The Comedy of Errors: The Shamen - L.S.I (Love Sex Intelligence) (19 June 1992)

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Happy Easter everyone and here to blow away any Lockdown inertia is a real old skool, weekend floor filler.

If dance music hit its commercial peak in the early 1990s in terms of the ubiquity with which the genre dominated both the charts and radio play, then The Shamen may have claims to be the most successful act of the period.  Between 1991’s Move Any Mountain single, the platinum selling Boss Drum album and its attendant singles including 1992’s most “controversial” record, the band were a fixture in the Top 10 of both single and album charts for around 18 months.
L.S.I (Love Sex Intelligence) was the first single to be released from Boss Drum and peaked at Number 6 in the UK Top 10.  It’s a piece very much of its time with standard Shamen touches such as  compressed synth sounds and drum flourishes, as well as some of the cliches of the era such as prominent female vocals, by Jhelisa Anderson in this case, and an overture statement by rapper, Mr. C (“Ooh, I want your love, I need your love”).  For all that though, I think The Shamen’s music from the period still stands up very well, partially helped by the fact that they never seemed to release the same record twice and varied up who took prominence on any particular track.  So it was Jhelisa Anderson here but with contributions from Mr. C and Colin Angus.  But on Move Any Mountain it was Colin.  Ebenezer Goode was virtually a Mr. C solo track. Boss Drum was a Colin/Mr. C duet while the criminally under-rated Phorever People showcased Jhelisa and Mr. C.  They kept mixing it up like a house music Beatles - with Mr. C’s raps as Starr Time.

John Peel had been playing The Shamen since they had started out as a psychedelic guitar band in the mid 1980s.  He had continued to play their music as it shifted towards electronic dance and had been playing early, vocal-free mixes of L.S.I in the weeks before playing the 7-inch single on this programme. He confessed that he had been glad to hear the vocal version as it meant he could stop racking his brains as to what L.S.I stood for: “Love Sex Indigestion?”

Video courtesy of themosttogain. Music starts at 0:13.