Beautiful Pea Green Boat - Get Religion (1988)

If Third Mind Records have endured to any extent in the collective musical memory, I've an unfortunate feeling it's probably as - ugh - old school industrial pioneers, as young people who know more than the rest of us are wont to put it, thanks to the undeniably seminal Rising from the Red Sand and status as a footnote in the saga of Front Line Assembly - apparently. Having actually been there at the time - and even painted a couple of the record covers for that matter - I can confidently state that this is complete bollocks, and nothing underscores the back catalogue's resistance to silly labels quite like Beautiful Pea Green Boat.

At the time, Third Mind seemed cut from approximately similar cloth to Some Bizarre (who weren't fucking industrial either), not least because they seemed to have booked all the Wild Planet people which Some Bizarre should have bagged - Nurse With Wound, Konstruktivists, Attrition and so on; but right from the off it was obvious that Gary Levermore simply intended to release great music regardless of how industrial or otherwise it might be deemed, and there was a point at which his main focus very much seemed to be Beautiful Pea Green Boat. He sent me a stack of records for services rendered or something, amongst which was an early Front Line Assembly release that I liked, but thought it sounded like a Cabaret Voltaire knock off - mostly grunting and sequencers. Get Religion, on the other hand, was clearly the prize of the litter. With hindsight it probably sounds very eighties, but at the time it seemed like the newest thing we'd ever heard. I'd already encountered sampled orchestral stabs and the synth pulse of New York high energy disco but never quite like this, and never with the same depth of feeling as the most heart wrenching sixties soul. The key to their power seemed to be in the contrast of Ian Williams' state of the art technical overload - at least as of 1988 - with Heather Wright's sweet, almost folksy voice. I'd say imagine a combination of the Pet Shop Boys and the Cocteau Twins, but as comparisons it captures nothing of the tumult or drama of their music which, in spirit, is almost Byronic.

Third Mind was a pretty great label while it lasted with more than its fair share of classics, of which Get Religion was possibly the finest. They really should have been fucking massive.