Their truly original 1989 LP wasn’t even by Virgo, nor was it actually an album. But Eric Lewis and Merwyn Sanders created an introspective dance music classic
There’s a great line in Bob Stanley’s self-styled “story of modern pop”, Yeah Yeah Yeah, where he mentions the back sleeves of the three House Sound of Chicago compilations that London Records released between 1986 and 1987. It’s hard to convey how inexplicable the music on them was in the British pop landscape of the time, how alien and strange it seemed when the opening track of Volume 1, Steve “Silk” Hurley’s Jack Your Body, turned up on Top of the Pops, at the top of a chart that featured No More the Fool by Elkie Brooks, Randy Crawford’s Almaz and Genesis’s Land of Confusion. It’s easy to snigger at Radio 1’s Peter Powell announcing that he was retiring, because if music like that could get to No 1, he no longer understood modern pop, but he wasn’t the only person who felt like that. And, as Stanley points out, rather than clarify the music they contained, the photos on the rear of the House Sound of Chicago albums only seemed to compound its weirdness.
The monochrome pictures of Marshall Jefferson and Steve ‘Silk’ Hurley were reminiscent of Delta blues singers, or the deep soul singers simultaneously anthologised on the Charly label: grainy, lost, a parallel and exciting America … Where did they come from? How could this have been going on while Steve Wright in the afternoon was playing Johnny Hates Jazz? They were unknowable. Such mystique.
Even at its most upbeat, it's curiously opaque. The vocals are mumbled and despondent: it feels like eavesdropping
Continue reading...by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian
No comments:
Post a Comment