History
History
Between 1984 and 1991 the fledgling Real PD recorded 11 albums on cassette for distribution amongst their friends. The songs on the tapes were almost exclusively their own original compositions, the arrangements prominently featuring the budget Casio and Yamaha mini keyboard range, but also piano, guitar and lots of often wayward percussion. The songs were recorded acoustically into cheap tape recorders, and were often live or with few overdubs. Inheriting the post-punk ethic which still permeated the world of pop, in Real PD musicianship took a back seat to imagination and attitude. Lack of instrumental or vocal ability was an irrelevance and 'artiness' was a goal in itself. To listen to this music now is to hear the broader musical trends and movements in 80's pop through the strange and distorting twin filters of naїvety and over-ambition; pop from a parallel world.
On this page you can find out the crazy truth about Real PD in the 80's and 90's, and listen to any track of your choice from the early albums - that's a whopping 266 songs in total! - we'll let you figure the quality/ quantity ratio for yourself. Ooh yeah, and you can also look at some vintage PD videos. There are notes on each album from Mark and Alistair. If your curiosity has been whetted there are also links to zipfiles you can download of the early albums in their entirety.
Album colour coding:
Search this page by album:
A Friend Called Sigmund (1987)
The Fascinating Game of Shadows (1990)
People Like These (1984)
Mostly Alistair solo, People Like These has a murky, ultra scuzzy production with dirge-like songs about Soviet spies soundtracked by a blizzard of tape noise, flushing toilets and vacuum cleaners. It borders on the unlistenable, even for fans of noisecore. But, hey, there’s nothing like a challenge…
Real PD started life as Potential Difference in 1984 as a solo project by a 13-year old Alistair Cumberford, who in the desperate search for something meaningful to do in Bluerinseville-on-sea (aka Southport) had (like many others before) settled on the idea of becoming a fabulous avant-garde fantasy popstar. Happily refusing to regard a lack of any musical knowledge whatsoever as an obstacle to achieving this goal, Alistair set to work crafting seven-minute dirges out of a barrage of tape-noise, a collection of Family Circle lids and a kiddies' organ from the CO-OP. He amassed enough of these for an album, 'People Like These'. It is the antithesis of easy listening, but does have some pretty interesting lyrics on topics as diverse as Russian spies and the transience of fame. Interesting, if you're able to make them out in the all-engulfing maelstrom of doom-laden noise, that is...
People Like These Tracklisting
Download a zipfile of the whole album here
Read a review of People Like These here.
With Mark and Guy on board, a quite astonishing sonic transformation occurs. Gone is the noise and in are pristine, if weedy-sounding, melodic plinky synth pop songs. Perhaps the best produced of all the original PD albums.
Love & Stuff Tracklisting
Download the whole album as a zipfile here.
Mark on Love & Stuff
A work of grand invention or merely just pretention?
The feeling surrounding the recording of Love & Stuff was that the material was
really strong and well rehearsed, a Greatest Hits So Far collection. With
decent recording equipment it was going to be quite possible to create an album
that would stand shoulder to shoulder with the latest offerings from Howard
Jones, Kajagoogoo, Nik Kershaw and maybe even The (Thompson) Twins. OK, the
singing was not virtuoso (something of an recurring theme/running joke
throughout later Real PD works), but on the whole for the first and last time I
think we achieved roughly what we set out to do.
Surprisingly we didn't consider it particularly challenging creating our Magna
Opus in a day; after all Everything But The Girl took only 2 days to record
their album and they clearly made the effort to hit the right notes and sing in
tune. The schedule was thrown down the Plunge before we had even begun. The
PT-50 had been programmed to let rip with The Videobox (pre-production?) but it
took longer than most of the album did to record to retune the guitar to
C#minor. This strange choice was probably influenced by the PT-50 having very
small keys and it being easier to play something that had lots of black notes in
it so you wouldn't hit 3 keys at once, not that the sound was polyphonic but it
was usually nice to hear the note you intended. In retrospect in may have been
quicker for Alistair to have learnt bar chords.
One of the stranger aspects of the period was that the songs had colours. There
was no reason for this, it just was. Videobox was dark metallic, National Pride
was orange pop, Stay was red and blue (angry and sad?), Chinatown and The Plunge
were red pop obviously, Commuter City yellow, You Hurt Me and both Love & Stuffs
were pink and silver-grey. Emigration was possibly green but admittedly this
was a difficult one. Nobody disagreed but they were probably just humouring me.
Looking back now at the simplistic arrangements, naïve chords and melodies,
wobbly sequencing and programming, tinny attempts at dance music and minimalist
ballads and most strikingly the narrative sometimes cringeworthy lyrics with
laboured rhymes... well actually on close scrutiny that puts Love & Stuff up
there with the best of the best from our transient pop heroes of the day.
Cunningly we would learn to avoid going down the dreaded dumper within 2 years
by failing to be successful in the first place. MJC 11/ 03
Alistair on Love & Stuff
Love & Stuff may not technically be the first Potential Difference album, (the completist is directed to 1984’s noisecore solo dirge-fest People Like These), but it was the first recorded as a 3-piece group and in terms of conventional listenability this is definitely where the story starts. In 1984 I’d played my funereal pubescent doom anthem Life in Danger to Mark Cahill, and his reaction was unique, among my friends at least. Instead of saying ‘You’re weird’ or even ‘You’re wasting expensive tape. You could be taping the Top 40 on that’ (oh yes!) he sat right through to the end, thought for a moment and said ‘I like the bit that goes Cha Cha Cha. It needs more of that.’ I was clearly dealing with someone on my wavelength. It was such an exciting moment. Flushed with pride, I played him the bare bones of Chinatown – he liked that too and started adding bits and suggesting arrangements - and by the end of the day we’d written our first song together – National Pride.
Musically, the fledgeling 3-piece PD were a diverse bunch: Mark knew everything there was to know about pop, I aspired to know everything, and Guy knew next to nothing, but he was willing to reinvent it from scratch in his own way. Guy’s household was permanently saturated in classical music – one of the earliest things we did together was a song fusing a looping ZX Spectrum sample with riffs from a full-size harpsichord made by his Dad. (Wednesday Afternoon). You can hear Guy’s influence on the piano outro to Emigration.
The genesis of the album was (for us) unusually long, with 9 months of honing the material before we committed it to tape. The two sides of the original tape were themed ‘84’ and ‘85’, with the newer material coming towards the end. The package was topped off with a cryptic photo of me throwing a pair of green Day-Glo socks from a suburban staircase. (I think it was about them being ‘so last year’ or something).
My strongest memory of the recording of Love & Stuff was the way that Mark quite casually unveiled a completely new singing voice in front of me and Guy, there and then, as the tape rolled, utterly without comment from any side. Previously his singing voice was like the one you might use in the bath – the normal milky voice of an English schoolkid. Suddenly here was this authentic-sounding Mid-Atlantic rasp with twisted vowels and woah-woahs all over the shop, all present and correct and sounding as if it had been around for ever. Presumably he’d been practicing it or working on it in secret. Whatever, it didn’t seem quite proper to ask. Mark went off to fetch some drinks after delivering The Videobox in his new style and Guy turned to me and said quite startled, ‘What’s happened to Mark’s voice!?’ I shrugged and that was that. AC 12/03
Read a review of Love & Stuff here
Video from the Love & Stuff era
The Videobox
Taking the songwriting emphasis of the second album and reintroducing a healthy dose of the experimentalism and chaos of the first, Paranormal is a very rare beast indeed: a delirious, but delicious musical migraine. Guy’s brother and sister, and other guests, help to give this album its frenetic energy.
Paranormal Tracklisting
Download a zipfile of the whole album here.
Alistair on Paranormal
First things first. It must be said that Paranormal is, on a sonic level, a very nasty piece of work. Immediately upon entering its portals, the album assails the listener with clanging, arrhythmic cowbells and it’s not long before these are backed up with ear-shredding screams and piercing blasts of kazoo. Further in, there are snatches of lopsided French horn, detuned short-wave radios, and even explosions. But fear not: Paranormal is full of the joys of (alternative) teenage spring, and it might even reward your patience with a chuckle, smile or even a belly-laugh.
Where Potential Difference’s first ensemble album Love and Stuff had been the result of almost a year of rehearsing and fine-honing the songs, with Paranormal PD sacrificed the smoothness for a rougher, (s)punkier feel. Recorded in one afternoon/ evening, Paranormal is more of a happening, an event captured on tape, than a carefully thought-through sequence of music. Nailed onto Boots’ best Chrome tape over at Guy’s house, it’s the sound of five oddball adolescents and two children, and possibly a dog (toothy Toby), locked in a room for seven hours, who have decided that, yes, they can indeed play with madness.
As with Love and Stuff, the songwriting was split between Mark Cahill and myself, with collaborations a rarity. Listening back to it now, it leaps out at me how different the styles were – Mark’s songs are waspish and poised, turning on tricky wordplay and delivered with rasping, world-weary vocal inflections, whereas mine are lyrically more based on absurd/ childish rhymes and sung in a more yobbish way. We obviously had different beasts within that needed unleashing in the playground of PD. The music on Paranormal is fresh-sounding, if only because it’s untutored and prone to taking unorthodox twists and turns. Witness the bizarre chromatic mismatch between the three segments of the title song – the fey guitar intro, the main body of the song and the Hey Jude-style na-na coda have nothing, and everything, to do with each other. Compositionally, the song itself is a patchwork Frankenstein.
Mark’s songs were particularly strong here, and two ‘Angels Dancing on the Pinhead’ and ‘Hipocritic’ were reworked in a housey big-beat style for the Nostalgia album in 1991.
Although he wouldn’t become a full band member until ‘And There Was Wine’, Adrian Brailsford was in the room that day, providing keys, bvs and ‘ambience’ as well as bringing a song to the party in ‘Sometimes I’. He also directed the videos for Would You Like It, Sometimes I and Um de la Que, the latter featuring Jenny W entwining herself fetchingly in chintz curtain.
Although we didn’t play live, we were resolved to find ways of communicating with our audience and encouraging their active participation in our art. ‘Anonymous Experimentations’ was conceived as a kind of continually growing art work, whereby we’d lend someone the tape of the album (that’s right, the MASTER TAPE!!) and ask them to tape a minute or so of anything they wanted on the B-Side. These range from the compellingly odd (disjointed samples of the Periodic table) to the hilarious (the ‘Jackie Graham’). The funniest thing of all about the ‘Anonymous’ Experimentations is, of course, that almost everyone supplies their name. AC 11/03
Mark on Paranormal
Paranormal, we thought, had been completely superseded and rendered irrelevant
by And There Was Wine. England was ace at the time but Waterloo was better.
Nothing there could be described as one of the cornerstones of our works (not
that we'd say that anyway) or made it to the Exam Relief set list. Our first
venture into real Uneasy Listening territory. I didn't even own a copy for
years until 1989 when I played it on my Walkman for a laugh on the train on the
way to a party after a can of Special Brew. And laugh I did as it 'took off'.
In a big way. Fellow passengers presumably thought I was listening to comedy.
Or that I was mad. I'm not sure to what extent we had realised that we were
always going to be unintentionally hilarious. There was no point camping it up;
we were camp anyway. But the humour here is born of chaos and perversity.
The expanded line up made for a rather crowded listening experience at times.
That the proto portastudio (ghetto blaster) was on the floor, its stereo mikes
barely a foot apart, with up to 7 people round it meant you sometimes had to
fight for your right to be heard. Tellingly most of the songs had not been
rehearsed as a group, despite 3 songs being at least 6 months old* and clearly
in the case of Lady Louise not even by its composer. A leap in the dark then -
the track listing had not been decreed in advance! We weren't even sure which
songs would be included (Whatever happened to I Think You're A Cat?). Hell, we
might even make some up as we went along! And we did. And it shows.
Such experimentation may sound fairly tame until one considers that this time we
succeeded in filling a whole side of a C-90 (Chrome obviously) in a day that had
to fit in with getting lifts from parents. That included allowing for stoppages
for Adrian to put his nose out of the window due to 'allergies'. With hindsight
I think Deutschland is the dill pickle in the Big Mac encapsulating all that is
Paranormal. A miniature blast of surreal sing-along travelogue cum total freak
out for all the family (well, 3 Wigmores) with kazoos followed by psychedelic
variations on its theme (with more kazoo) clocking in at 12 minutes.
Effectively a centrepiece and filling almost a third of the album it's early
arrival as track 2 seems designed to frighten off the faint-hearted prospective
listener.
Incidentally the bizarre colour coding scheme came unstuck around here possibly
as the songs became less clear cut in what they conveyed. Sure, Angels was
clearly yellow pop and the title track purple but it gets difficult beyond
that. What was A Slip Of The Tongue? A grey rainbow maybe?
MJC, 10/ 03
*Supporting documentary evidence: Original sleevenotes for Love & Stuff contained a teaser for the already forthcoming album including song titles.
Read a review of Paranormal here.
Video from the Paranormal era
Would You Like It?
A side project recorded by Alistair with Mark and Adrian under the name ‘Sandwich in Motion’, this eponymous and aggressively percussive album may not be a PD album proper but clearly is the missing link between the wilful zaniness of Paranormal and the piano-soaked sound that the group were headed for.
Sandwich in Motion tracklisting
Download the whole album as a zipfile.
Mark on Sandwich in Motion
The first of Sandwich In Motion's 3 recording sessions began with 2 songs that had clearly been prepared before my arrival. I started to feel that there was some secret concept afoot to which I wasn't quite privy. Should the casual listener have the hour to spare and the inclination to sit through S.I.M. in its entirety it's inevitable they'd come away with the same feeling. For beyond the first 2 tracks (and let's face it Pity The Earthworm is anything but normal) there lies a parched and primitive musical landscape with lyrics addressing death, isolation, murder, paranoia, suicide, the emptiness of domestic 'bliss', loneliness, supernatural happenings, reincarnation and, er, lyrics (other people's). The only conventional song on the album, the theme from the film Fair Play (don't ask!) has a message that can be summed up, 'Life sucks - get used to it' and the patch of potential brightness at the start of Side 2 can only be read as sarcastic undermined by the 2 songs in question's hysterical and rather flat deliveries. And Physics And Chemistry was about absolutely everything ever. I don't remember being particularly any more depressed than usual and yet until the late arrival of the queasy reggae of Fingerprints (inspired by the Ray Bradbury short story, The Fruit At The Bottom, fact fans) and the Goth swirliness of Make Up for Ghosts the sounds are really rather jolly in their waywardness.
In short following Paranormal's experimentalism, it was the first time we went
truly 'Out There'. Whether the lack of the PD banner allowed for a greater
artistic freedom is hard to say. Certainly it's perverse that this most Guy
like (heavy on the heavy percussion, littered with 'interesting' chords and
generally quite bonkers) of albums was created entirely without his presence.
Only the lack of personnel prevents some tracks from dissolving into complete
chaotic rackets.
Sandwich In Motion came with a booklet with photos, original artwork and
handwritten lyrics as a special limited edition of... well OK, yes it was unique
- there was only one of them. If anybody knows where it is or has seen it in
recent years it would be nice to have it back as it took f***ing ages to do.
MJC, 10/ 03
Alistair on Sandwich in Motion
It was the Easter holidays 1986. We were busting with ideas and, quite possibly, teenage hormones in desperate need of sublimation. In short, we were wanting to make music. Potential Difference had, just a matter of weeks before, recorded their second ensemble album Paranormal along with keyboardist Adrian Brailsford. Adrian had played Billy Preston to our Beatles, but it had been such fun we decided we wanted more. Trouble was, Guy was by now at a different school and the holidays didn’t coincide, so a PD album wasn’t possible. Never mind, this was the 80s and ‘sideprojects’ were de rigeur. Following in the, er, illustrious footsteps of Power Station, Arcadia and Dr Calculus, Adrian, Mark and I became ‘Sandwich in Motion’, for one album only.
‘Sandwich in Motion’ the album is generally perceived as one for the headstrong only. I think this is a bit unfair as it contains at least a couple of discernible melodies in Living in the Middle Ages and Make Up for Ghosts. The album certainly wears its idiosyncracies on its Paisley puff sleeve, and it has more than its fair share of unpredictable twists and turns. Listening back to the record now, the key for me is to remember where it was recorded. The first and last of the three sessions were done at Adrian’s house. Hopelessly cluttered, with the detritus of a thousand Blackpool souvenir shops splattered all over the walls and surfaces, alarmingly alive with stick insect terraria stacked atop hamster cages and grating budgie squeaks emitting at regular intervals, it would nowadays be the subject of a ruthless cull in a Puritan get-rid-of-it-all-and-live-again lifestyle makeover TV show. At the time it appeared to us as a wondrous Aladdin’s cave of kitsch. And amongst the crazy costumes, wigs and Laurel and Hardy figurines was a box of weird and wonderful instruments – routine children’s stuff like penny whistles and maracas but also something called a ‘zippy zither’ which you can hear to full effect on the otherworldly intro to Physics and Chemistry. Recorders and tambourines and even a viola all made their way onto Sandwich in Motion, as did the unique combination of sensory overload and musty claustrophobia which the house induced. One of the many items of bric-a-brac in the house was Flossie, a vaguely animal-shaped poufée, on whom we were always entreated to sit by Adrian’s Mum. Sitting on Flossie became something of a PD institution and gets a mention in the Talking-Heads inspired ‘Let’s Play House.’
This album is the only of the PD Remasters where you can hear Adrian’s viola playing – he decorated ‘Pity the Earthworm’ with corrosive squawks and did something genuinely avant-garde with ‘Far From the Western World’ which I did my best to undermine with lyrics about toast and bacon rind.
SIM boasts quite a variety of lyrical themes, and is possibly the album with the lowest tally of conventional love songs. ‘Pity the Earthworm’ was inspired by an article I’d read about ‘stress leakage’ which is where even if you try to appear calm and deceive others, your body will always give you away: your leg bobs up and down for example to alert any body language experts who may be observing you that you are in fact stressed. I thought it would be interesting to explore the idea of people leaking stress in other ways, eg environmentally. ‘Make Up For Ghosts’ was our first and possibly only suicide song, but remains a curiously uplifting affair. ‘Living in the Middle Ages’ was borne of my love of schlocky ITV children’s ghost dramas of the 80’s (eg ‘Echoes of Louisa’, ‘Nobody’s House’) and is about a child who goes on a school trip to a castle and regressing to a past life where they were a ‘mad sage’ in the king’s court. The exception to all the lyrical richness of course is ‘I Just Wanna Be Perfect’ which started life as an Adrian solo composition called ‘My Honey Bee’. ‘…Perfect’ boasted one of our cheeriest videos ever in which Adrian performed a medley of sleight-of-hand magic tricks upside down.
SIM was a bit of a multimedia extravaganza. As well as the lavish 70’s indebted art booklet that accompanied the original tape, we made videos for Pity the Earthworm, I Just Wanna Be Perfect and Fair Play, the latter song also being the title song to our feature film of the same name, which had a pretty simultaneous release. In 1986, SIM was part of a sprawling glut of art that glooped out of us ad we adhered to our (admittedly unwritten) manifesto: ‘Creativity rules… and quality control be damned!’ Or, more prosaically, suppose this is one way to pass the holidays, innit? AC, 10/03
Videos from Sandwich in Motion
Pity the Earthworm
I Just Wanna Be Perfect
Adrian B’s full time recruitment as piano-playing third songwriter galvanised the band and kick-started a purple patch of three classic PD albums. The solid and empathetic songwriting was typically streets ahead of the dodgy, punky musicianship but the chaos that ensued was frequently unintentionally humorous and threw up lots of interesting musical shapes and textures.
And There Was Wine Tracklisting
Download a zipfile of the whole original album (tracks 1 - 13 above) here.
Download a zipfile of the extra tracks (14 - 30 above) here.
Mark on And There Was Wine
At some point in the final year of school Alistair (and quite possibly Adrian) attended an educational French language video evening hosted by a lady called Miss Olliphant. What we do know is that she put masking tape across the bottom of the TV screen to cover the English subtitles. It sounded like an event that was a lot more fun as a story than to have actually been there. Having spent some time describing the experience already I recall the scene exactly when Alistair announced, “And there was wine”. “Good name for a song/album/crap film” etc was a fairly standard response to many of our utterances but this time it was different. It was the birth of a legend.
And There Was Wine was recorded, by Real PD standards, in a purpose built studio. The room was in fact a disused granny flat but contained a piano, a harp (plus eventually a home-made harpsichord) and space to contain the ever-expanding line-up of peripheral members. There was no room for ego or musical genius but we tried to squeeze those in too. The most major development unsurprisingly was our (Adrian’s) new synthesizer which occasionally took our sound a tiny fraction nearer to the mainstream. Given that Sandwich In Motion had required very little preparation and a year had passed since Paranormal it felt like we were about to take a giant leap forward with sharper songwriting and (mostly) vastly improved instrumental ability. Onwards, forwards and upwards. And yet already I felt that our days were numbered. Within the year we would individually start leaving the North West to pretend to be adults. This was going to be The Big One. It had to be. And indeed it would transpire to be the last time we would fill an entire side of chrome C-90 in one session.
Beyond my own songs my musical role within PD was usually adding poppy lines where I felt necessary and subverting the too ‘scure’ songs with arty effects. For this album I remember making a conscious effort to find a niche and make my contribution more specific. I’m sure this was due to insecurity at the presence of Adrian’s ability and the fact that my keyboard was now inferior so once he’d laid down his piano part for track 1, a re-recording of the previous year’s ‘Quick’ ep lead track With Or Without You I plonked myself at the piano stool and didn’t budge except to record overdubs. Also I now wrote and practiced (yes…’practiced’, I’m not going to be pretentious and write ‘rehearsed’) at the piano so it felt natural and didn’t involve having to adjust to the smaller-sized keys of all keyboards. Indeed my proudest Real PD moment is probably the wistful introduction to The Big Sea which only goes to make what follows sound rather disappointing.
While not quite suffering writers’ block I had tunes galore but found lyrics increasingly difficult. Alistair finished off Tegan, producing the surreal dialogue of non-sequitors, Voice of the Free unintentionally only has 1 verse, Amphisbaena literally runs out of words early in the 2nd verse (hence the grunting) and Radar, despite being mostly instrumental on purpose, was so lacking in inspiration that a paraphrase of the album’s title was shoehorned in.
I found recording my own songs traumatic. Hunching over a microphone on the floor made it almost impossible to sing and I hadn’t previewed any of the material to the rest of the band so put on the spot even Adrian found it impossible to come up with complimentary arrangements. Key signature changes in Tegan and throughout Radar meant the steadying effect of the beatbox was impossible. Nonetheless the recorded evidence dispels the myth that I was completely controlling and if anything I was still pitching the punk inclusivity and spontaneity spirit. This just about works on Tegan as the piano stays in control and while the sonics of the additional keyboards drifting all over the place sound slightly alarming initially this does make some kind of sense after a couple of listens. On Radar, despite some mean harp from David E Newton, I regret I allowed a free-for-all and the key and time changes are sometimes followed very hestitantly and sometimes not at all. It got piddled all over and is largely quite horrible.
Still I wasn’t above ruining other people’s works. I insisted I played the synthesizer on Ups and Downs despite never having done so before because I thought it was easy and it wasn’t very good anyway. And it shows.
And There Was Wine marks the first significant appearance of recording keyboards by line directly on to tape. I certainly wasn’t against overdubs but I felt the end result was rather dry, completely lacking in any sort of group sound (even if it was invariably chaotic). In fact it’s positively criminal that Mount Vesuvius, potentially the greatest Real PD sing/thrash-along song, should be recorded in this manner. Similarly Amphisbaena was considerably more dramatic in its original piano form.
While a lot of the above sounds fairly negative And There Was Wine was still a huge leap forward if not the Magna Opus we had such high hopes for. Just (just!) peak period PD with everything wonderful and woeful that that entails. MJC 10/ 04
Alistair on And There Was Wine
An opening track on an album normally has one of two, mutually exclusive, functions. The first of these is to announce a change and show you how the group has progressed since you last heard from them. The first track thus acts as a calling card for a group’s new sound and is placed in pole position to whip the audience into a state of drooling anticipation over the wonders to come over the next 45 minutes. (The Queen is Dead’s title track, Airbag on OK Computer etc). The second, and quite opposing function of an opening track – and this is normally at the behest of a record company very keen to hold onto a fanbase already carefully built – is to reassure you that absolutely nothing has changed whatsoever and that what you’re about to hear contains no surprises whatsoever and will be more or less exactly as you expected it to be. (Tiny Dancer on Madman Across the Water, I’m Coming Back on the League’s Hysteria).
Why am I writing all this? I suppose it is in an attempt to understand why the Real PD chose to start their 1987 opus And There Was Wine with the lachrymose ballad With Or Without You (and yes, before you ask, we got there with the title before U2). I think we were indeed announcing a change. We’d never aspired to grandiosity before. Although I can’t say I’m at all fond of the song today, it did signal another shift in the music of Real PD: we weren’t just about quirkiness anymore. We started to aspire to writing music with at least some emotional impact. It probably wasn’t until Stop Me Dreaming managed to turn down the bombast that we got it quite right, but we were on our way here.
The other change that was being trumpeted was one to the personnel of the band. Here for the first time piano-playing Adrian Brailsford appeared as a fully-fledged band member, and rather like Fleetwood Mac with Stevie and Lindsay finally in the frame, it was with Adrian’s arrival that we hit upon our trademark sound – frilly piano and haphazard keyboards intertwining, soured to taste with dour northern vocals, and with the odd nervously plucked acoustic guitar thrown in for good measure. With Or Without You was Adrian’s music and my words. The song’s video featured a cluttered room being emptied and then stripped bare. The new band-name Real PD is then scrawled onto the wall. The video is melancholy but feels like a new start. It matches the song perfectly.
Incidentally, this was more or less the period when I stopped writing music. Whilst I’m now able to hold in tension the fact that I’m a ‘musical’ person, with the indisputable fact that I am a well-shitty instrumentalist, back in 1987 with our new organic piano style I began to lose any confidence in myself contributing anything other than the lyrics.
We could still do quirky though. Indeed Mark Cahill’s Amphisbaena fairly out-quirked the competition. It also contained a narrative which could have been a prophecy about the group itself, given the (temporary) split which was about to occur later in the same year. ‘She was moving in two directions… oh no she couldn’t wait to die.’
Waterloo’s warm melodicism felt like another landmark to us. We reworked it to death (see bonus disc) but it’s probably best in its original form. Sorry Carpenters, by the way – we always knew it was a steal of Yesterday Once More. The lyrics were influenced by Philip Larkin’s ‘Here’ – an evocative northern railway travelogue we did at school. Our Waterloo was nothing to do with the battle and everything to do with the Merseyrail station which for a while in the 80s apparently broke all records for heroin transactions.
For all the supposed musical development, there is, of course, a great deal of shocking (and unintentionally comedic) incompetence on display on this album. I mean, with all those bloody drafts of The Big Sea, you’d have thought someone would finally have sorted the chorus out, wouldn’t you? This too was the third version of Ups and Downs, yet it’s audibly flying by the seat of its disco pants. Another mental note: acappella should only be practised by the musically capable. And what the hell is that vocal on Tegan? It sounds like Yoda swallowed Bette Midler whole and tried to spit her out to music. Bum notes and fluffed intros still abound here: this is certainly a flawed album, but one which ,nevertheless reflected a little more maturity and a broader emotional palette. It’s not called ‘And There Was Panda Pop’, after all. AC, 09/ 04
Video from And There Was Wine
With or Without You
A Friend Called SIgmund (1987)
A companion piece to 'And There Was Wine', following just 3 months later, with a slightly more upbeat feel and a slightly trashier edge, but none the worse for that.
A Friend Called Sigmund Tracklisting
Download a zipfile of the whole album here.
Mark on A Friend Called Sigmund
Creative juices in full flow, same place, same people, we reconvened to lay down a second album in as many months. Astonishingly a good half of the end result far outshone all previous efforts. I don’t think it was a conscious decision but the tracks tidily went where they wanted to and just stopped. Gone were the inebriated excesses of And There Was Wine where even the best tracks like Waterloo would have benefited from pruning. Consequently Sigmund is rather short and none the worse for it. Had it been commercial product I feel it would have been released at a special mid-price, after all fans would recently have forked out for a full priced album and possibly a single or 2. It just had that sort of feel. Plus some of the tracks (at least a couple of mine) clearly couldn’t belie their origins as ATWW rejects. In an imaginary professional scenario this would have been the session to record b-sides and additional last minute tracks for ATWW as well as fine-tuning and remixing what we already had. Had we hung fire until we had this much strong material then the Sigmund Wine album truly would have been the mighty musical banquet we’d hoped for. Instead we had 2 distinct idiosyncratic entities on our hands.
Hybrid had been intended (not by me I hasten to add) to be a sort of centrepiece. I lied and said like Amphisbaena it was from a musical I was working on about an alien who falls in love with a tea cosy. Despite its Physics and Chemistry style proggy structure and an amusing accidental moment involving an oriental-sounding person trapped in an ordinary computer game it was anything but a highlight. Love’s Back In Fashion… kicked off proceedings with the shock of an excellent post-AIDS love song that still stands up well today. Psychoanalyst’s Couch has a beautiful lo-fi acoustic scuzziness that couldn’t be bettered. Richard Owen’s Bag clatters along at a furious full electro-pelt transcending its Primitives/Cure influences. Even Should It Really Make Any Difference? works really well as a brief change of atmosphere. As usual my desire to interfere got the better of me making the PT-50 feedback on New Start which I still maintain gives the sound an edge. The unexpected Big One of course arrives late on. Initial recording of Stop Me Dreaming was the best ever experience with the Real PD and something I will never forget. As it came together and just happened I was genuinely moved and actually felt by the refrain that whatever it was, it was going to be All Right. Unfortunately the bright orange oblong that was passing as our recording equipment (by far the cheapest thing we ever used) started sticking, so it became a bit of a nightmare and I kept swapping between the piano and guitar to keep it fresh. What you are actually hearing is about the 5th slightly weary take. But the song itself had a life of its own and everybody without exception as far as I’m aware who heard it, loved it and remembered it and even now friends have told me that they’ve found it in their heads and gone searching through old records before realising who recorded it. And if Morrissey is ever in need of another comeback single…
More democratic than ever, all 4 core members took a lead vocal on at least one track. I’d learnt that it was generally better to risk a variety of bum notes than to premiere songs too far in advance or they always turned in full-on sing-alongs complete with hokey adlibs. Possibly I had become so strict that rarely by this point did anyone attempt to add any kind of arrangement to my songs, though I resent the fact that behind my back the working title was Big Nose Strikes Again. If anybody had really wanted to have a go they could have called it Stop That Clapping. MC 11/ 04
Alistair on A Friend Called Sigmund
A Friend Called Sigmund followed just 2 months after And There Was Wine in April 1987. With two full-length albums plopping out within the first quarter of the year, it was clear that Real PD were either on a roll or caught up in an accelerated life-cycle. In fact it was both: rather like the seminal real-world group of the period, the Smiths, our purple period of prolific output preceded a split. Happily, our split was only to be a temporary one. But, hey, that’s a story that can wait for the next album’s sleevenote.
It’s all there in the titles, to a certain extent. ‘And There Was Wine’ was ostensibly just a line from the song Radar, but it was the one we all seized on when mooted as an album title, perhaps because, on another level, it suggests a fermentation process finally yielding its intoxicating, matured results, as well as having a melodramatic Charlton-Heston-Biblical proclamatory ring to it. Hahahahaha! And as such, Wine was an album prone to melodramatic flourishes, though of course it certainly wasn’t anything like as ‘fermented’ as we might have liked. The title ‘A Friend Called Sigmund’ was ostensibly a line from the song Psychoanalyst’s Couch, but by invoking Freud it implies a desire to root around in the subconscious and unearth anything it might throw up, in the name of addressing some dysfunction or other. And to have as much fun as possible in the process. ‘Sigmund’ is in some respects a lightweight album, but it’s a life-affirmingly happy, giddy kind of lightness. There were those within the PD camp who felt it should have been a double-album with Wine, but I feel that Sigmund was a totally different beast. Its cheapness and brevity lend it an ‘up’ feel that the more widescreen Wine doesn’t have. It opens with a toneburst and fanfare which then segues into the decidedly wonky opening chord of ‘Love’s Back in Fashion,’ a strong song which fairly skips along. Further on, Sigmund has whistling (‘Ice and Sticks’) and the wired super-brash electropop of ‘New Start.’ It also had a rare songwriting contribution by Guy, who in the time-honoured Ringo tradition turned in a decidedly dodgy C&W hoedown. And best of all, it has the dizzingly fast pseudo-S&M tease of Richard Owen’s Bag.
Sigmund has so many moments to love. ‘When you’re speaking, talking next to me/ I think/ Wow’ from Mark’s Ice and Sticks remains, to me, one of the dumbest and simultaneously most brilliant lyrics ever in a pop song. And then there’s the bit on ‘What I Want’, the album’s tart closing track, a delightfully flossy-headed meditation on material acquisition, the snarling consumer/ narrator proclaims ‘I might desire material goods/ Stacked up to the ceiling’ before the self-doubt enters in, with a classic cheeseball couplet, ‘…is it morally right/ how I’m feeling?’ I laugh everytime I hear that. Then there’s Going Up to Scotland, one of only 2 Real PD tracks to feature Adrian on lead vocal and the only full lyric of his songwriting career. We had a huge row over this song, as the original draft had the word ‘f**king’ in it, and I didn’t approve at the time. It was totally unnecessary and completely a case of swearing for the sake of it, but now I wish we’d left it in. Just in case you want to hear how it would have sounded, try substituting a heartfelt ‘f**king’ for ‘beercan’ in the line ‘Even on Scot pavements/ Och, there’s beercan rubbish there.’
Our ‘anthem’ Stop Me Dreaming was done very quickly – Adrian and I wrote it upstairs at Guy’s house while Mark and Guy and David E executed the magnificently unhinged Hybrid below. We were all sitting really close together when we taped it; Guy really did hammily lay his hand on my shoulder as I sang that line. Although it was clearly one of my best co-writes, for a long while in my twenties I was quite ashamed at having written Stop Me Dreaming. The lyric seemed to me be about a person who purges themselves of all ambition and drive, fearing disappointment should their dreams never come true. I began to feel that this song was almost immoral. But then I gradually came round to accepting and then liking it again, and bizarrely seeing it as rather a spiritual song. Measuring yourself against the 'magnificent mountains', oceans etc affords you a strange kind of solace in the ensuing sense of cosmic insignificance. Certainly, for the Real PD, insignificance continued to be the closest we got to fame. But we looked at it through the mirror… whatever that meant. AC 10/04
Video from A Friend Called Sigmund
Stop Me Dreaming
With Mark temporarily estranged, this lengthy and eclectic set, introducing electric guitar into the mix for the first time courtesy of rocker Sean, favoured a more focused and straight-ahead pop-song approach than the experimentalism of yore. Some of the best songs in the PD catalogue are here, marred only by a monochromatic and tinny production feel (even by our standards).
The D Factor Tracklisting
Download a zipfile of the whole original album (tracks 1 - 19 above) here.
Download a zipfile of the extra tracks (20 - 36 above) here.
Alistair on The D Factor
In June 1987 we in Real PD found ourselves catapulted into a cruel and unforgiving world. It was a world of skyscraping gothic hairdos, pisspoor covers of Queen and Sisters of Mercy songs and, importantly, dreadfully played and insufferably loud electric guitars. For we had made it onto the line-up of ‘Exam Relief.’ This was an end-of-year charity concert from the Assembly Hall of our school, and was high profile enough even to enjoy the patronage of a Radio City ‘personality.’ The sensible thing to do would probably have been to cram our set with cover versions of rabble-rousing anthems. But oh, no, Real PD were far too clever for that. We were artists and songwriters of wit and integrity and thought absolutely nothing to delivering to the baying crowd a set of quirky original material with, yes, the cheaper end of the Yamaha and Casio kiddie keyboard range the main instrumental weapons in our arsenal. (Though we did have an extra guitarist on some tracks as a kind of concession to the testosterone-fuelled air of the show, and a drummer who, we later discovered on the video of this sorry event, was doing the internationally understood ‘wankers’ sign behind our heads as the songs finished). Needless to say, the performance bombed bigtime. We had set the controls for somewhere that simply wasn’t Radio Gaga and they just didn’t want us to take them there. Previous ‘gigs’ has been in band members’ front rooms and we weren’t versed in the art of communicating with a larger crowd. We were booed, pelted and cajoled. Even the Radio City non-personality was unspeakably bitchy about us from the stage itself. But out of sheer bloody-mindedness we insisted on working through the full six-song set to the bitter end. (Waterloo, Stop Me Dreaming, Richard Owen’s Bag, Chinatown, Amphisbaena, and Mount Vesuvius).
We were ever the conceptualists and in the backstage aftermath we came up with the idea of splitting up and having the split announced over the PA. Mark was all for this and he made what has to be quite the flounciest resignation speech any member of any band can ever have made. ‘It’s over. I’m sick and tired of wearing out the knees on my trousers kneeling to sing into a cheap tape recorder’ he flounced, before flouncing off into the night.
Much as I love some of the people I met there, I secretly hated the school and in a way I felt a perverse sense of triumph in having ended my time there in a melee of chaos at the heart of a highly charged real-life drama enacted on the main school stage. However, I decided after the event that I for one wasn’t sick of wearing out the knees on my trousers. Guy felt the same and we decided that we would continue as Real PD, and that our first album as a twosome would be a concept record expanding on ‘Waterloo’, but where every single song was based on a different station of the Merseyrail Northern Line. As ideas go, it’s a stupendously shit one, but I do so wish we’d gone through with it now: it could have been our ‘Tales of Topographic Oceans’. And then the other revelation hit: Mark had in fact only flounced as far as Adrian’s house, where they had formed a new pared-down duo ‘Life on the Edge’, whose admittedly rather excellent music emphasized the more art-rocky elements of PD. And whose vocals were presumably recorded wearing shorts. For me in 2004, the ‘Life on the Edge’ sessions, inconclusive though they are, are infinitely more listenable than the warmed-over gruel of ‘D Factor.’
Guy and I were sent mafia-style cut-up letters from Adrian in the wake of the split proclaiming us to be the ‘Potentially Untalented’ of the ex-foursome. (The envelope containing these contained a mysterious white powder which turned out to be a pinch of salt. Nowadays it would probably have set off a nationwide terror alert. Or even, if we’d been feeling at all vindictive, a drugs raid on Adrian’s house). Yet by the end of the summer Adrian and I were sufficiently reconciled to write a new song with him. ‘Will You Have Me Back’ was a template for the new high-energy inflected sound which was to characterize the next Real PD album, the ‘D Factor.’
Three weeks or so into my first term at university I got a tape in the post from Adrian with twelve or so instrumentals on it, both keyboard and piano tracks, with instructions that I should write lyrics and vocal lines to accompany them. I came up with words to all but one of the songs, (a jaunty thing which I titled ‘Celebration’ and subsequently lost). It was only much later I discovered that many of the same songs had been sent to Mark with the same instructions!! I was living in Oxford at this stage, away from home for the first time, and my new environment had an impact on the songs: the real ‘Summertown’ being a leafy Oxford suburb, to give but one example. I had also become heavily involved in the student Christian movement and this led to a rash of what Adrian dubbed ‘God songs’ on this album. (‘This is the love’ being a case in point).
Adrian’s music is certainly the saving grace of this rather lackluster collection; ‘Remember Me’ is, for example, quite a lovely, tender little piano piece. I have to say that, on the whole, I hate my lyrical and vocal contributions to this album with quite a passion, to the point where it is almost unlistenable for me: I can’t stand it when musicians are derivative and here I can hear so often that I was in thrall to Morrissey – I seem to have lost my own authentic voice. This is especially true of the dreary second half of the album. I felt the need to purge myself of all things Smiths quite soon after this. I thought it was a spiritual thing at the time, but now I can see that it was a way of recovering my own musical identity.
Although not an official band member for this album, Mark returned to the D Factor sessions in a ‘guest’ capacity on the songs ‘Consequences’ and ‘Jack in the Box.’ The group’s ranks were, however, swelled for this one album only by the inclusion of Sean Naughton, our guitarist from the Exam Relief days. The D Factor originals ‘Violent Lies’ and ‘I Could Forgive You’ were recorded in his basement, and they are unique in the PD canon in featuring live drums, also courtesy of Sean. Rerecordings of Mount Vesuvius and Stop Me Dreaming (tragically both worse than the originals) were done on Sean’s equipment too. Oh, yes, and there’s the inexplicable cover of the dreadful Under the Boardwalk to boot.
In retrospect, I think of the Cahill-less ‘D Factor’ as being rather like those Beach Boys albums of the late 60’s and early 70’s where Brian Wilson is absent, away with the fairies in his sandpit. There’s nothing really wrong with the melodies here, although the production is flat and two-dimensional. Unlike Brian Wilson of course, Mark had never been the songwriter with the most prolific output. But it had been Mark’s job within the band to steer us towards experimentation and away from ‘tastefulness.’ And his influence in such a capacity is sorely lacking here, resulting in a conservative and workmanlike album: the couple of tracks where Mark actually appears are the ones where we sound the most like Real PD. Happily, we would go on to make at least two much better albums than this, in the shape of ‘Popstars’ and ‘Nostalgia.’ But things had to get worse before they got better…
And now some assorted ‘D Facts’:
v The song ‘Centre of the Storm’ had a working title of ‘King Lear’ and was inspired by the eye-gouging Shakespeare despair-fest.
v ‘Remember Me’ originally had different lyrics and was called ‘Formby Point,’ after the famous stretch of coastline. Adrian vetoed the first draft, deeming it 'far too silly' for his ‘beautiful music.’ The offending refrain ran: ‘I haven’t got a care in the world./ In actual fact I’ve got two./ The first is that I don’t know who I am,/ and the second is, I can’t see the point in Formby Point./ Well, can you?’
v Adrian was very taken with the Kevin Godley/ Andrew Gold MOR ‘superduo’ Wax and wrote the song ‘This is the love’ in (subtle) imitation of their hit ‘Building a Bridge to Your Heart.’
v The song ‘Bazaar’ was originally named ‘Devil’s Bazaar’ and was based on Ray Bradbury’s short story and stageplay ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes.’ Mark, Adrian and I had all seen the play the previous summer at the Liverpool Everyman. This of course makes it the second PD song to have a Ray Bradbury connection (see Sandwich in Motion linernotes). AC, 10/ 04
Mark on The D Factor
OK then, why should I, appearing as I do on only 2 tracks of the D Factor be contributing sleeve notes? Dear Listener, let me tell you: 1) Why shouldn't I? 2) PD Remaster continuity. 3) Disc 2 comprises some of the Life On The Edge sessions which is all about me! (And Adrian, but mostly about me!) 4) To provide a balanced account of the circumstances surrounding this post Exam Relief album as I have the luxury of writing in response to Alistair's contribution.
Exam Relief does not hold happy memories for me. I'm afraid I lacked the courage of our convictions. All the elements of our ridicule - our day-to-day image, clothes, songs, crap keyboards were in place and I should have risen above it and enjoyed it for what it was but instead it was so traumatic that I decided there and then (apparently) that I was no longer a member of the Real PD. I was after all the only member who had to return to school for a final year after the humiliation. I probably thought that the game was up anyway as we'd be spending the majority of the next 4 years (in fact as it turns out rest of our lives to date) living in 4 different cities. A couple of years later dressed in my best student fatigues complete with Jesus Jones (before the hits obviously) badge on my black cap I overheard 2 children between tracks on my Walkman at Town Green station: 'Do you remember that concert at school. He was in that band.' In fact in retrospect we probably won over the very aggressive crowd somewhat in the last 3 songs but the psychological damage had already been done. It was doubly disappointing because as the 3-piece mini-PD with Adrian and Sean we were the surprise hit of the audition - can you see where this is going? The very compere who barged Alistair off the stage grooved irony free to Chinatown, the rap in Waterloo was considered genius, the knowing humour of Richard Owen's Bag genuinely funny and Stop Me Dreaming went down a storm. I can only think now that I blamed Guy and Alistair for the utterly hostile reaction, which is rather unfair particularly when you consider whose songs I'd mostly been singing and rather unwise given the problems I was having writing decent lyrics.
I don't think I was particularly covert about taking Adrian with me and had probably been jealous for some time at Alistair getting first crack at all Adrian's best music. I had certainly been very frustrated at the lack of control I had in the Real PD and musically Adrian could and would do what I wanted when asked.
The Life On The Edge sessions here are just that with only Sun Don't Shine (aka Mental Emergency) being the definitive 'finished' version, even then with the alternative middle section missing ('When I asked the Queen for 2 minutes of her time/She just gave me £720'). There are definitely other tracks lost in time, presumed gone forever, such as a gorgeous instrumental version of a song called Muriel. You can hear I was most interested in grafting electronics onto a piano base for dramatic effect and I think with Adrian's music and our ability to improvise arrangements it mostly worked well. I regretted not doing that with Amphisbaena and I don't think this style was ever explored to its full potential.
Adrian I think enjoyed being pushed musically by somebody who vaguely knew what he was talking about and working by turns with strict and experimental methods but understandably he had his own interests and agenda and ultimately 2 wasn't as much fun as 4. Sun Don't Shine was joy though, piling the miserablisms over all that chirpiness. From the tapes he sent me I was immediately inspired to sit down and write Not This Time line for line to the given structure complete with (to my mind then) Suzanne Vega style metaphors and themes. Considering it was all imagination, I felt there was a convincing ring of truth to the violent relationship described. Rather like tempting fate, unfortunately it all came true.
Of the other songs on Adrian's tapes I found the rest of the piano ballads a bit dreary and the dance-pop stuff not my sort of thing and didn't do anything with them which is just as well because as you know (and here I am relieved to say it's where Adrian not me perhaps unfairly comes across as the villain of the piece) Alistair had received them too, so inadvertently I am responsible for the content of The D Factor. I never got Summertown! I would have snapped that up right away. I did also write words to Centre Of The Storm about a selfish person compared to a spider at (coincidentally) the Centre of her Web but they weren't very good anyway.
Surprisingly the only part of Alistair's sleevenotes with which I have contention is that I 'became increasingly lazy' (as a songwriter). Admittedly I am incredibly lazy in general but I've finally understood that I only really wrote well with a piano or at least a full-sized keyboard to which I've not had access since the turn of the 90s. I am also poor at fully realising songs on my own and from this point we didn't have time to work on stuff together before recording so more than anybody my ideas didn't reach their full potential and I was reluctant to record anything half-finished as sessions had a habit of becoming albums proper.
So to the album itself. I haven't heard these recordings in over 10 years (and still haven't yet) so are you sitting uncomfortably? Let's listen together now...
Well, I think The D Factor itself is actually pretty good. It's disciplined in a way not accomplished since Love & Stuff and largely coherent despite splitting as it does fairly equally between Adrian electro, Piano ballads and Sean sessions. I can't see my presence would have made much difference in this respect. There is a distinct lack of chaos with the obvious exception of Jack In The Box. The music is excellent throughout, though the lack of production variety makes some of Adrian's songs sound initially a little samey and the lyrics succeed as slightly subversive standard pop fare - certainly better than most of what was to come over the next couple of albums.
Ignoring that which applies to all our oeuvre (bum notes galore, crap singing etc) obviously The D Factor is not above specific criticism. Bar the Sean tracks which have a weird eclectic vibe the lack of live band recording leads to a very dry sound, unflattering to the songs themselves, that starts to feel unavoidably flat over a number of tracks. The completely unrehearsed live version of one of this album's highlights Summertown, which hopefully will appear on CD at some point, shows how it could have been; not necessarily better but bigger, wider and just more PD. Also The D Factor is overly long but again since Love & Stuff we were not great ones for quality control. Probably it would benefit from the pruning of the rerecordings with Sean which would have made contextual sense as B-sides of say an I Could Forgive You. In an act of foresight this new version of Mount Vesuvius appears to have accidentally invented the camp disco-metal of Electric 6.
Consequences is the one track on which I did have a significant artistic input. Had there ever been a poll of favourite PD songs it's quite possible that this might have come top despite most fans (dare we use that word?) failing to notice it was a duet - what on earth did they think it was about? Schizophrenia? I think we'd decided roughly what it was about without knowing exactly where it was going before Alistair and I took it in turns writing a line each. For some reason this lead to New Order style Oh-that'll-do type lyrics like, 'It's not that I'm an evil man/It's just that things got out of hand'. I did try to complete a couplet for Alistair's character: 'Your name is dirt all over town/Since you got off with Mrs Brown', but sadly it was vetoed. Nobody seemed to mind what we would now probably call an Interpolation of Strawberry Switchblade's Since Yesterday. It was clear by then that more than any of us Adrian was an utterly shameless musical magpie to great effect. I wouldn't be surprised any more if it was revealed that Stop Me Dreaming was based around the Coronation Street theme tune.
Finally The D Factor began a trend for terrible album titles. What did it mean? What about the P? Did it convey anything? Had I been in a position of influence I would have strongly objected and suggested alternatives. Let's have a think... The Split P (or The P Soup) and The D Factor? I know I wouldn't have got away with (Why Did The P Come? Because) The D Factor but it would have been fun trying. MJC10/ 04
Video: An update of 'Summertown', which first appeared on The D Factor, live in Chester 2008
Summertown Live in Chester April 11th 2008
'Filmstars' is indisputably the nadir of the band as a 4-piece. Although we weren't a drug band, the horribly woozy lack of focus here and the lack of memorable songs are suggestive of some kind of narcotic torpor. 'Collectors' only.
Filmstars Tracklisting
Download a zipfile of the whole album here.
Alistair on Filmstars
1998’s ‘Filmstars’ is, with the possible exception of ‘People Like These’, the least loved album in the Real PD canon. Much of it sounds like a bit of a mess of half-baked and half-hearted songwriting, and a rather joyless mess at that; certainly the mood is quite distinct from the happy-go-lucky serendipitous chaos of, say, ‘Paranormal’. If you are someone with little time for this album, I’m not going to write anything here to try and make you love it, but I will say that with hindsight I hear ‘Filmstars’ as something of a necessity for Real PD in terms of both the group dynamic and the way we made our music. Although it felt, and sounded, very much like an end at the time, it was actually a stepping stone on the way to somewhere else: a transitional album, if you like; our ‘Monster’, perhaps. ‘Filmstars’ was the collective constipation just prior to the creative unblocking of ‘Popstars’.
Mark Cahill’s period of self-imposed exile following the Exam-Relief debacle was over, and on ‘Filmstars’ he’s credited once again as a fully-fledged band member. During the brief period of our split in the summer of 1987, he and Adrian had worked together on the ‘Life on the Edge’ project (see D Factor) and the smooth yet spiky version of their track ‘Not This Time’ is perhaps the highlight of ‘Filmstars’. It was recorded, like ‘Darling,..’, ‘Trash’, ‘Bernie’, and the pointless retread of ‘Psychoanalyst’s Couch’, at Mark’s house in Aughton. This felt a little like coming full circle, as it was the first major recording we’d done there since ‘Love & Stuff’ back in ’85.
‘Darling, our future’s in the bin’ was, in retrospect, a good opener; I still enjoy the way it wrong-foots the listener by fading in on a blistering tempo and then effectively screeching to a halt before staggering to its oompah feet. It’s permeated with a spirit of slightly spiteful mischief, a recurrent musical theme on ‘Filmstars’; ‘Bernie, the Poison Ice-Cream Seller’ and ‘Beverley Hills Duck’, for example, both share the same nasty naughtiness. There was certainly still some bad feeling or resentment around following the whole Exam Relief thing and that seeped on to some of the tracks. But if, say, the ‘White Album’ is the sound of a previously unified band starting to fall apart, ‘Filmstars’ is the sound of a band in disarray starting to fall back together. It’s all healthy therapy really, and this collection certainly has its fair share of ‘acting out’ – ‘Trash’ unflinchingly revisits Exam Relief itself and casts a withering, coruscating gaze at the paucity of the musical offerings of the rest of the bands, the ones that dared to be able to play their instruments, only to press them into serving up horrid populist covers of Queen tracks, which, at the time, was anathema to our arty outsider sensibilities. We were militant in our geekiness. ‘Trash’ settles into a groove and refuses to budge for nearly 13 minutes, like a malevolent squatter. It is Real PD’s longest track, overshadowing even ‘Deutschland [a slip of the tongue]’. For a track lambasting vacuous rock manoeuvres, it is not without irony that the song itself boasts something of a rock dynamic, brought even more to the fore on the instrumental version assisted by Sean Naughton featured here as an extra track.
More ‘acting out’ came in revisiting the song ‘Dismal Tuesday Mornings’, a very old [1982] Size 42 track (cowritten with John Eklund and one of the first pieces of original music I ever recorded), seemingly for the sole purpose of destroying it. But the symbolic Oedipal culmination of the album is surely the gut-wrenchingly awful interpretation of Thompson Twins’ ‘Hold Me Now’ which closes ‘Filmstars’. This track is shot through with a kind of hysterical exhaustion and is very difficult listening indeed (although Mark’s spot-on Alannah Currie impression is to die for). The Twins had been exactly the kind of riffy, percussive, colourful & upbeat pop band we aspired to be when we were making ‘Love & Stuff’ at the start of our musical life as an ensemble group in ’85. Here we basically enacted a dark musical phantasy of killing them off. It was all subconscious but it’s hard in retrospect not to give it that meaning. The acting out on almost-blues ‘Blue Rinse Baby’ got quite graphic: as the tape ran, we inserted the microphone at various points into our mouths before inserting it inside the body of the acoustic guitar, the instrument that we had failed to master and which we were simultaneously ‘afraid’ of and yet, in our anti-rockism, the instrument which we also considered ourselves snootily above. The ritualistic acts of destruction in ‘Blue Rinse Baby’ and ‘Hold Me Now’ allowed us to break free from our original blueprint, and, on next album ‘Popstars’, to discover a new lease of life and a new energy.
Perhaps as a reaction to the tastefully composed but rather sterile songwriting which characterised the previous album ‘D Factor’, ‘Filmstars’ introduces a more spontaneous approach: it’s no secret that some of the tracks here were improvised as the tape ran. We got better at this on ‘Popstars’, where we acquired the technology to save up a barrage of little riffs and musical motifs which we could drop into the tracks as they unfolded. Some of these early experiments here like ‘Beverley Hills Duck’ aren’t bad, but they do suggest that, paradoxically, you actually have to learn how to improvise properly before it sounds ace.
Here in its remastered form, ‘Filmstars’ is bolstered by an impressive array of contemporaneous extra tracks, many experimental in nature and several just brain-bogglingly odd. The original of ‘Disaster! Disaster!’ is present and is built on a sample of the Talking Heads’ track ‘Nothing But Flowers’. Listening back to this now I can’t help but notice that there were clearly some technical problems with the microphone that day – Mark turns in a two-thirds absent stuttery vocal which sounds like nothing so much as a tribute to that PA system gag that Bob Carolgees became famous for. Why the hell didn’t we do another take?? Having severed our links with the Twins, we promptly turned back to them to provide the rhythm track to the weedy ‘Bradley’ (it’s the beats from the 12" version of ‘Get That Love’ if you must know). Not to give George Gershwin a writing credit for vast swathes of Adrian’s pseudo-classical fusion piece ‘Enough of the City’ seems bordering on the litiginous, but the biggest pointer of where we were headed next is, improbably, the interminable, cacophonous, disco-concrète ‘happening’ which is ‘Orienteering # 3’, if only because of its clear homage to New Order.
I hope you enjoy this album, or if that’s not possible, I hope at least that it doesn’t make you ill. AC 12/04
Mark on Filmstars
Of the rerecordings, 2 find a permanent home on album from the musical ether that was the Life on the Edge sessions. Not This Time is vaguely justifiable as the other version has a budgie cheeping at random points throughout and my recent chest infection provided a pleasantly alternative rattley vocal. This also would have suited Trash if I’d been able to sing properly in the first place. On hearing this version of Trash again it drifted by fairly quickly. Inspired as it is by The Psychedelic Furs and a song called Heartbeat in particular I occasionally affect a Richard Butler imitation when I can be bothered. I remember looking up at some point towards the end of its recording, seeing the others were starting to look rather bored and deciding to bring it to a close. By this point Trash does seem to gain purpose if only to warn off the unwary. Typically it would appear that despite the endless repetition I hadn’t practiced enough so as to be actually able to hit the right keys regularly and didn’t know the words or structure well enough to come in at the right places even when reading the lyrics. It seems unbelievable that the first time I added the arrangement stolen wholesale from There Is A Light That Never Goes Out (and there are precedents that suggest this might even be legal) that nobody noticed its origin during recording but I suppose its fairly likely that everybody had switched off by that point.
The rest of the album is as astonishingly uninspired as its title with a can’t be bothered attitude permeating throughout. We never really considered listeners so it’s hard to say why any should make the effort. I’d never considered Bernie as something that would appear on an album. I’d written it once when I was in a bad mood probably to annoy my parents. I couldn’t imagine lyrics but I‘d have expected something incredibly pretentious and archly existential to suit the utter malevolence of the music. Oh, well.
The final 4 songs from session without Adrian is almost an exercise in pointlessness. Blue Rinse Baby is effectively Eurythmics’ I Need You with different words and Beverly Hills Duck (where the lyrical content manages to be as bad as the title) comes from an unused coda to Lady Louise (I guess it was a miracle that we ever made it to the end of that song without trying to add extra bits) stretched out wafer thin way beyond the point of elasticity. Hold Me Now simply evokes the misery of a painful lingering death.
The bonus tracks here are considerably better in quality and the breakbeat experiments of Bradley and Disaster! Disaster! (aka Attack Is The Best Form Of Defence) at least point to a potential way forward. Tellingly Filmstars itself offers nothing new and ultimately it would be new technology rather than classic songwriting that would bring about a renewed enthusiasm on the sessions later that year that would become Popstars. MJC 01/05
Hoorah! Re-invigorated by the possibilities of House music, the PD came back with a lyrically obtuse but sonically inventive album which bounced all around the room when you put it on. And made you want to bounce along with it.
Popstars Tracklisting
Download a zipfile of the whole album here.
Alistair
on Popstars
After one slightly disappointing album and one downright dodgy one, 1989’s ‘Popstars’ represented something of a return to form for Real PD. On ‘Popstars’ we temporarily set aside the craft of traditional songwriting and concentrated rather in translating a certain energy and spontaneity onto tape: that we had a new keyboard in our armoury helped, as did the synergy of the group members’ contributions: with the possible exception of ‘You Came’, all the group members were involved in some creative way with every track.
We were all crazy about pop music and endlessly discussed and dissected the latest sounds. Yet we realised that when it came to discussing Real PD’s music, we’d always home in on little ‘bits’, as in ‘there’s that fabulous bit just after the chorus in such and such a song where so and so does such and such and it sounds absolutely fantastic for about 5 seconds.’ We slowly came to realise that the ‘little bits’ of magic were perhaps a strength we could exploit, and on ‘Popstars’, we essentially abandoned the big picture and started off by custom-making the delicious little bits, only fashioning the actual songs later!. I’ll give you an example of what I mean: we had a new keyboard (the Yamaha MT-68) which enabled you to store a number of little sequences, which you could then let fly at a given point during the song. So on, say, ‘I want to go somewhere’ we had the little marimba runs and wobbly woodwind which were prepared beforehand but which we then splattered like bright blobs of colour onto the dark, Deep House-apeing canvas of the track as we went along, without much rhyme or reason other than the logic of intuition. This way of working was good for us because it enabled us to still have our spontaneity and chaos, but within the traffic-calming repetitious grids of House. House was a new phenomenon at the time, and it’s easy to forget now how terrible exciting, eerily spartan and fresh it sounded.
‘Popstars’ has its weaker, well, OK then, downright crap moments too, the pointless and dire cover of Kim Wilde’s erstwhile gorgeous pop hit ‘You Came’ being a prime offender. The recording levels are so out on this, it can actually cause temporary deafness if played at high volumes on headphones. Mark redeemed himself with another cover, this time of the Fall’s ‘Hit the North’. A Fall cover had all the right signifiers: shambolic, prolific, Northern, edgy, geeky-cool: it almost doesn’t matter that it sounded quite good too. The lyrics on this album have come in for a bit of stick in the past too… I’ll defend them and say that in the way they repeatedly drop the listener right into the heart of a fantasy narrative, without a map or much sense of what’s going on, they are a precursor of Beck’s more obtuse 90’s style. Hahaha! Actually, some of them are plainly rubbish: in ‘Please Believe Me’ the meaningless, directionless chorus lyric undermines the whole song. Tant pis, darlings.
Some random facts about this album:
· The skirling synth lines of ‘Please Believe Me’ were written as a nod to the theme of the Anneka Rice show ‘Treasure Hunt.’
· ‘It’s just a weapon’ was the sole Popstars track recorded at Guy’s house in Hillside: the rest of the songs were committed to tape in 2 sessions at Adrian’s, the last of which was on New Year’s Eve 1988. Although the album’s release date was 1989, which was the earliest we got copies out to our friends, it was actually all in the can before the final moments of ’88.
· The track ‘Leonard Cohen’s Smile’ began as an attempt by Adrian to write a piece in the style of ‘Tower of Song’, a track from Laughing Len’s heady ’86 opus ‘I’m Your Man.’
· Only one song from ‘Popstars’ had an accompanying video made: ‘Murder on the Underground’ featured a tableaux of rapid-fire Network 7 – styled wobbly camera shots of run-down areas of Liverpool: the band walk the streets around Sandhills station, desperate for the gritty backdrop of urban decay to create the impression that they are something other than pampered middle-class mummies’ boys.
With its big beats and freeform dancey feel, Popstars is one of the only Real PD albums that mirrored and was even slightly ahead of general shifts in the way popular music was made: ‘The Stone Roses’ and ‘Technique’, for example, typified a general move towards a looser, (‘baggier’ if you will) aesthetic married to the rhythms of House. And it’s actually got better with time: not having given it a listen for a few years, I approached ‘Popstars’ in 2003 with some caution but was amazed by how up to date some of it sounded: the huge, abrasive synthy riffs of, say, ‘Murder on the Underground’ chime neatly with the new electropop chart sound of Sugababes and Girls Aloud. Maybe a sound worth revisiting on our new material...? AC, 12/ 04
Mark on Popstars
As Alistair has documented, the new keyboard afforded a huge leap forward in terms of sound and how we were able to put tracks together. Popstars I think was recorded in 5 different rooms in 3 different houses, sorry ‘studios’ over at least as many sessions and as such it sounds more cobbled together than ever but most of the tracks have their share of individual merits.
An obvious point to make from my point of view is that for the first time I was regularly going out dancing. While the Leadmill and Limit in Sheffield tended towards Indie on the nights I was there Inner City and New Order’s Fine Time were always highlights. For some reason the 4 tracks for which I wrote the music are all bunched at the start (I’m pretty sure this was not the recording order) and definitely exhibit these kind of influences.
The release of ‘Introspective’ as a proper full-price album rather than a cynical cash cow doubtless informed the inclusion of what clearly is a very extended version of I Want To Go Somewhere. While we couldn’t sample as such (though D.E.N. would soon provide an excellent attempt at this using a tape recorder) I wanted it to feel like a collection of samples laid end to end over the simple danced-up blues progression. We even went self-referential like Cameo or Thompson Twins lifting a riff from The D Factor’s The Other Side Of You. As such it isn’t really a song but announced the brave new sound and set out Popstars’ stall. In keeping with the rest of the album the lyrics are not very good at all. The main problem was that listeners seemed to think it was about waiting to go to the toilet (in a car with somebody beside??) and the previously-unheard-by-man note hit on the word ‘face’ didn’t help. Hilarity inevitably ensued when after an instrumental break Alistair announces that he has ‘been somewhere’. Having assumed the words were improvised I was appalled on rereading a letter from Alistair where he outlined some ‘great new lyrics’ about, you guessed it, going somewhere in a car with somebody. If I am missing something then somebody let me know. Apart from that it was pretty cool!
STRanger is at least supposed to be funny as well as our most slightly racist moment since Chinatown. Children Of The Pleasure Culture was the archetype for how this album should work, improvised, written, programmed and recorded in about half an hour. In an era where everybody had been ‘keeping it real’ for half a decade and keyboards were used to sound like other instruments the unrepentantly electronic synthfest drew sour faces from listeners but actually sounds more modern now tapping directly into 70s Kraftwerk and Being Boiled era Human League. The title is inspired by a lyric in the Gang of 4 song Call Me Up. As with most of the more experimental moments on Popstars we probably should have completely abandoned traditional structures and narrative. I can’t really criticise the lyrics as I couldn’t improvise them and was virtually idea-free by this point but they probably would have been be better if there were less of them whether repeated or not and only hinted at what the songs were about. Created by the same method, Murder On The Underground is even better, equally tuneless and ace in a way that can only be achieved from a hasty conception.
The new keyboard’s one slight glitch was at the end of each loop there was a barely perceptible heartbeat that just wasn’t quite right, like The League’s Fascination (where the horn sample is also fractionally out of tune).
As usual we could do without the covers being there but with time a constraint it would have meant waiting until Easter to finish the album otherwise. Hit The North is actually quite good if a little pointless. It was more of an exercise in having fun with the new keyboard. It was very difficult to hear what the words were supposed to be though and The Fall were not good at providing lyrics other than scrawled excerpts on sleeves. Please refer to the lyrics of I Don’t See Why I Should for my feelings on being required to sing You Came. Given that it is my only lead vocal it is sung perhaps with less enthusiasm that Hold Me Now earlier in the year.
The recording of the closing track was the most lovely PD moment since Stop Me Dreaming. After the technical stress and angst of most of the material it was actually relaxing playing Leonard Cohen’s Smile and it had proper lyrics. Despite Guy’s presence on this album keeping a low profile his organ produces some beautifully right wrong chords.
Alistair may have been exorcising Morrissey with Just A Weapon but the vocal inflections lived on, particularly on Please Believe Me. That song is distinguished by a fight breaking out towards the end involving a cheap box of chocolates (the kind where they all look different but have the same mallowy toffee centre) possibly resulting in the ‘strings’ running interestingly several bars behind the backing track. My only audible contribution to Where Have You Been All My Life, Adrian’s other upbeat number, was the perky riff at the end of the chorus of which I am immensely proud. I think it was supposed to be a concept of what if Rick Astley had written Left To My Own Devices and was the point at which we thought we had invented Wobble Houseä where you jab at one key rhythmically while wiggling the pitch bend. It didn’t catch on. MJC 09/04
The Fascinating Game of Shadows (1990)
Murky production hides some cool pop moments. But there aren't that many... worryingly features a Stock/Aitken/Waterman cover version.
The Fascinating Game of Shadows Tracklisting
Download the whole original album (tracks 1 - 18) as a zipfile here.
Download the bonus tracks (19 - 33) as a zipfile here.
Alistair on The Fascinating Game of Shadows
Sometime in 1989, the middle fell out of pop music. It was all dancey beats and basslines at the bottom end and sparse skittering hihat in the upper register from that point on, with an eerie empty space in between, allowing plenty of room for an optional vocal, from this point on. Real PD tried our best to imitate this sound, and although Nostalgia is our beats ‘n’ basslines album par excellence, the makeover started on ‘The Fascinating Game of Shadows’.
‘Shadows’ is something of a wallflower in the PD Catalogue, which for some reason puts me in mind of the Beach Boys’ much maligned 70’s album Holland; imperfect yet with flashes of charm. Of course, even Holland didn’t have copious bum notes and appalling singing all over the shop; and you can be sure that Brian Wilson never sang into a pair of cheap headphones because he couldn’t afford to replace a broken mic! In addition, the Shadows album suffered from an unhelpful track sequencing: its two undisputed standout tracks, Shadowman and You’re Like Music To Me, are buried in the tracklisting, the latter coming right at the end. Flawed the album may be, but now it’s time to rediscover it…
The Fascinating Game of Shadows was recorded over three sessions in December 1989/ January 1990. Personnel at the first, and third sessions, in Millcroft and Hillside respectively, was Adrian, Guy and me. The second session was again at Millcroft, but with only Adrian and Mark present. This was the session at which ‘Shadowman’ was laid down. This was perhaps fitting, as the song had its instrumental genesis in the Brailsford/ Cahill side project ‘Life on the Edge’ some 18 months previously (listeners are directed to the Life on the Edge Sessions disc on the D Factor set). In a spirit of inclusivity, Adrian recorded a sample of a phone conversation he had with me during the ‘Shadowman’ sessions and incorporated it into the track. I don’t know why Mark didn’t come to the other sessions, but I suspect he wasn’t in the Liverpool area for very long that Christmas. Incidentally, I know there’s a story behind Shadowman’s lyric but I won’t be able to tell it as well as Mark can, so I’ll leave that to him. Maybe he can also reveal who the sampled girl who says, with remarkable insight, ‘you’re strange’ on the song’s playout is…
This album was the first time that some backing tracks had been pre-recorded before the sessions: ‘No-one’s Talking’ was completed as an instrumental by Adrian before the first session. I was just returning from my first few months of living abroad, in Schleswig Holstein and the song perhaps reflects my initial feelings of alienation (always a winning theme in electro-pop!!) on finding myself in a foreign culture I didn’t really understand.
‘Emigration’ was essentially a karaoke-lite revisiting of the erstwhile emotionally fraught soapy-story-song from Love & Stuff. It notably featured Jenny Wigmore in a more up-front role than previously, as did Your Music On and I Don’t Wanna Get Hurt. In Your Music On, Jenny reads out a letter from an obsessive fan to a ficticious popstar ‘Nick’. This was in direct imitation of a then recently aired BBC TV documentary about ‘sick fan syndrome’, all about the excesses of teen idol worship. The programme was punctuated by readings from a series of increasingly desperate epistles from a young woman to a musician known only as ‘Ni(c)k.’ This programme was meant to be very serious in tone, but unfortunately the reconstructions within it were shot through with melodrama and we all found it hilarious. And we were all trying to guess which Nick it was… Kershaw? Heyward? The majority consensus was that it was obviously Nick Rhodes, but we didn’t know why we all felt so sure of this. Your Music On was rebuilt from the roots up for the altogether jollier single version, a poppier confection than its spacious, House-y album cousin. Featured here as a bonus is yet another version of the track called ‘Your Acid On’, which was a rather fantastic Acid House instrumental courtesy of Adrian. I guess we could update it with a Hard House version. But on second thoughts…
Although Jenny contributes vocals to 3 tracks on Shadows, her only actual ‘singing’ happens on ‘I Don’t Wanna Get Hurt.’ Whatever possessed us to cover a minor Stock Aitken Waterman hit I don’t know. They were the sound of the times, I suppose. We did a better job of covering SAW (well, at least, Adrian did on the instrumental side of things) on ‘Got to Be Certain’ from the Martini Kid session in May 1989, included here as a bonus track. This session was a three-way, round the piano jam with Adrian, me and my student friend Adam Creen. The location was the most beautiful we ever recorded in – the oak-panelled Old Library of Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford. Adam had a more scholarly take on pop than the rest of us: he had an endearingly old fashioned Brill Building style approach to songwriting that involved music paper and pencils. We collaborated a few times in the 90’s: ultimately, Adam taught me the value of building a song around distinctive harmonic progressions and not always just from riffs flung together. But from what I can remember, our first co-write, Martini Kid emerged in quite an organic and collaborative way.
In late November 1989 Adam sent me some music in the post which I then played to Adrian – he set about arranging it straight away and the Shadows track ‘Sweet Yesterdays’ took shape. The pleasingly crashing percussion sounds at the end of the song’s fourth bar were caused by Guy stepping on a cup of tea by accident and making it flip over onto the saucer. Guy has a history of musically serendipitous moments in the PD but this was one of his flukiest yet. Like Your Music On, ‘Sweet Yesterdays’ was subsequently reworked for the single version (featured here on CD1 as an extra track).
The jokey Jack the Rabbit was essentially a piss-take of the Jive Bunny phenomenon. For the young and uninitiated, this was a string of utterly undeserving #1 records by a lazy-arsed production team who simply strung together early rock and roll hits and Glenn Miller numbers with the most gaga-simple of swing beats behind them. And promoted them by way of a large (and unconvincing) dancing rabbit. Our rip-off sounds just as good as any of theirs. And it’s funnier.
‘You’re like Music to Me’ has something of a Philadelphia-Soul vibe to it, a new flavour for the PD. It was also the subject of some disputed authorship, with Adam Creen claiming that Adrian had been influenced by Martini Kid when writing ‘Music’ and had effectively interpolated it. In the absence of a high-court copyright battle, Adam won a writing credit for his tenacity alone.
Disc Two of this double set features extra tracks also recorded by Real PD in 1989. The aim of the summer’s ‘Disaster Disaster’ sessions, taking place at Mark’s house in Aughton, was to create a greatest hits album, comprised mostly of rerecorded versions of our best-known songs, but with a few token newies thrown in for good measure. (Mark had by far the best recording equipment and a piano with a lovely, crisp tone.) Such re-recording projects rarely bode well in the world of pure pop: I know that Luke Haines and Bonny Prince Billy have got away with it, but one only has to listen to the blank menopausal android synth-sludge of Petula Clark’s 80’s restylings for a budget German label to recoil in horror from the very notion. This project was duly abandoned after 25 minutes’ worth of music (Tracks 1 – 7 on Disc Two) had been laid down. Actually, these recordings are not at all bad and, the anaemic reading of ‘Tegan’ aside, they can be said to rank amongst the best things we’ve ever done.
With the spooky, brooding ‘Life on the Edge’ Mark conjured up the most deliciously dark 5 minutes in the whole PD songbook. With those jungle sounds at the start, this track has always been so filmic to me: I always imagine a video with Mark looking dishevelled singing this in some longhouse wearing camouflage and being buzzed by flies, in some Heart of Darkness scenario. ‘Telethon’ was a riffy sequencer jamboree, if ultimately inconsequential. I hate ‘I Recognise Your Writing’ but other people seemed to like it. And ‘Disaster! Disaster!’ itself lifted the original out of a slightly murky groove and gave it a glistening pop sheen with a pulsing staccato undercurrent. Not to mention the fantastic scream – perhaps the best PD scream of all. I think we just couldn’t be bothered doing any more after we got to the end of Chinatown. And fair enough.
Also included here on Disc Two are a number of mostly solo recordings (Inside/ Outside was together with Adrian) which I made in 1989, borrowing Adrian’s keyboard for a week and seeing what I came up with. After 2 years of having no confidence in my ability to make music I suddenly had the urge to try again. The four songs here, (tracks 9 – 12) originally formed part of a collection called ‘Chile Style’ (that’s Chile as in Voodoo Chile, and not as in the South American country). Hearing them now, I’m struck in equal measures by their utter naivety (‘Rain Comes Down’) but also in places by their winsome freshness (‘Tired of not Belonging’). I ought to have pushed for their inclusion on Shadows as I think it would have given it a more varied dynamic but I was still too shy. Happily, the next and final Real PD album from the original run was to witness all the group’s writers firing on all cylinders… AC 01/05
Video from the Fascinating Game of Shadows era
Sweet Yesterdays
Some attempts at big-ish beats sitting not uncomfortably alongside moments of autumnal wistfulness.
Nostalgia Tracklisting
Download a zip file of the album (tracks 1 - 17) here.
Download a zip file of the bonus tracks (18 - 35) here.
Alistair on Nostalgia
The final album in Real PD’s original run of recorded output, Nostalgia doesn’t quite have the class of a Visitors (although it does share something of the same autumnal vibe, particularly in the sentiments of the lead track and the melancholy of ‘The Safety Net’ and the broodiness of ‘The Tide’), but, as a parting shot, it’s got perhaps more of the essence of the group’s soul than, say, an anaemic and fractious Let It Be. With ‘I Don’t See Why I Should’ and ‘Dancing to a Stolen Beat’ it boasts two of our best songs. However clunkily (‘Time 2 Get Up’) it at least tries to fuse contemporary dance elements with the group’s trademark sounds and therefore is perhaps a better reflection of the then current musical climate than other farewells – Cut the Crap or Suede’s dire New Morning to name but two offending swansongs.
The Real PD sessions for what would become Nostalgia span the unprecedentedly long period from March 1990 (Stop me from starting this feeling) to January 1991 (91 Angels Dancing On the Pinhead). ‘I Don’t See Why I Should’ and ‘Nineties’ hailed from the remarkably productive day’s recording in Aughton around Easter 1990 and were both, on their own terms, fully–realised epics and as such they bucked a trend in Mark’s songwriting towards sparse minimalism. They both fairly crackle with life; the former benefits from a thrilling arrangement from Adrian with tabla ’n’ sitar Indian inflections. To my ears, Marks started at this point to adopt a more naturalistic voice than the more stylised vocal he uses on the earlier PD output. ‘Nineties’ is another sophisticated popsong which exhibits a textual playfulness. The line stating unequivocably that the 1990s will ‘see the end of the Real PD’ is a ‘Verfremdungseffekt’ trick as deft as John Lennon’s bathetic ‘I don’t believe in Beatles’ on ‘God’. Or at least as jolting as ‘this is Phil talking’ on Love Action.
Fast-forwarding to November 1990: I had unofficially given my Uni friend and fellow Tinpan Alley enthusiast Adam Creen the status of my musical editor. I stayed at college for a couple of weeks at the end of Michaelmas term, ostensibly to work towards my finals, but I typically ended up going on a bit of a songwriting binge. I played Adam a new song I’d written called ‘Time We Were Going.’ Adam thought it was catchy but vetoed it for being an outré key change - or four - too far. It appears for the very first time on the Bonus Disc here – you can make your own mind up as to its musical illegality! So I scurried off and wrote ‘Nostalgia’, which was cut from pretty much the same cloth.
‘Nostalgia’, perhaps undeservingly, turned out to be one of the most re-recorded songs that I ever wrote. When I played it to Adam he said, ‘that’s it, that’s your number one hit.’ I was devastated when, travelling back home to Liverpool on the train, a bottle of bath oil shattered and spilt all over the tape. (Fifteen years later I find it’s finally dried out and appears on the Bonus Disc.) The album version has a reprogrammed-from-scratch backing track. Two further recordings came in the 90’s on the Scores albums in 1996 and 1997 repectively. It was only at this point I realised that the song was actually 90% gorgonzola anyway and that it probably wasn’t worth going back to again. ‘Polishing a turd’ would be too unkind a phrase to describe what I was doing but ‘buffing up a cheese’ might fit the bill. Why did I become so obsessed with this song? I think it was the subject matter: I am naturally inclined to be a very backwards-looking person who can dwell on the past to an unhealthy degree and I would use Nostalgia’s chorus as a kind of wake-up mantra to myself.
The vintage band music heard at the beginning of the album’s track comes from Adrian’s extensive collection of old 78’s. (He later went on to collect old Gramophone players on which to give them a suitably authentic spin.) The footage for ‘Nostalgia’s’ video was recorded on the same occasion as the band vocals on the song, New Year’s Eve 1990-1. It was an elaborate conceit following a Scrooge/ Christmas Carol theme with Alistair being awakened from his sleep only to be confronted by his own ghost, wearing a lurid yellow dressing gown. Mark appeared fleetingly in the video, wearing black leather and playing acoustic guitar, in a most pervy fashion, with his tongue. This video had a very off-kilter feel, even by our quirky standards and it may well have received heavy rotation on MTV Japan, had they ever got hold of it.
Adrian had called me when I’d got back the North West at the beginning of December, very excited about some new music he’d been writing. He was a big fan of De La Soul’s ‘Three Feet High and Rising’ album, and, in tune with the magpie sample-culture of the time, ‘Dancing to a Stolen Beat’ lifted from Chic (the already ubiquitous Good Times bassline, with the right notes, OK, Beverley Knight?!) and Double Trouble and the Rebel MC’s ‘Street Tuff’, topping it off with an interpolation of the sax riff from ‘The 49 Number (Hear the Drummer Get Wicked)’. Happily with ‘Stolen Beat’ Adrian manages to weave all these elements seamlessly into a proper song, and not just a showy novelty song (a la Jack in the Box from D Factor). We recorded the song, and the accompanying video (storyboard: a rather lame night-time police car-chase), at his house in Millcroft all in one December 1990 evening. Guy, Adrian and I were present at the session, but this time Mark was absent. We also laid down our self-cover of ‘Hipocritic ’90’ (whose squelchy bass riff was lifted wholesale from Beat International’s ‘Won’t Talk About It’) and the pretty awful cover of Phd’s ‘I Won’t Let You Down’ on the same evening. As a sign of my repentance over the wrongly harmonised IWLYD, a gleaming new 2005 version with the correct chords replaces it here. The original remains my favourite pop single ever.
The final session for ‘Nostalgia’ came a few days into 1991. Like the first demos we did, we recorded it at my house, which I guess closed the circle in some ways. On ‘Angels Dancing On the Pinhead ’91’, we reworked Paranormal’s opening track in a big-beat style, in possible homage to Candy Flip’s treatment of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever.’ ‘Reach for the Phone’ was a flaccid story-song saved only by some vintage Guy BVs.
As the extra tracks on the disc attest, there followed a few more isolated recordings in the early 90s, featuring various combinations of me, Adrian and Guy. ‘Light at the End of the Tunnel’, showcased a new drum machine of Adrian’s, and was recorded in Lampeter later in 1991. ‘24 Hour Heartache’ had a video (involving blue screens, blue bubbles, blue faces and even a pervy bit with what looked like blue wee-wee) which won Adrian a prize at a university filmmaking competition. 1991’s ‘Slideshow’ and ‘Why Doesn’t Love Make the News?’, from the following year (both one-off songs recorded under the name PD Possee, a moniker first used for the upbeat AA cassingle of ‘Spring Has Got To Me Again’/ ‘Stop Me From Starting This Feeling’ from April 1990) were probably our finest music moments post-Nostalgia. (2 further collaborations with Adrian and Guy can be heard on the Scores on the Doors albums Smile and Kisses, from 1993 and 1995 respectively.) Adrian gave me another New Order-ish instrumental to work in 1992 which I couldn’t think of what to do with. I’ve finally given it a lyric and a vocal and it appears here as the opening track on Disc 2, ‘The Gift You Give Yourself.’
Other bonus tracks on Disc Two show Adrian becoming a Jean Michel Jarre for the nineties with his spacey instrumental Korg tracks. He later went on to write children’s musicals for schools, having a couple of them published. The final bunch of tracks on disc two were instrumentals in the ‘Wobble House’ idiom (see the ‘Popstars’ sleevenotes), cut solo by Mark in 1990. Although I have often felt intimidated by the instrumental prowess of my fellow PD-ers, listeners should note that these particular tracks are Mark’s keyboard playing and not mine: ‘Telethon’ in particular sounds like some kind of music therapy for arm amputees. However, ‘The Letter (House Mix)’ is fab beyond words, and as a nod back to ‘People Like These,’ is an ideal place to conclude these reissues.
AC 01/05
Video from Nostalgia
Nostalgia
Twenty-Four Hour Heartache