KiN ‘Papageno’

Sorry it’s been kind of quiet round these parts this summer, but we’ve been busy. Oh yes. Been getting back in the saddle, and getting comfy today and job number one is clearing out waaaaaaaay too much dubstep, techno, tech-house and various combinations of the above from our soundcloud.com dropbox. Blimey, if we had a pound for every bedroom DJ sticking stuff in our ears we’d have £92.

As our regular reader will know, we’ve started using soundcloud on our sister site, rippingvinyl.co.uk, and it’s very neat indeed, take a look if you’ve a mo. Only problem is hypem doesn’t pick up tracks from soundcloud. Hypem assure me it should only be a matter of time, and then we’ll make the switch to their player here too.

So anyway, after our ears were hurting from the sound of waaaaaaaay too many repetitive beats we found a proper pearl. ‘What kind of magic is this?’ are the words that squeeze themselves, popping out in a Minnie Mouse squeak (and we mean that in a good way), from the quite breathtaking pipes of Stockholm’s Sara Hedin, or KiN if you’ve got a soundcloud dropbox. Which we have. Have we mentioned it?

What kind of magic indeed. With a growling thrum of backing tracking, think Depeche Mode booted out the back of a Transit on a cold, dark winter’s night, think Lykke Li taken by the darkside, think Kyle with Winehouse’s problems, think Emilliana Torrini on 45, Bjork dating Goldie… oh, hang on…

In our usual through music journalist manner we know Sara is a girl, she dwells in Stockholm and has released two albums as KiN, ‘The Zombic Hunch’ and the brand-new ‘Those Bombs Were Made For Us’, there’s also an EP and four, count ‘em, singles. We also know that one of her songs ‘Sandman’ featured in Portuguese TV soap Morangos com Açucar, we never miss an episode.

She deserves better than Portuguese soaps though. What she does is quite quite quite quite the most brilliant thing we’ve heard all year. ‘Papageno’ stopped us dead in our tracks. It sounds utterly bonkers first time, and come to that it still sounds bonkers the second time too. What it does is leave you scrabbling for more. And the more is just as good.

Not only does Sara sound like a star, she looks like one too… almost. With eyes you could stand teacups on, she’s got something of the Cheryl Cole about her… only with a Katie Price makeover… at night… with doll’s clothes. Sounds original, check, looks original, check. You could file comfortably under the current 80s electro revival and no one would bat an eyelid.

Best of all though, the whole thing has the sort of rough diamond feel that gets people like us all worked up. It’s all there, but it could do with a bit of spit and polish. Not the finished article, which is a good thing, but you just know when she does (and from where we’re sat, it is when rather than if) get a polish, well, blimey.

More hear…
- The album then, ‘Those Bombs Were Made For Us’, is available from iTunes.
- There’s the usual MS and a site too, kinplanet.se which looks like it’ll fall over over if you click on anything. I’m assured it’s being rebuilt, but it’s all part of the charm, all part of the charm…
- You can also find here on last.fm, ilike and twitter.

I used to live next door but one to Phil Oakey. It’s a story I often forget, but I’ve been waiting to write that line for a while. He wasn’t very neighbourly. It was 1988, The Human League were quite famous. He’d nod, and Joanne would smile occassionally, we’d just stare a lot, so I guess his non-neighbourly-ness was understandable.

I was in the first year of a Fine Art degree at Psalter Lane in Sheffield. Me and Whil rented the downstairs of a house on the corner of Gisbourne Road and Ecclesall Road South, just down the hill from college. Phil and Jo, as we never called them, lived two doors down on Ecclesall Road South.

We moved up to Sheffield from Norfolk in the back of horsebox. It belonged to Whil’s uncle and was one of the lorry types, clearly very much in use for moving horses, and quite recently too as it was full of straw bales. We travelled, with all our worldly possessions (bag of clothes, radio/cassette, duvet, black and white TV), in the back for some reason, perhaps it was the allure of standing straw bales on their end and trying to surf them as we rattled towards South Yorkshire.

We stopped off in Nottinghamshire, somewhere or other, to visit more of Whil’s relatives. I appreciate this tale is getting a bit off-piste, and I really must check, but I recall this relative was an old friend of Christine Keeler, who in 1961 had a fairly low-key affair with with a guy called John Profumo… who was the Secretary of State for War in Macmillan’s government. Show me a man who wouldn’t want a job title like that – isn’t it called Secretary of State for Defence these days?

Anyway, back on track… slightly. Our house in Sheffield was odd, but then when has student accommodation ever been anything else? We shared it with total strangers called Kev and Bella (jolly nice people as it turned out, luckily). We had one frontdoor, they lived upstairs, we lived down. The place we moved to after Gisbourne Road was next door to a, erm, ‘massage parlour’, and their fire exit was a wooden hatch that opened into our flat. Not a problem when you’re a student, I guess. It also had a room in it that was locked. We were told the previous tenant had left his stuff and was going to come collect it at some point. Can’t remember if he did. Must ask Whil.

So, Phil and Jo’s house wasn’t the sort of place you’d expect mega pop stars to live in. there was very little sign of opulence, but in the drive there was a Jag and more than several big motorbikes – five or six. The most remarkable thing about it was the front room, which was clearly visible from the road. In it was a giant teddy bear, giant, almost as high as the room, and across the back wall, arranged in a line like some sort of mission control, there were four TVs.

There was no Sky, which was perhaps lucky for Phil, because the TVs were all on at the same time, each tuned to one of the four available channels. We thought it was terribly impressive, the very height of pop starness. Boy, were we were naive fools.

What? Oh, music, yes. Almost forgot. In the days when proper remixes were coming from a sprinkle of US cities, from New York and Detroit, Martin Rushent (have I mentioned him before? I have? Oh) was leading the charge in the UK. ‘Dare’ had been a massive hit for The Human League in 1981, and in a cynical bid by Virgin to exploit the success and fast, ‘Love And Dancing’ appeared the following year.

It was a revelation, stripping out much of the vocals and adding rafts of effects and tricks, Rushent says the mixes, essentially all his own hard work, were a result of not having time to do ‘proper’ B-sides. Inspired by Grandmaster Flash, he’d add effects and chop and splice tape till his eyes bled and his fingers ached, or until he’d finished, whichever came first. He’d then serve them up to Virgin as B-sides. When he had half a dozen he’d almost done the whole album… so he finished the job and the spectacular ‘Love And Dancing’ was the result.

More hear…
- The ‘Love And Dancing’ album is still very much available, get it from Amazon on CD or download for about a fiver. There’s a rather nice remaster from 2002 of the original ‘Dare’ album bagged up with ‘Love And Dancing’, for a bargain £7.99. Download that here.

Long before Coldplay were going on about fixing people, Sunderland’s hugely under-rated Kenickie – featuring modern day wireless and telly presenter Lauren Laverne – were much better at fixing. Proof? Well, would you rather have ‘Lights will guide you home’ from Coldplay or ‘Sometimes the sunshines on unkind people’ from the Kens excellent ‘I Would Fix You’? I rest my case.

A big favourite at the Maker (Lauren was dating one of the writers, but no one should hold that against her, especially if you knew which writer), Kenickie are one of a string of bands from the time who, in my humble opinion at least, deserved much better. They had a gift, you could tell by looking. They were funny, sexy, smart, and their output was pretty much all killer no filler. But like many bands kicking around in late nineties they appeared dogged by bad luck. There’s a book waiting to be written about what went on post-Brit pop. No one would buy it, but hey, maybe one day. Kenickie managed a mere two albums before imploding in 1998, which is some sort of crime against music when you listen back 10 years on.

It’s hard to fathom, but Kenickie never cracked the Top 20, despite an appearance on TOTP, while Lauren landed her biggest hit – a number 15 smash – when she appeared on Mint Royale’s ‘Don’t Falter’ single in 2000. Doesn’t seem right somehow. Marie and Emmy-Kate went on to carry the torch for a little while with the excellent Rosita, and Marie can be found these days in the delightful The Cornshed Sisters, no idea where Emmy-Kate got to, Lauren we know about, and her drumming brother, Johnny X is still at work.

Carrying on my eighties revivalist theme, DJ Downfall was a man on a mission 10 years too soon. His first two singles ‘Song For Kelly Le Brock’ (1997) and ‘Shape!’ (1998) were spectacular enough for me to beg to do the Maker Breaker, meeting John Stanley, for that is his real name, in a Finsbury Park boozer. The photo – by the addled eyes of Sweeney, one of my favourite smudges – featured John posing with… wait for it… a Downfall game, the one where you turn the dials and little discs drop down… or I might just have made that up. For the life of me I can’t find the piece anywhere. If anyone else can I’d be grateful.

It’s all a little hazy, lost in my personal mists of time, but Downfall was on a great little DIY label called Where It’s At Is Where You Are, who I’m happy to discover are still doing their thing with the same level of style and commitment today. I recall that me and Sharon O’Connell, the live reviews ed at the time, were big fans of the label and the owner, John. Note to self: must dig out some more of his old stuff, when I’ve more time.

I appreciate I’m rambling now, but this meeting of two of my favourites of the time left me, frankly, over-excited. It’s a great remix, it actually sounds like it’s two different songs. I’ve listened and listened and I’m convinced it is one song, but it might well be two. Whatever, you’ve got to love it how ever many songs it is.

More hear…
- If you can hunt down DJ Downfall’s early singles you’d be treating yourself. His most recent opus is the well-recieved ‘Bon Viveur’ album from 2007.
- You can’t go wrong buying both Kenickie albums, ‘At the Club’ and ‘Get In’. Weirdly, amazon appears awash with the first album, you can pick it up for a bargain £1.99, while the second looks harder to find, only available from third parties starting at £7.99. It’s a strange world.

On the back of the Steinski piece, I remembered I had an Age Of Chance white label kicking around along similar lines. It was part of my record shop booty haul and remains a real gem. White labels seemed incredibly precious, they made me feel like I was owning something very limited, something few others would own. And even though they were nothing of the sort, I still loved getting them during my Maker days.

Age Of Chance were the bastard little brothers of bands like PWEI, their mess of metallic guitars, shouting and falling down stairs beats seemed intoxicating at the time. Peel championed them early doors, and they went on to sign for Virgin who bottled releasing this mix because, as we’ve mentioned before, ‘copyright difficulties’ might rear their ugly head. Might. Rock and roll eh? it’s hard to fathom these days why labels were running scared of this sort of dazzling creativity. Why not just clear the samples? Must have been a good reason.

After signing for Virgin, AOC covered of Prince’s chartbusting ‘Kiss’. These days, with every indie Tom, Dick and Harry covering pop smashes, the very idea seems pedestrian, but back in 1987 it was a revelation. It was how you’d expect – punk ethic, hip hop beats, car crash guitars, shouty northern vocals, it was cheeky, irreverent and, like everything AoC did, it was brilliant fun.

It’s amazing that during their six-year career they never landed a hit single, but that just fuelled the music press fire where commercial success was a no-no. NME championed AoC, inviting them to appear on the legendary C86 compilation, a tape revered for inventing indie. You can perhaps imagine how far AoC stuck out alongside the fey jangle of early Primal Scream and The Shop Assistants.

The white label version of ‘Kiss’ – ‘Kisspower’ as I’ve just discovered it’s called – rides roughshod over their own cover… and the original. It’s an absolute, joy mashing up Springsteen’s ‘Born In The USA’, Janet Jackson’s ‘Nasty’, Aerosmith and Run DMC’s ‘Walk This Way’, Diana Ross, twice, and perhaps my favourite, Xavier’s ‘Work That Sucker to Death’ and there’s more, I think MARRS’ ‘Pump Up The Volume’ might be in there. A pat on the back for anyone who fancies adding to the list. Listen and enjoy.

More hear…
- There’s a bit of stuff knocking around on amazon including, fantastically, some cassette versions of singles and albums from about £50! Cassettes eh? How brilliant were they?
- Once again we have to turn to the collector sites for more reasonably priced stuff, check out eil.com for vinyl bargains.

At the risk of alienating everyone, I’ve found myself back in 1982… yet again. It’s like therapy, I will get over it. It’s curious to discover how much music I can listen to again comes from 1982. But I digress.

And at the risk of a digress on top of a digress, this track is a good example of why sites like rippingvinyl.co.uk exist. It’s a cracking tune, not a classic granted, but there must be rafts of stuff like this gathering dust on shelves. The point of this site originally (and of course I’ve digressed) was to dust down music that doesn’t stand a cat in hell’s chance of being heard ever again. The Leisure Process’ back cat is long deleted, can’t buy a sausage by them anymore, except from collector sites (see ‘More Hear…’ section below).

It doesn’t seem right somehow when labels spend time scratching their collective arse and wondering how to make money when they’re sat on piles of tunes that stand no chance of making any money because they’re no longer available. If any label bosses would like to talk to me about how they could turn dusty tracks into cash, I have some ideas, natch, but I guess arse scratching and shoulder shrugging is probably easier.

Anyway, disgress over. I’m enjoying the current eighties electro throwbacks (Little Boots, La Roux, etc), because I was there as a newly turned teen first time round. It’s going to get quite odd over the next few years as the 30th anniversaries start to come thick and fast – how about The Human League’s ‘Dare’, released 30 years ago in October 2011?

Which brings me to Leisure Process. I was nothing if not a trainspotter in my early teens, and I had a favourite producer. Yup. I came to recognise the genius that is Martin Rushent after falling for his Altered Images remixes. I recall this mix catching my ear on Peel one night. It’s stuck with me and a few years ago I found the 12-inch in a shop for a couple of quid.

It’s funny how people remember Peel as an indie champion, I always saw him as a champion of good music who happened to be tucked away in a late-night hidey-hole. Always thought the joy of the radio DJ was they could just play the music without offering up an opinion. If they hated it, three minutes and it’s gone. I still wince at some of the bands I championed, in print, at The Maker.

Anyway, Leisure Process, as you can see, are a man with a saxophone and another man. The other man is singer Ross Middleton who arrived from Scottish new wavers Positive Noise, while the saxaphone man is Gary Barnacle, the go-to sax player during the eighties (and no, Hazel O’Conner didn’t go to him for ‘Will You’, that was Wesley Magoogan). A renowned session player, Barnacle has enjoyed a pretty successful career, even redeeming credibility lost by his association with Level 42 by popping up on no less than three albums by The Clash.

More hear…
- As we mentioned up top, everything is long deleted, but there’s still stuff knocking around, pretty cheap, on collector sites like discogs.com and eil.com.