Coil – A Guide For Beginners – The Voice Of Silver / A Guide For Finishers – A Hair Of Gold

I first became aware of Coil through their remixes of Nine Inch Nails, initially on the singles from The Downward Spiral, and then going backwards through their work on Fixed; or, more precisely, that’s when I first heard them.

It felt like I’d always known about them, just like I’d always known about the interconnected web that incorporated them, Psychic TV and Throbbing Gristle, that awareness somehow being imprinted on me through hours of reading The Wire, NME and any music magazine I could get my hands on in the 90s; like a lot of the stuff I read about, and which appealed to my sensibilities, at that time, I rarely actually got to hear any of it. Instead, I was forced to imagine it in my head based on the vivid descriptions of Coil’s music alone.

And, quite honestly, it scared me as much as it intrigued me; tempting, on all sorts of levels, but also terrifying. Somewhere along the way I read that they’d recorded a soundtrack to Hellraiser, and that was it. I’d grown up with my mother working in a video store. When I used to meet her after work, I’d stare at the images on the VHS boxes of films like Hellraiser and be gripped by an inconsolable fear, well before I’d even watched any of these films, and yet I couldn’t look away. And I guess that’s how I approached Coil – deeply, strangely intrigued, but also absolutely petrified.

Time passed. I got over my timid wimpiness about horror films and the darker sides of life and found myself absorbing myself in bands like NIN in order to develop a thicker, more robust exterior. But still Coil somehow didn’t directly come into that new weltanschauung – tangentially, for sure, through remixes and the odd track on a compilation or other, but the idea of diving into their catalogue was still nerve-racking, what with all the bootlegs, alternative versions and other recordings. Part of me wanted to keep the mythology intact about the core creative and romantic duo of Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson and John Balance, and part of me was just simply daunted by the exercise; it’s like when someone tells you, at around series ten of something that you failed to watch when it first hit the screens (e.g. Game Of Thrones), the idea of going back that far fills me with absolute and unimaginable dread.

Fortunately, in the case of Coil, a solution is at hand – though it wasn’t, for a long time. A Guide For Beginners – The Voice Of Silver and its counterpart A Guide For Finishers – A Hair Of Gold were released by the Russian Feelee label on the occasion of Coil playing their first show in Moscow in 2001, and have now been released as a double CD edition by the Cold Spring imprint. Calling the pair of collections a ‘best of’ seems utterly, utterly inappropriate, but what these two albums highlight are Coil’s panoply of diverse and outwardly incompatible concerns – dark ambient, twisted folk, skewed lysergic techno experiments, punishing industrial bleakness, psychogeographical excursions into oblique storytelling, magick, mushrooms, moon music and occult mystery.

The collections traverse the entire Coil back catalogue from 1984’s Scatology through to 2000’s second volume of Musick To Play In The Dark, but in a typically non-linear way. Here you’ll find deserved staples like the brooding Italianate operatic gestures of ‘Ostia (The Death Of Pasolini)’ and the nauseating sampleadelica of ‘The Anal Staircase’ from Horse Rotorvator (1986), or the svelte electro of ‘Further Back And Faster’ from Love’s Secret Domain (1991). You’ll also find more surprising inclusions, like the urgent, trance-like ‘A.Y.O.R’ from 1993’s Backwards bootleg and the low-slung paranoid dub-dread of ‘Scope’ from 1990’s ‘Wrong Eyes’ 7-inch. The discordant serenity of ‘A Cold Cell’, on A Guide For Beginners, was effectively a solitary exclusive here, a different version appearing on The Wire’s sixth volume of their enduring Wire Tapper series.

Across two hours, and when taken as a whole, these two albums make for a disturbing and trippy listen. Coil’s brand of ambient music has a rough edge, its outer fringes laced with dangerous temptations and a languid, savage latency which leaves you feeling ever so slightly unsettled. When in the mood, Christopherson and Balance could also produce sublime and beautiful music. The edit of ‘Batwings (A Limnal Hymn)’ from Musick To Play In The Dark Vol. 2 is nothing short of devastating, its delicate, ephemeral, libidinal poignancy all the more striking when you know it was played at Balance’s funeral two short years later.

It is inevitably the darker moments, however, that prevail. ‘The First Five Minutes After Death’ (mistitled as ‘The First Five Minutes After Violent Death’, the name of a completely different version) from 1987’s Gold Is The Metal (With The Broadest Shoulders) has all the harrowing and unswerving brutality of one of Warhol’s Death and Disaster screenprints of car accidents. Long after the albums finished, I was still haunted by the chilling melody of ‘The Lost Rivers Of London’, originally recorded for the Succour -Terrascope Benefit Album in 1996. The song is a tumultuous ride through the hidden tunnels and passages of the pulsating, demoniacal London beneath London, finally arriving at a scene of dispassionate, detached horror not unlike Velvet Underground’s ‘Lady Godiva’s Operation’; its melody is as chillingly insistent as Elliott Smith’s plaintive ‘Figure 8’ and a soft, conspiratorial delivery from Balance is like listening to someone gently narrating your worst nightmares. (Note to my younger self: you were right to be scared of Coil’s music(k).)

Cold Spring’s reissue preserves the vague impenetrability of the Feelee original albums. Like the Russian CDs, the new edition lacks any information, being intended for the Coil-curious novice but also directly appealing to the aficionado, the follower that can discern Stephen Thrower’s and Danny Hyde’s contributions to Coil from Drew McDowall’s and Thighpaulsandra’s. At first my instinct was to find this frustrating, a ‘deluxe’ package lacking the expected qualities of a ‘deluxe’ package – no credits, no liner notes – feeling like little more than a bootleg in an official release’s clothing.

As I turned the fold-out cardboard case in my hands, I slowly came to see this artefact as the precise embodiment of Coil: an elusive, unknowable proposition, where answers are fewer than questions, an evolution that took their music from post-Throbbing Gristle industrial reference points to a sort of electro-psychedelia, and whose inner impulses, motivations and secrets Balance and Christopherson took to their untimely graves.

A Guide For Beginners – The Voice Of Silver / A Guide For Finishers – A Hair Of Gold by Coil was released October 23 2020 by Cold Spring.

Words: Mat Smith. With thanks to Gary at Red Sand and Bryan.

(c) 2020 Documentary Evidence

Fad Gadget – The Best Of Fad Gadget

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The Best Of Fad Gadget was originally released in 2001 to accompany Frank Tovey bringing his Fad Gadget alias out of retirement for a support slot with Depeche Mode. It was a moment of electronic music history repeating itself, albeit in reverse and on a massive, stadium-friendly scale: Depeche had supported Gadget in 1980, back when they were all a bunch of callow, synth-loving young chaps, Frank Tovey being the first artist to join Daniel Miller’s nascent Mute Records.

Twelve months after the compilation was issued, Tovey was dead from a heart attack. It’s hard not to listen to these tracks, hand-picked as they were by Fad himself, without mourning the fact that he left behind such a brief legacy – a clutch of singles, four Gadget albums and a challenging performance art repertoire that was already honed back when he was fighting over Leeds Polytechnic’s studio space with fellow students Dave Ball and Marc Almond.

Mute’s pressing of the album on vinyl for the first time coincides with the fortieth anniversary of ‘Back To Nature’, Fad Gadget’s first single. Recorded with Daniel Miller, ‘Back To Nature’ nodded to the Ballardian tropes of Miller’s own ‘Warm Leatherette’ statement, but also highlighted Tovey’s wry humour: while its gloomy industrial electronics sounded like a post-apocalyptic world of extreme temperatures, it was in fact Tovey ruminating on sun-loving folk enjoying the beach at Canvey Island.

Its B-side, ‘The Box’, was yet more subversive, its desperate lyrics reading like the stage directions for a macabre one-man show with a performer stuck in a box. After the dry ‘Ricky’s Hand’ single – the sinister counterpart to Depeche Mode’s similar-sounding ‘Photographic’ – Tovey gently moved Miller’s producer’s hand to one side and forged his own path, his 1980 debut album Fireside Favourites dealing with everything from cosy nights around the hearth during a nuclear meltdown on its memorable title track to bedroom frustration, each track a symbiosis of Tovey’s synths and whatever potential sound-making objects were lying around the studio at the time.

Through his ensuing albums – Incontinent (1981), Under The Flag (1982) and Gag (1984) – Tovey developed his songwriting craft, initially through getting to grips with kit like an MC-4 sequencer and then developing a full-band aesthetic at precisely the same time as pop music was dispensing with traditional instruments in favour of keyboards and drum machines. But even as his music matured, anticipating the series of folk and rock-inflected albums released under his own name with the band The Pyros, Tovey was still covering himself in tar and feathers on stage, or stripping off his clothes and spraying shaving foam all over his body, memorable images of which Anton Corbijn captured for Gag and the harrowing cover of this compilation.

His songs never once lost that slightly disturbing potency that had made his earliest singles so insistent. ‘Lady Shave’ made a song about the quotidian act of removing hair a seedy, voyeuristic, perverted show; ‘Saturday Night Special’ dealt with guns and the right to bear arms; ‘Love Parasite’s sleek electronic shapes detailed a sexual predator; ‘Life On The Line’ and ‘For Whom The Bells Toll’ were dour pop songs that betrayed Tovey’s paranoia at having become a father for the first time; ‘Collapsing New People’ took industrial percussion and the looped mechanical sound of a printing press to offer a vivid anthropological assessment of the dispossessed, wasted, vampiric youths he observed while recording the track in Berlin. The compilation ends with the leftfield proto-electro and howling baby sounds of ‘4M’, sounding somewhere between clinical fascination and the soundtrack to the end of the world, but was in fact a tender piece of sound art using the sampled voice of his baby daughter.

It would, perhaps, be too easy to look back on Frank’s wild Fad Gadget years as a kind of grim novelty cabaret sideshow schtick, a product of an anything-goes, disaffected, post-punk British society, his effect on the development of electronic music in the early 1980s easily dismissible in favour of dark-hued works by Cabaret Voltaire, Human League, Soft Cell and others. Observed in hindsight, no other musician managed to fuse art school theatrics and dystopian social commentary so fluidly within the emerging constructs of electronic technology as Frank Tovey did, and the likelihood of another artist like Fad Gadget emerging in these supposedly super-liberal times is unimaginable; we’re all trapped inside the metaphorical cage of ‘The Box’, and no one dares try – like he did – to break out.

Frank Tovey: 8 September 1956 – 3 April 2002

The Best Of Fad Gadget by Fad Gadget was originally released in 2001 by Mute, and reissued as a double vinyl LP in 2019.

Words: Mat Smith.

Note: this review originally appeared in Electronic Sound issue 57 and is used with the kind permission of the editors. Thanks to Neil, Zoe and Paul.

(c) 2019 Mat Smith for Electronic Sound

 

Depeche Mode – The Singles 81 – 85 (Mute compilation, 1985)

Depeche Mode ‘The Singles 81 – 85’ original artwork.

The Singles 81 – 85 was Depeche Mode‘s first UK compilation album, gathering together all their singles up to that point in sequential order, tacking on the new tracks ‘It’s Called A Heart’ and ‘Shake The Disease’, the latter of which has become something of a live staple for the band and a firm favourite among fans. Both tracks were released as singles to support the compilation.

The Singles 81 – 85 was also the first of a sporadic series of artist compilations issued by Mute, the catalogue codes for these albums ditching the familiar STUMM tag in favour of MUTEL. The idea was to cheekily reference the K-Tel budget collections of yesteryear but most people didn’t get Mute’s in-joke. The track list on the reverse reflected each track’s success in the singles charts rather than being in the order they were released in, a strategy Mute used again on the first Inspiral Carpets collection ten years later.

Even if you’re familiar with the Depeche Mode journey from Basildon synth-pop boyband to the stadium-conquering electronic rock act they became toward the end of the Eighties, listening to the singles in order, the band’s rapid progression still feels remarkable. There are just two years between the trio of Vince Clarke-penned singles and the ambitious recording techniques and early sample experiments that birthed songs like ‘Love In Itself’.

While you could argue that the band simply benefited from having access to some seriously cutting-edge technology and talented, forward-looking producers in Gareth Jones and Daniel Miller, that would fully ignore the huge leaps forward in terms of arrangements and Martin Gore‘s songwriting.

Gore’s lyrical development from ‘See You’ (a cutesy, endearing single penned as a teenager) to the harrowing introspection of ‘Shake The Disease’ showed a dizzying level of maturity in the briefest of timeframes. ‘Somebody’ (excluded from the LP edition, presumably because of space) remains Gore’s most powerful, fragile ballad, his tender lyrics interspersed with darker considerations and ruminations; elsewhere, tracks like ‘Everything Counts’, ‘People Are People’ and ‘Blasphemous Rumours’ were casually and effortlessly cynical, the latter getting the band into hot water with the Church of England given its pondering about the existence of a cruel God.

The Singles 81 – 85 was re-released in 1998 with a different sleeve to tie in with the the branding of the follow-up singles collection, the LP edition restoring ‘The Meaning Of Love’ and ‘Somebody’ to the collection and making it a double, rather than single, album. That new version tacked on the extended Schizo Mix of ‘Just Can’t Get Enough’ and the version of ‘Photographic’ from the Some Bizarre compilation. The newer version might look more modern, but for me I still prefer the slightly garish and simplistic T+CP sleeve from the 1985 edition. Mute also released a three CD boxset containing both compilations in 2001.

Depeche Mode ‘The Singles 81 – 85’ reissue artwork.

Over in the US, Sire had released a compilation of Depeche Mode tracks the year before called People Are People, while a compilation using more or less the same sleeve as the UK Singles 81 – 85 album was issued in 1985 as Catching Up With Depeche Mode, featuring a totally different tracklisting. That edition also included the old photos of the band from the gatefold sleeve of the UK LP (something the UK CD didn’t include) and in among those are some lovely, candid – but too small – photos from the formative years the original band members spent at Southend Tech.

Personal recollections

The Singles 81 – 85 has a special place in my memory for a couple of reasons.

I first came upon the CD in my local library in Stratford-upon-Avon in the summer of 1992, right at the start of my exploration of the Mute back catalogue. Up to this point my only interest in Depeche Mode was with the early Vince Clarke years. I hated Depeche Mode at that point, detested ‘Personal Jesus’ and the band’s image, resplendent on the folder of a girl in my English class called Sarah.

If it wasn’t for the Documentary Evidence brochure that fell out of my 12″ copy of Erasure‘s ‘Chorus’ the year before, I may never have bothered borrowing The Singles 81 – 85 from the library. Given how much I detested the band, finding out through that pamphlet that Vince had been a member of Depeche Mode in their early years made me groan, as all of a sudden I felt obliged to listen to a band that I had decided I didn’t like. Looking back, it’s no surprise to me that I started my collecting of Vince’s other music with a copy of Yazoo‘s Upstairs At Eric’s, bought on cassette from my local Woolworths, instead.

So The Singles 81 – 85 represented my first real exposure to the music of Depeche Mode and for a while I’d deliberately only play the Vince Clarke singles; I couldn’t bring myself to put on the other tracks. When I eventually did, I wanted to be cynical (I initially sneered in agreement with the self-deprecating display of journo quotes included in the sleeve against each song), but I more or less instantly fell in love with those songs and kickstarting the process of building up a collection of Depeche Mode albums that meant, by the time of Songs Of Faith And Devotion the following year, I considered myself a fan. My bedroom walls were quickly adorned with posters bought from Athena of the band circa the Violator era – something of an irony given how much I’d loathed the similar images on Sarah’s folder.

The other reason I have fond memories of this compilation is because of a girl. In 1992 I was a shy, unconfident 15-year old besotted with a girl called Katie that I couldn’t even talk to, let alone ask out.

I was listening to The Singles 81 – 85 in my dad’s favourite armchair one evening during the two week hire of the CD and Katie walked past my lounge window with another girl I knew from school. Katie lived way out of town, so her appearance outside my window was sort of strange. I don’t think it was intentional, as I don’t think she knew where I lived, but that didn’t stop me thinking that it was. For days after, I resented myself for not rushing outside as she walked past to say hello and talk to her.

From that moment, I began to latch onto Martin Gore’s lyrics to help me understand myself to some degree. Through his introspective words I was able to accept that it was perfectly okay to be the quiet kid at school, and from then on I found inspiration in his lyrics whenever it felt like events or people (or just my own thoughts) were conspiring against me.

First published 2013; edited and re-posted 2019.

With thanks to David McElroy.

(c) 2019 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence

Can – The Singles (Spoon / Mute compilation, 2017)

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Last week Spoon / Mute released The Singles, a collection of all of Can‘s singles and selected B-sides, which serves as a great entry point into the musical genius of this band.

I reviewed the compilation for Clash – read my thoughts here.

(c) 2017 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence for Clash

Various – The Boston Creative Jazz Scene 1970 – 1983 (Cultures Of Soul book + album, 2016)

Just lately, I’ve found myself delving further and further into jazz music of all forms. I haven’t fully worked out yet how I came to persue this genre so avidly, but it’s become a major musical passion for me over the last five years. Caitlin Moran wrote recently in The Times about how your music taste atrophies in your thirties; in my case, as I race toward the conclusion of my thirties, the burning quest to still find new things to get excited about hasn’t diminished at all, but whereas at the start of this last decade of my life I was listening primarily to Mute, now I find myself more and more playing and buying jazz records.

One of the reasons it’s become so important for me is because I rarely ever write about it. Instead it’s become music I can just listen to without feeling compelled to document it in some way. Opportunities to review jazz records only come up at Electronic Sound if they stray into adventurous synth territory, and Clash never covers jazz – so I jumped at the chance to cover this book and album when it appeared on the monthly reviews list for the latter. 

This album covers the under-surveyed Boston avant-garde jazz scene of the Seventies and early Eighties via an authoritative book written by one of the scene’s central figures, accompanied by a CD featuring some of the artists whose careers the book highlights. For anyone who thinks that developments in jazz were confined to New York and Chicago, it’s an illuminating proposition.

My review can be found here.

(c) 2016 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence for Clash

Larry Levan – Genius Of Time (Universal compilation, 2016)

  
Larry Levan was a major figure in the New York club scene of the Eighties, and The Paradise Garage on NYC’s King Street where he had his residency was the day-glo decade’s answer to Studio 54. As a DJ Levan was legendary; as a remixer he applied his dancefloor nous to his work in the studio, developing mixes that focussed on the groove but emphasised soulfulness over alien electronics and overly-regimented 4/4 beats. 

Universal have released a compilation of 22 mixes, edits and extended versions by Levan. I reviewed the album for Clash. You can read my review here.

(c) 2016 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence

Various Artists – Fly : Songs Inspired By The Film ‘Eddie The Eagle’ (Universal album, 2016)

  
I reviewed the soundtrack to the film Eddie The Eagle for This Is Not Retro. Fly features a who’s who of Eighties music, including everyone from Martyn Ware‘s Heaven 17to Paul Young, most of whom have recorded exclusives for the album.

Erasure‘s Andy Bell delivers the title track, while Nik Kershaw’s ‘The Sky’s The Limit’ (from his 2012 album Ei8ht) steals the show as perhaps the best song ever written about following your dreams. Kershaw said he wrote this song to his child to show that you really can be whatever you want, and as a father to two growing little girls, I can’t listen to this song without getting emotional.

My review can be found here

(c) 2016 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence 

Various Artists – Straight To You – The Gothic Country And Blues That Inspired Nick Cave (Uncut covermount album, 2010)

  

Uncut put together this covermount CD of tracks that purportedly inspired Nick Cave, covering blues and country tracks by the likes of Leadbelly, Elvis Presley, Hank Williams and Johnny Cash.

I’m always a little dubious of these types of things, especially where the artist in question wasn’t actually involved, particularly since a lot of the tracks and artists here are ones that Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds covered during their career (mostly on Kicking Against The Pricks) – while it may be possible to conclude that they were therefore an influence, I’m not so sure about all of them. The one artist that Cave frequently spoke about as being a major formative influence on him was The Man In Black, Johnny Cash, who Cave would have the nerve-racking opportunity to work with during Cash’s twilight years. Cash’s nihilistic ‘I’d Rather Die Young’ is one of the tracks included here.

Certainly you can hear a certain Birthday Party-era wildness in Gene Vincent’s ‘Cat Man’, there’s the ‘grinderman’ lineage in Memphis Slim’s ‘Grinder Man Blues’ and Cave displayed a healthy interest in the mystical aura of Elvis Presley on ‘Tupelo’. Defining precisely what has influenced a person, given that life is an entire summation of experience – recognised or otherwise – is a fool’s game. When I interview an artist and feel duty-bound to ask them about their influences, it is invariably greeted with a sigh or an awkward silence. We nevertheless are obsessed with such details, on the basis that it helps us rationalise a person via certain reference points, and that will never change.

This is one for the Cave completist only. I’m not sure now whether the magazine that this came with included a feature on Cave or some sort of explanation about how these tracks had been selected, or maybe it tied in with a Bad Seeds release that month. I certainly don’t have it any longer. If you surrender the notion that this is intended as some sort of definitive listing of what made Nick Cave who he is today – ignoring the fact that to do that justice would involve everything from church choir music through to The Stooges – what you are left with is a decent album of some very important blues and country songs.

(c) 2016 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence

The 7th Plain – Wishbone

    

The 7th Plain was an alias that future NovaMute / Mute artist Luke Slater used for a brief time, the first album issued under the name being the brilliant My Wise Yellow Rug released in 1994 by General Production Recordings (GPR). The 7th Plain found Slater operating in a firmly ambient mode, complementing the more dancefloor-friendly tracks he issued under his Planetary Assault Systems alias.

‘Wishbone’ doesn’t appear on My Wise Yellow Rug, but it sounds like it should have been included there. Here Slater lays down a rich, slowly-developing tapestry of mostly pleasant sounds underpinned by a hissing rhythm that sits somewhere between skeletal electro and the factory-like drum pattern from Depeche Mode’s ‘Ice Machine’. Toward the end Slater introduces a bassline constructed from a somewhat darker synth sound while a repetitive arpeggio sequence takes on a queasy insistence as the track concludes.

Throughout, even as Slater drops in what feels like a organic, jazzy looseness at the very beginning via vaguely piano riffs, there’s an underlying mechanistic, robotic quality to ‘Wishbone’; that reminds me of a review of one of the tracks on My Wise Yellow Rug which compared the track in question to Vince Clarke covering Vangelis’s theme to Blade Runner. In the interests of full disclosure, I actually bought the album on the strength of that line alone. At the time it wasn’t apparent that Slater would go on to become a Mute artist, but I was pleased he ultimately signed to the label, though I can honestly say that his work as The 7th Plain was always more interesting to me than the output under his own name.

Equanimity was released as a double compilation by the GPR label in 1995 and features some really good tracks from Max 404, D:Fuse, Beaumont Hannant, Russ Gabriel and other artists from the imprint’s roster. It sits squarely alongside the Warp series of Artificial Intelligence / listening electronica albums but at times seems to have much more of a concrete, robust edge compared to some of the ambient noodling that Warp’s series tended towards. With Max 404 and a crunchy Bari-speed rave track from the absurdly-named Radioactive Lamb being two possible exceptions, it would have been slightly inconceivable to find any of the tracks here finding themselves sitting comfortably in a techno set of the time, but an adventurous DJ could have probably found a way. They usually could.

(c) 2015 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence

Various Artists – Junior Boy’s Own Collection (JBO compilation, 1994)

  
compilation // Junior Boy’s Own Collection

Including this compilation on this blog is highly tenuous, and as I shipped it off to the guy who bought it off me this weekend, I really couldn’t find a reason to write about it at all. I then opened up the CD sleeve and found a brief message of thanks to ‘Darren Price and Centuras’, and bearing in mind that Price became a celebrated NovaMute artist a few years later, that gave me the highly tenuous reason to document this here.

Centuras were a trio of Price, Eric Chiverton and Gary Lindop, and the unit dropped a few 12” singles on various labels before finally settling at Junior Boy’s Own, the dance label established in 1991 as a subsidiary of the UK’s Boy’s Own Productions. Price’s early group don’t feature on this compilation, predominantly because Junior Boy’s Own Collection was designed to showcase the label’s bigger acts – Terry Farley and Pete Heller’s house project Fire Island, Underworld, Ashley Beedle’s X-Press 2 and a unit then known as The Dust Brothers, who would of course go on to become The Chemical Brothers.

Underworld were poster boys for UK dance music around 1994, having transitioned from a singles band operating squarely in the club genre to the front cover of the NME and Melody Maker upon the release of Dubnobasswithmyheadman, probably because Karl Hyde played guitar and that made it acceptable to the indie masses. Two Underworld tracks (‘Dirty Guitar’ and ‘Rez) are included here, along with the upbeat ‘Bigmouth’ under their Lemon Interrupt alias. That JBO had both Underworld and the other highly lauded crossover act The Dust Brothers (their rare early cut ‘Song To The Siren’ appears here) was quite remarkable for a small indie label, and probably the catalyst for Virgin’s V2 subsidiary taking them over.

As a survey of the disparate forms that dance music was already coalescing into in the pivotal year of 1994, Junior Boy’s Own Collection is near-definitive, given that it covers two flavours of house, nascent trip-hop and cross-over electronica. The only thing missing is pure techno, something that JBO had never really specialised in, the mantle for which was already being picked up by other, more specialist small labels.

I recall buying this from an HMV in Birmingham in 1994, for no apparent reason whatsoever. I already had the Underworld and Dust Brothers tracks and had no real interest in Farley / Heller, X-Press 2 or any of the other acts included here. It’s the kind of needless spending that I did as a kid, and one of the reasons I now feel the need to trim back my record collection.

(c) 2015 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence