That strange summer of 1982, or at least its tail end since I spent most of it on holiday in New York, watchng New Pop happen again a year late, before returning to the proverbial "cold grey building reaching high against a cloudy dark rainy sky" of a Britain where New Pop seemed to have buckled back on itself, even if everyone, and I mean everyone, was still playing The Lexicon Of Love; there was the warning of imminent autumn darkening throughout the second side of New Gold Dream, and Songs To Remember seemed to be drawing as firm a line below the past as it was above the beckoning future.
But there were also these strange little singles - indeed the most commercially successful was "Strange Little Girl" by the Stranglers, a song and arrangement dating back to 1974 - which weren't quite psychedelic, weren't quite summery and were in their modest, pink ways quite ominous; I'm thinking of things like Thomas Dolby's "Windpower," Brigit Novik and M's "Danube" ("Where's the water running to?"), Kissing The Pink's "Mr Blunt," and if it hadn't come out to a deafening silence six months earlier, Nick Nicely's phenomenal "Hilly Fields (1892)" - songs and productions which already sounded after the apocalypse (as winter and darkness drew in, Marc and the Mambas' Untitled and Madness' The Rise And Fall would intensify both - wasn't it supposed to be summer forever now?).
In that summer also appeared "Past Meets Present," the second single by Weekend, the group formed by Alison Statton from the recently dissolved Young Marble Giants with guitarist and ex-Mole Jazz stock buyer Simon Booth and a bassist simply known as Spike. That spring's "The View From Her Room" had already added an extra glistening leaf to the burgeoning green apex of New Pop; this was in its quietly determined way not rock, but it was yearning towards jazz and perhaps Latin whilst noticing the peculiarly green sea beyond; they talked of being played on Radio 2, and indeed it was, sometimes even in its full 12-inch length, featuring an extended semi-free trumpet solo by Harry Beckett (Weekend were keen on joining important dots with a decade previously by working with key musicians; this would eventually lead to the full-scale Working Week, at least before the latter were forced to retreat from jazz to corporate eighties mock-soul). Statton's voice and words were as quietly concerned and concise as they had been in YMG, and their parallel moves may not have been that far away from Scritti's in the same period.
The sleeve of "Past Meets Present" depicted a bold green and red line drawing of the band sipping drinks at a parasol-covered table in the middle of a London park; possibly Hyde Park, although the general layout seems more suggestive of Clapham Common. The mood is slow, hypnotic and very gently disorientating in a 1967 kind of way; Statton's vowels lapsing and morphing into the patiently swirling string arrangement, ebbing and flowing like the mutual bond of breath; "Past meets present, it feels like a dream" before the Eastern flourishes take over for the harmonically ambiguous chorus as her close-up voice suddenly resonates from the top of an unreachable hill ("Look at the faces," she elongates, "Life so, so unmingled"); there is the old "inkshed shelter" (and her immense sadness when noticing that "the names haven't changed"), dim yellow light adding warmth to rain's pour, a scene nothing like whatever she might have remembered however many years ago but still there is hope, as Larry Stabbins' gentle entry on tenor after each chorus quietly demonstrates, breathing Webster-via-Shepp oxygen and sun back into the gloomy scenario; she knows the scene should really be in monochrome, but if she stares and hopes hard enough, she herself may imbue the colours of new promises.
But there were also these strange little singles - indeed the most commercially successful was "Strange Little Girl" by the Stranglers, a song and arrangement dating back to 1974 - which weren't quite psychedelic, weren't quite summery and were in their modest, pink ways quite ominous; I'm thinking of things like Thomas Dolby's "Windpower," Brigit Novik and M's "Danube" ("Where's the water running to?"), Kissing The Pink's "Mr Blunt," and if it hadn't come out to a deafening silence six months earlier, Nick Nicely's phenomenal "Hilly Fields (1892)" - songs and productions which already sounded after the apocalypse (as winter and darkness drew in, Marc and the Mambas' Untitled and Madness' The Rise And Fall would intensify both - wasn't it supposed to be summer forever now?).
In that summer also appeared "Past Meets Present," the second single by Weekend, the group formed by Alison Statton from the recently dissolved Young Marble Giants with guitarist and ex-Mole Jazz stock buyer Simon Booth and a bassist simply known as Spike. That spring's "The View From Her Room" had already added an extra glistening leaf to the burgeoning green apex of New Pop; this was in its quietly determined way not rock, but it was yearning towards jazz and perhaps Latin whilst noticing the peculiarly green sea beyond; they talked of being played on Radio 2, and indeed it was, sometimes even in its full 12-inch length, featuring an extended semi-free trumpet solo by Harry Beckett (Weekend were keen on joining important dots with a decade previously by working with key musicians; this would eventually lead to the full-scale Working Week, at least before the latter were forced to retreat from jazz to corporate eighties mock-soul). Statton's voice and words were as quietly concerned and concise as they had been in YMG, and their parallel moves may not have been that far away from Scritti's in the same period.
The sleeve of "Past Meets Present" depicted a bold green and red line drawing of the band sipping drinks at a parasol-covered table in the middle of a London park; possibly Hyde Park, although the general layout seems more suggestive of Clapham Common. The mood is slow, hypnotic and very gently disorientating in a 1967 kind of way; Statton's vowels lapsing and morphing into the patiently swirling string arrangement, ebbing and flowing like the mutual bond of breath; "Past meets present, it feels like a dream" before the Eastern flourishes take over for the harmonically ambiguous chorus as her close-up voice suddenly resonates from the top of an unreachable hill ("Look at the faces," she elongates, "Life so, so unmingled"); there is the old "inkshed shelter" (and her immense sadness when noticing that "the names haven't changed"), dim yellow light adding warmth to rain's pour, a scene nothing like whatever she might have remembered however many years ago but still there is hope, as Larry Stabbins' gentle entry on tenor after each chorus quietly demonstrates, breathing Webster-via-Shepp oxygen and sun back into the gloomy scenario; she knows the scene should really be in monochrome, but if she stares and hopes hard enough, she herself may imbue the colours of new promises.
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