One thing I will always find poignant about doing this blog are the instances where I listen to a Peel recording and discover a band I had not previously heard of due to him playing their latest record, only to subsequently discover that the band have split up around the same time. Up to now, The Pixies have been the most pointed example of this, but off the back of this programme, Leeds-based outfit Age of Chance can join them.
Had it been available to share, this post would also have been showcasing Age of Chance’s latest (for which read “final”) single She is Filled With Secrets, which my notes described as “a dance track which samples the Doctor Who theme”. Peel also remarked on this, but having listened to it again, I think we may both have been overstating things somewhat. Playing both the new single, and presumably so as to show the distance the group had travelled in seven years, their 1985 debut single, MotorCity, Peel reflected, We haven’t heard a great deal from Age of Chance recently. They did have a rather dull LP on, I think it was Virgin Records, a year or so ago. What really, I think, finished them off, or at least made them change their entire lives and sense of direction and everything was I once interviewed them for television, up in Yorkshire, and interviewed them in my father-in-law’s garden and things were never the same again for them. Things were going pretty well up until then. I interviewed them in his garden and that was it, by and large. But they’re bouncing back and that’s, I assume, doing pretty well and getting played in the dancehalls....
No-one can feel shortchanged by just having MotorCity to enjoy though. Driven along by Steve Elvidge’s strident, nasal vocals, a pounding, insistent drum beat which sounds like a piston on a production line and an urgent, staccato guitar line, MotorCity presents a rather queasy vision of mid-1980s life. Its automobile aesthetic is much closer to Leeds or Dagenham rather than Detroit. Any futurism suggested by the title is presented as a dystopia rather than utopia through Age of Chance’s eyes as Steve E sings in a simultaneously defeated and accepting way about the violence of capitalism (In this business, you’ve got to be ruthless....they’ll steal your shirt), age divides (Some people don’t mind being old, just sign here cos you’re young and stupid), self absorption (There’s nothing worse than being understood...If you can break through my wall of sound...I’ll marry you), urban boredom (In MotorCity there’s nothing to do but work and buy) and casual sex (In MotorCity there’s nothing to do but call each other “baby”).
Listening to it I can hear a country’s youth curdling as they’re forced into job training schemes designed not to replace lost industries but to shift them around into new statistical pools of undefinable “output”. But by the same token, it feels like a rejection both of aimless dole-culture and of the window dressing which Government indulged in to try and make it look like people weren’t being softened up to go from “citizens” to “service users”. Why isn’t this record better known? Why wasn’t it a sensation at the time? It’s nothing less than 1985’s own Subterranean Homesick Blues, and I can confer no higher praise than that.
Video courtesy of Cherry Red Records
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I liked this band because they would try anything. First discovered them in 1989 with Higher Than Heaven and found out they covered Prince and Kiss a couple of years before. And of course the Peel Session. You listen to that and those tracks and the one above. All by the same artist. Deserved more recognition.
ReplyDeleteI heard their cover of Kiss and thought they did a good job with it.
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