The video is taken from Peel’s show on 17/4/93, and as you’ll hear him say, Come Alive is taken from the album, Cake and Eat It, but what he didn’t mention was the lengthy journey that The Blue Up? had gone through to get an album distributed.
Formed as an all-female quartet in 1984, the Minnesota outfit released two singles in the mid-80s on Susstones and by 1989 were set to record their first album. The album, called Introducing Sorrow, was due to be released by British label, Midnight Music, but it ultimately never saw the light of day due to Midnight Music going bust. By the time The Blue Up? recorded Cake and Eat It, they had reduced themselves to a trio and, clearly eager to make up for lost time, produced an album boasting 23 tracks, albeit half a dozen of them were snippets ranging between 7 & 23 seconds in length.
With its jittery time-signature verses and strident choruses, Come Alive somehow marries together Eastern European folk with Goth rock. In the verses, singer Rachel Olson - now better known as Ana Voog - sounds as though she’s channeling the heroine of Another Day by Paul McCartney, a woman out of place in the modern world, simply trying to get through another day without being harmed or hurt. And yet lurking under the surface is a more confident, sensual figure waiting to burst forth when the time is right. The cries of despair after each chorus showing how desperately the heroine wants to break free of the constraints placed upon her, constraints which in Voog’s case were later attributed to Post-traumatic stress disorder and agoraphobia. These conditions foreshadowed Voog’s later work as a visual and internet artist, where she would garner notoriety with anacam, one of the earliest life-casts on the nascent internet, in which she set up a webcam to broadcast her life 24/7, and did so for 13 years. This Vice article by Voog from 2018 gives more details of why she did it and what she learnt from it.
The band clearly had a high opinion of Come Alive as they re-recorded it for their only major label album, Spool Forka Dish, released on Columbia Records in 1995, but the snippet of that which I heard on genius.com suggests that, like Shonen Knife before them, The Blue Up? lost something of what made them so compelling once they stepped into bigger and shinier facilities. Stay in the Catacombs where The Blue Up? recorded this version and enjoy something both catchy, chilling and icily magnificent.
Video courtesy of John Peel.
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