Excepting Barbara Dixon whom my parents took me to see when I was a kid - presumably because they couldn't find a babysitter - the Abstracts were probably the first band I saw playing live, and they made a huge impression on me. It was some kind of school disco, the sort of thing I would ordinarily have avoided like the plague but my best friend's big brother played bass in the Abstracts. I'd heard the demo tape, recorded at Woodbine in Leamington Spa, and thought it was great, so I couldn't really not go the thing at the school.
I remember that the PE teacher wasn't keen on them. I also remember imaginatively calling out play some Joy Division - Martin, my friend's big brother pulled a face at me, played the opening bar of Transmission, then continued to ignore me for the rest of our respective lives. I remember that they were fucking great - like the real world had finally come to our shitty, hairy, backwater school to show that there could be life beyond Judas fucking Priest and bumfluff-moustache twats pulling wheelies on a Yamaha FS1; and that's about all I remember because, annoyingly, I never managed to get a copy of the demo and I don't think they lasted much longer. I was very briefly in a band with Paul, the drummer, and also, the Abstracts were featured in the final issue of Martin Bowes' Alternative Sounds, which was therefore the first fanzine I ever bought and which opened up another can of worms for me.
Otherwise, I've spent the last forty years with just Contrast stuck in my head and not much else to go on, and it's probably significant that I can't actually have heard the song more than two or three times, and yet it stayed with me. Now, after all these years, that demo has been released as a download and limited seven inch and, let's face it, the chances of it living up to the legend which has been fermenting in my memory during the intervening years were pretty slender; but guess what?
This stuff is actually better than I remember it being, leaving me now more mystified than ever as to how they never quite achieved escape velocity - as I was absolutely convinced they would. Contrast has a killer bassline while Mark Gibbons seems to be playing a different song on the guitar, all angular jazzy chords - somehow both spiky and west coast mellow at the same time - and while Jez Randall's voice may not immediately leap out at you as likely to launch a thousand ships, it's difficult to imagine anyone better suited. Oddly, his vocal proposes the Abstracts as occurring halfway between A Certain Ratio and a moderately more punky Dentists, or something along those lines; which as convoluted comparisons go, should probably be taken as an indication that they didn't really sound quite like anyone else. How something this good, and this full of life, and so gloriously original can have remained hidden away for so many decades is astonishing.
No comments:
Post a Comment