A faintly punky upbringing left me generally suspicious of psychedelia, at least as I understood it at the time. Fags and lager were my drug of choice, I couldn't stand even the smell of dope, and psychedelia seemed like sappy nostalgia for something which rarely sounded so amazing as had been promised. Wobbly drawings of gnomes engaged in lazily surrealist situations, smoking joints or whatever, were habitually greeted by a few of my peers with the usual chorus of wow, then pronounced amaaaaaaazing spelled with seven As in the middle; and if The Prisoner had been an entertaining, inventive TV show, it hardly seemed like anything containing the meaning of life. Psychedelia struck me as a safe, cultish understanding, the redundancy of which seemed confirmed by some book I checked out of the library, possibly something to do with Encyclopedia Psychedelica, and which listed the Psychedelic Furs as contemporary exponents of the form, presumably because of the fucking name. Of course, I had a few records which might be deemed psychedelic to greater or lesser degrees, but I never really thought of them as such because they usually did something else besides jangling or saying things like oh wow, I just tried to Hoover the carpet but I ended up carpeting the Hoover! The Shamen evaded my otherwise rigorous screening process when I heard Christopher Mayhew Says on John Peel, whenever that was, and found myself seduced by the startling combination of spaced out backwards mind-felch with hard, pounding electro not a million miles from what you might have heard on one of those Street Sounds compilations.
Sadly, as we all saw, they somehow became the Adam & the Ants of the nineties, someone of whom it would forever be said that you had liked their early stuff; but then even Ant's cheesiest guest spots on the Basil Brush show usually had something going for them, whereas the ravey Shamen were just plain fucking crap, at least to my ears - the sound of people who should have stuck to their Pink Floyd impersonations failing to understand acid house - which wasn't actually that fucking hard to understand; one shit hit single after another, the ingenious wordplay of Ebeneezer Goode, then LSI which stood for love, sex, intelligence and I felt insulted the latter through lacking either the subtlety or sincerity of Mel & Kim's similarly acronymous FLM, which was at least, as one of the initials promised, fun by some definition. Anyway…
Before it all went tits up, we had this record, tripping its knackers off while jamming acid house and psychedelic guitars together on the same tracks, and working because it never sounded like an impersonation, just a peculiar juxtaposition of unrelated elements. Gorbachev sounds as though it was informed by the spirit of seeing what would happen, with none of the later populist box-ticking. Half of it is way too hard and crunchy to work in a rave setting, and there's even a few of those tracks which jangle and say wow when you show them a picture of a rainbow pixie with a bong, but fed through weirdy filters sufficient to distance them from anyone still wearing velvet loon pants. Of course, sampling evangelical preachers praising God so as to highlight what evil fuckers those guys can be was so dated by this point that even Phil Collins had done it, but the Shamen got around the in-your-face obviousness of the affectation by really shoving it in-your-face with bells on to the point of it seeming so joyful as to render its raw cynicism positively poisonous. They were trolling, and they were trolling hard - not least with the album title - because the evil bastards in their sights needed to be trolled.
It was all downhill from here, albeit not in the commercial sense, but even silly Ebeneezer can be forgiven then dutifully ignored in light of this record. It did everything it needed to do at the time and was endlessly inventive, from the Star Trek samples on Synergy to an entire song about a lady's fanny euphemised as Rasberry Infundibulum. Had other psychedelic revivalists been so riotously progressive as this, I would have had much less cause for grumbling.
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