A Heart Of Fool's Gold

Back with a selection of 1980s alternative/indie 12" versions to enliven your weekend.

Earlier this year, I included Peter Hook's original mix of Elephant Stone by The Stone Roses in the last of my Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon posts. Here's the more familiar 12" mix by John Leckie. Can it really be 35 years old?! I never got into The Stone Roses in a big way at the time, though with the benefit of hindsight it's hard to deny that their debut album and singles like Elephant Stone were pretty amazing.

And this is where my timeline memory gets very confused. As The Stone Roses were paving the way to the future, All About Eve were just about to make it big, presaged by the single Our Summer. Hard to imagine now that the two bands were contemporaneous. This 12" version was produced by their mates from The Mission, Wayne Hussey and Simon Hinkler, who were also enjoying a bit of commercial success - and Smash Hits interviews - themselves. 

 

Cat-House by Danielle Dax was a staple of the alternative clubs I frequented in the late 80s/early 90s. I didn't own the 12" single but I did have CD88: The Vinyl, one of the quality and reasonably priced Indie Top 20 series that were great for penniless students like me at the time. The album included Our Summer and Cat-House, albeit in their single versions. Extended mixes of the latter popped up on a US-only 12" in 1989.

Earlier this week, SWC at the ever-excellent No Badger Required wrote about the race to be the first person to be 'into a band' when growing up. Big Audio Dynamite were 'my' band when I was at secondary school. A few kids had The Clash scrawled on their school bags or jackets but, let's be honest, we were all a bit late for that and had only heard of them by nicking borrowing our older sibling's records. Nobody had heard of Big Audio Dynamite, though, so buying those early 12" singles and the debut album was a moment. It helped that they were bloody brilliant, not least Medicine Show with it's Sergio Morricone samples and dub-inflected extended version.

A.C. Marias was essentially a duo of Angela Conway and Wire's Bruce Gilbert. I first heard a song (Give Me) on a Mute compilation and bought the single One Of Our Girls Has Gone Missing on 3" CD with a lengthy cover version of Vicious by Lou Reed as the B-side. There was no extended version of One Of Our Girls Has Gone Missing on either the 12" or CD single but the album version is about a minute and a half longer, so that's good enough for me.

Love And Rockets were born from the ashes of Bauhaus in 1985 and arguably found greater commercial success in the USA than the UK. I liked their earlier singles, including Yin And Yang (The Flowerpot Man) featured here, which has a rockabilly vibe yet can still be traced back to their earlier goth/post-punk roots. 

I resisted The Blue Nile for too long. The constant music press gushing in the late 1980s, telling me that I must like The Blue Nile because they ploughed a similar furrow of organic musical exploration and experimentation as one of my favourite bands, Talk Talk, actually made me less not more inclined to check them out. I learned the error of my ways years later and whilst they've never quite hit the spot that Mark Hollis and co. achieved, I shouldn't have let the journos put me off all those years ago!

 

The first time I heard the 12" version of Soul Mining by The The was when I bought the 12" double pack of Infected in 1986. Labelled as a "previously unreleased" version, it also popped up on the cassette format of the Infected single, the CD single re-release of Sweet Bird Of Truth (1987) and on the limited edition 2nd CD single of The Beat(en) Generation (1989). The B-side of the Uncertain Smile 12" single in 1983 contains Soul Mining (Definitive Version) which to these amateur ears sounds identical to the "unreleased" version. Either way, it's a great version, as all The The's 12" singles were throughout the 1980s. No surprise then that the song provides the title for this selection and an apt closure.

Happy weekend everyone, wherever you find yourself and whatever you may be doing.

More nonsense here tomorrow, more or less same time.

 

1) Elephant Stone (12" Version By John Leckie): The Stone Roses (1988)

2) Our Summer (Extended Mix By Simon Hinkler & Wayne Hussey): All About Eve (1987)

3) Cat-House (Overnight Mix By Danielle Dax & Renny Hill): Danielle Dax (1989)

4) Medicine Show (12-Inch Remix By Paul 'Groucho' Smykle): Big Audio Dynamite (1985)

5) One Of Our Girls Has Gone Missing (Album Version By Bruce Gilbert, Gareth Jones, John Fryer & Paul Kendall): A.C. Marias (1989)

6) Yin And Yang (The Flowerpot Man) (Remix By John A. Rivers): Love And Rockets (1986)

7) Tinseltown In The Rain (Album Version By Paul Buchanan & Robert Bell): The Blue Nile (1983)

8) Soul Mining (Definitive Version By Matt Johnson & Paul Hardiman): The The (1983) 

 

1983: A Walk Across The Rooftops: 7

1983: Uncertain Smile EP: 8

1985: Medicine Show EP: 4 

1986: Yin And Yang (The Flowerpot Man) EP: 6

1987: Our Summer EP: 2

1988: Elephant Stone EP: 1 

1989: Cat-House EP: 3

1989: One Of Our Girls (Has Gone Missing): 5

 

A Heart Of Fool's Gold (45:16) (KF) (Mega)