Peel, who invited the band to record two sessions (1980, 1981) for his BBC radio show. By 1981, when Scars finally got around to focusing more on recording, their sound had evolved significantly, and what they delivered on their lone LP, though generally little-known, easily stands with the best of the original Post-Punk movement.

Characterized by the expressively insular vocals of Rob King (which occasionally recall Ian McCulloch before he began to court the ghost of Jim Morrison), the razor's edge chime of guitarist Paul Research, and the propulsive rhythm section of John Mackie and Steve McLaughlin, Author! Author! epitomized, in the words of NME critic Paul Morley, "the post-punk new seriousness that ha[d] radically re-activated pop music, destroying the dichotomy between intelligence and emotion and confronting a whole range of different fears and desires. New pop that treats the transient thrill seriously." Poetic abstractions aside, Author! Author! consistently displays the traits that made the best post-punk bands such a stimulating antidote to the increasingly regimented and sectarian aspects of the Punk scene. Produced by Penetration's Robert Blamire and issued on Pre Records, a subsidiary of Charisma that was also the home of Delta 5, the album yielded one single, "All About You," which, due to its periodic inclusion on a few anthologies over the years, single-handedly kept Scars from falling entirely through the cracks of popular memory, and one listen leaves no doubt as to why.

Taking the abrasive guitar-based textures and moody lyrics that previously defined their sound and seamlessly transplanting them into a more straightforwardly pop context yields stunning results on this particular song, and leaves one wondering how Scars failed to achieve the kind of success a band such as Echo & The Bunnymen enjoyed. On the album's other standout track, "Leave Me in the Autumn," the atmosphere is much darker, and King's slightly frantic vocal performance beautifully conveys the sense of painful isolation that runs thematically through the song's lyrics. However, the star on this song is Mackie's bass-work, which initiates the proceedings and never lets up, effectively creating the palpable tension that gives the song its emotional power. Author! Author! represented a huge leap forward for the band sonically, but it also ushered in an image change, which ultimately may have helped do the band in. In a move that in hindsight seems inexplicable given the band's gritty Post-Punk reputation at the time, they decided to adopt a look reminiscent of Viviene Westwood's World's End pirate-inspired collection (a look made famous by Adam Ant), and in doing so, they unknowingly aligned themselves with the New Romantic movement, whose music bore little resemblance to the tense, jagged pop genius of a band such as Scars. Too pop for the punks and too genuinely arty for the Duran Duran crowd.

Adam and The Ants- Dirk Wears White Sox (1979) / Kings of the Wild Frontier (1980) / Prince Charming (1981) / Peel Sessions (1991) MP3 & FLAC

"You may not like the things we say, what's the difference anyway?"

Adam Ant: "Look, I'm a punk rocker. I always was; I'm not a New Romantic. But I was a punk rocker who wanted to get more than one fuckin' album. The Pistols were great, but they only did one fuckin' album. Not enough! Sorry!"  It's easy to forget how fleeting the original U.K. Punk scene was before the media storm over The Sex Pistols' infamous appearance on Thames Today turned the whole thing into a simultaneously demonized and co-opted caricature of itself. In addition, with its prized rejection of technical proficiency as a criterion for musical expression (a philosophy that opened the scene to virtually anyone with a guitar, something to say and the bollocks to say it), few of the participants in the early Punk movement were interested in thinking about the music in careerist terms, as "no future" was more than just a catch phrase; it was an ethos. However, as many of the original Punk bands began recording albums and developing as musicians as well as song-writers, the aesthetic limitations of the basic Punk sound- three chords played really hard and really fast- became apparent; as a result, bands such as The Clash, The Damned, Siouxsie & The Banshees and Penetration (to name only a few) began experimenting with and integrating other musical elements and influences into their work.

Malcolm McLaren

The new music scene (not yet labeled "punk") began to catch fire in early 1976, and Adam Ant, then known as Stewart Goddard, had recently dropped out of prestigious Hornsby College of Art to pursue a music career, a venture that originally took the form of playing bass in a pub band called Joe and The Bazookas. However, during one of their gigs, an opening band called The Sex Pistols changed everything. Inspired by what he had seen and heard, Goddard soon adopted his famous moniker and made a number of abortive attempts to form his own band. It was during this time that Adam Ant found his way into the orbit of the burgeoning Punk scene's uber-elite, who congregated at Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood's fashion boutique SEX. Ants guitarist Marco Pirroni: "Without the shop [...] there would have been no punk, no Sex Pistols, just a load of pub bands who would have made no impact on anything. Malcolm is of course a complete liar but what is true is that he invented the punk attitude and made the Pistols act it out for him [....] To ask how important clothes were to the early scene (not called punk, not called anything in fact) is ridiculous. Clothes were the scene. It was not fashion; it was totally anti-fashion to everything that was going on at the time. The scene was tiny and totally hated the outside world [....] It was about telling the world that you weren't what it wanted you to be; you weren't anything except what you wanted to be. And what better way to tell England that you would not accept any of its upper class, lower class, middle class know your place, we are your elders and betters, fucking feudal society than wearing offensive pornographic clothes on the street?"

Adam Ant in his punk phase

Adam Ant's most important connection at SEX was Jordan (Pamela Rooke) who, in addition to being one of the original architects of the now-iconic look of the London punks, served as Ant's manager and occasional vocalist after he formed Adam and The Ants in the spring of 1977. In many ways, this early version of the Ants stood in stark contrast to their Punk scene contemporaries, as they adopted a very theatrical stage presence (something that would also characterize the band's later, more pop-oriented incarnation) and employed explicit sadomasochistic imagery both lyrically and visually. It was these tendencies and Jordan's connections that landed Ant a part in the Derek Jarman film Jubilee, which also featured the band playing a particularly chaotic version of "Plastic Surgery." Due to a number of line-up changes, work on the Jubilee soundtrack, and a dispute with their soon-to-be ex-record label Decca, Adam and The Ants didn't get around to releasing their debut album until the fall of 1979. The self-produced Dirk Wears White Sox is easily the darkest and most divisive album of Adam Ant's career, and while many portray the debut as having little relation to the more polished, energetic, chart-savvy work that followed it, the chaotic blend of Glam excess, Punk minimalism, and Post-Punk melancholy that characterizes songs such as "Cleopatra" and "Tabletalk" does occasionally hint at the direction Adam and a new set of Ants would take a year later on Kings of the Wild Frontier.

Post-Punk Pirate

Despite gaining the band a sizeable cult following, Dirk Wears White Sox was a commercial failure, which greatly disappointed Adam Ant, as chart success was something he had desired all along: "I wanted to be a graphic designer until I saw the Sex Pistols play live. This was 1975. That's when I knew I wanted to be a pop star, and that for me was like being a matador, a boxer." In an effort to change the band's commercial (mis)fortunes, Ant approached Malcolm McLaren about becoming the band's manager, the result of which was McLaren convincing the Ants to jump ship in order to form Bow Wow Wow with 14-year old lead singer Annabella Lwin. It was also around this time that McLaren had given the soon-to-be ex-Ants some world music recordings from which to gain inspiration for their next recording project, including The Royal Drummers of Burundi. When Adam Ant caught wind of his band's planned defection, he reportedly took these recordings with him to utilize with his new band, which, in addition to guitarist Marco Pirroni, also included two drummers. Once the new version of the band had been assembled, they were now in direct competition with Bow Wow Wow to record a batch of songs employing the Burundi-style percussion, a race Adam and The Ants won easily by, irony of all ironies, adopting a McLaren-style media-savvy image (Native-American pirate dandys) and releasing Kings of the Wild Frontier, an album that would make Adam Ant the pop star he so badly wanted to be. 

Simply put, Kings of the Wild Frontier sounded like nothing else at the time. Displaying the same brand of androgynous swagger that had characterized the best of the Glam scene nine years earlier, employing stripped-down Burundi beats, Duane Eddy riffs, Native American chants, and a mish-mash of historical allusions, the second incarnation of Adam and The Ants managed to tap into the ominousness of the debut album while offering up a great slab of irresistible pop that was as daring as it was derivative, as biting as it was cartoonish. Nowhere is this summed up better than on the lead track "Dog Eat Dog," a song that clearly signals a new day has dawned for Adam and The Ants, as it goes far beyond anything on Dirk Wears White Sox in terms of accessibility. Beginning with a prelude of tribal beats mixed with whistles and howls, Pirroni's dark, spaghetti western guitar twang soon kicks in to set the stage for Adam Ant's defiant opening ultimatum: "You may not like the things we do, only idiots ignore the truth." Despite the tremendous commercial success of Kings of the Wild Frontier, the band only recorded one more LP together, Prince Charming, before Adam Ant embarked on his circuitously ill-fated solo career, and while the album features a few of the Ants' best songs, such as "Stand and Deliver" and the title track, overall it lacks the consistent quality of songcraft that made the previous album so memorable. Ultimately, there is one question that always seems to linger about when trying to re-evaluate Adam and The Ants: vacuous foppish trash by a Punk sell-out hell-bent on becoming a pop star? or a masterful re-imagining of the kind of image manipulation that defined the Glam-era married to an unapologetically post-modern bricolage of disparate cultural signifiers all woven into something daring, entirely disposable and eternally delicious? Can the answer be both?

Adam and The Ants- "Ant Music" Video (1980)

Music's lost its taste so try another flavor- Anyone for some Ant music?

Scars- "All About You" (1981) Live on the Old Grey Whistle Test

Another great Scottish Post-Punk band that appeared at the dawn of the eighties, Edinburgh's the Scars only released one album, and in my estimation, it deserves far more love/recognition than it gets- Josef who?

The Lotus Eaters- First Picture of You: BBC Recordings (1998) MP3 & FLAC

"She is the hunger artist, alone of all her sex."

Liverpool's The Lotus Eaters were a band who did not fit comfortably into any of the various subdivisions of the Post-Punk movement. Their roots lay in lead singer Peter Coyle's earlier band Jass Babies, whose sound had much in common with the raw melodic approach of Joy Division, and guitarist Jem Kelly's The Wild Swans, a Jangle-Pop band he formed with ex-Teardrop Explodes keyboardist Paul Simpson. While The Lotus Eaters were typically grouped with New Romantics such as Visage and Japan, their sound, if not their image, suggested they were very much out of step with the trendy theatricality of the genre; rather, their music combined romantically-obsessed lyrics with more organic, Folk-inspired guitar-based textures, which, in some ways, prefigured the Sarah Records sound that bloomed at the close of the eighties. First Picture of You: BBC Recordings collects several John Peel sessions and few other radio recordings that predate the band's debut long-player, the brilliant and under-appreciated No Sense of Sin. While these albums have a number of songs in common, with a few exceptions (such as the title track), the earlier BBC versions employ sparer arrangements, thus allowing Coyle's fragile, unaffected vocals more space in the mix. However, the true star here is Kelly's luminous guitar-work, which ranges from lovely Felt-like arpeggios to some fine, dynamic acoustic strumming. A gorgeous example of this is "When You Look at Boys," which begins as a wistful ballad, but halfway through, Kelly dials up the dynamics several notches, and in doing so, makes it one of the most memorable tracks on the album. Another standout is "German Girl," a catchy sophisto-pop gem that again features some lovely contributions from Kelly. The Lotus Eaters' taste for sixties baroque-pop and its ornate instrumental tendencies certainly set them at odds with the prevailing trends of Post-Punk in the early eighties, and as a result, they quickly disintegrated after releasing the one album. Nevertheless, they are well-deserving of rediscovery.

Talk Talk Series, #2: Talk Talk- The Party's Over (1982) MP3 & FLAC

"And I hope that I've kept you amused, to wipe that spit right off my shoes."

While The Party's Over is easily the most conventional of Talk Talk's five studio albums, it is, nevertheless, far more than a mere footnote to the band's small but legendary discography. In actuality, Talk Talk's debut bears many subtle signs of the greatness that was soon to follow on its heels. Primary among these is Mark Hollis' distinctive vocal-style; his uniquely emotional (and somewhat nasal) phrasings were heads and tails beyond what other vocalists in the New Wave/New Romantic genre were doing both in terms of originality and musicality. This allows a song such as the single "Talk Talk," which, on the surface, sounds a bit like a rehash of Duran Duran's "Planet Earth," to transcend its derivative origins. In addition, The Party's Over occasionally shows flashes of the band's unconventional melodic sense that would blossom to great affect on later albums. For example, on "Today," straightforward synth-pop elements are combined with Japan-esque bass and percussion to create a sonic landscape for Hollis to work his melancholy magic, but the haunting chorus, with its chants of "Today" takes the song in an unexpected and striking melodic direction.  Talk Talk's debut, while certainly not as groundbreaking as future albums, it well worth a listen, as it both prefigures the band's greater works and contains some pleasures all its own.

Talk Talk- "Such a Shame" Video (1984)

Talk Talk doing the pop thing and doing it exceedingly well...