Clean Your House, Figure It Out And Feel Me Now

Possibly needless to say that I've enjoyed Blancmange the band far, far more in my life than I have enjoyed blancmange the dessert.

 

I was quite happy to leave the latter in the receding mists of my childhood without any strong urge to revisit it in the 21st Century. By contrast, Blancmange's music since resuming releases in 2011 has been something to continually look forward to. 

 

There were two prompts for me this week to post about Blancmange. Firstly, I'm going on a work trip to The Big Smoke later this month to attend a conference (these days, a rare thing indeed). Travelling by train from the South West, inevitably means arriving at Paddington, which inevitably brought the 2015 song of the same name to mind.

 

Secondly, I have occasionally participated in themed...I don't know what you'd call them, 'events'? on the ol' musky dead bird. I appreciate the irony that the twit's rebrand and reduction to a single letter has forced writers in an almost Prince-like homage to add the suffix 'the social media site formerly known as'...

 

Anyway, I digress. This is my second or third contribution and I barely tweet anything beyond that, but this is good fun. This time around, the theme is #SynthPopSeptember and my contributions are developing into a mix of the old (Fad Gadget, The Human League, O.M.D.), the older-than-I-thought (Les Rythmes Digitales, their remix of Cornershop) and the relatively recent (Marsheaux).

Blancmange were an inevitable inclusion, but I've gone for something that has a foot in different time periods. Clean Your House was originally a song on 2020's rather excellent album Mindset. Neil Arthur subsequent released Extended Mindset with, as you might guess, extended versions of all 10 songs. Andy Meecham aka The Emperor Machine then went one step further and turned out a pair of superb remixes of Clean Your House, elevating the song to another level entirely. The main mix has added backing vocals, funk turned up to eleven and yes, Clean Your House is basically transformed into Feel Me for the present decade.

Not the first time this century that Blancmange has had a go at updating Feel Me, though. In 2013, Blancmange released Happy Families Too..., a new version of their 1982 debut. I like the reworked version of Feel Me a lot and it shaped the version performed on stage when I saw Blancmange live in concert last September.

 

Blancmange's most recent album, Private View, was released to coincide with the tour and you can find this, Mindset, and plenty of other Blancmange releases on Bandcamp.

Note: I'd normally embed YouTube video links in my posts. For some reason, at the time of writing this, Blogger and/or YT don't want to play ball and 'couldn't find' any of the videos when I posted the links. Technology, eh?