Imagination - Scandalous (1983)

I never had any strong feeling about Imagination back in the day, apart from finding them amusing and being fairly certain that at least one of them was probably batting for the other team. If questioned, I probably would have mumbled something dismissive about bland disco music and how I preferred the work of someone or other that you've never heard of; but picking up those memories in 2019, flipping them over and having a look inside, let's face it - I knew Just an Illusion was fucking amazing even if I wasn't admitting it in front of any bigger boys in leather jackets, much less to myself. The breakthrough came when my mother began hanging out with young Algerian men for reasons which are too complicated to go into, and which aren't quite as exciting as I've probably made it sound. One of them - Arezki, as I recall - had an album he needed taping but no tape recorder, and as the nearest available westernised teenager I was called in to assist. The album was Scandalous.

I spent a long time looking at the cover because it was hilarious, and realised I was actually curious about what the hell this thing would sound like. Of course, I knew it would be awful and probably in a highly amusing way, and not a patch on the work of Portion Control or Bourbonese Qualk or others I'd routinely namedrop without having actually found any of their records in the local shops. I slapped it onto the turntable, hit play and record, and immediately had my nuts blown off by New Dimension.

New Dimension is the first track on side one, a breathy extended funk epic running on phased hi-hat with a touch of maybe Soft Cell, a suggestion of grandeur, and which sounds like the sexier cousin to something from Cabaret Voltaire's 2X45, albeit a sexier cousin which gets out of the house a bit more. It's a long way from the sort of novelty fun-time dance jingle you might expect from three blokes trying to smoulder whilst wearing bin liners.

Naturally the rest of the album seems a bit of a step down once we're past the first track, but it catches up with a few more spins. Imagination slinked and oozed at least as hard as Prince or Rick James whilst managing to remain light and breezy, never quite collapsing Schrödinger's Diva down to any single sexual state.

The boys who paint their faces,
The girls they look so strong…

Yet, I still don't know if they were batting for the other team or not, regardless of Shoo Be Doo Da Dabba Doobe with its chorus of this means war suggesting nothing so much as the Wayans brothers wearing tiny hats. To be honest, I didn't actually realise Marc Almond was gay, so maybe it doesn't matter, or maybe the idea that it might is at least as absurd as that of there even being another team, if you see what I mean.

What does matter is that Scandalous probably remains one of the sexiest albums ever made. It's funky, romantic, classy, sensual, sweet, strangely elegant in all of the right places, and anything the eighties ever had going for it can be found at its finest on this record; and State of Love for one really should have been on one of those Crucial Electro compilations. Don't be fooled by the marketing department which seemingly had them down as the Seaside Special version of Parliament.

Stex - Spiritual Dance (1992)

There was a point about halfway through the eighties at which it seemed like Some Bizarre were the only label of substance and I'd never need to bother with anyone else's records ever again. It seemed as though pop music had stopped being a wanker, or was at least doing something kind of interesting; and then the Smiths came along to restore order, to calm the fears of those who foresaw the extinction of proper music made by white blokes with guitars and a love of the jangly sixties, like we knew before all those - well, you know, can't say no names or nuffink but name me one good reggae song, yeah?

Then Cabaret Voltaire were suddenly on Parlophone, The The were similarly elsewhere, Psychic TV failed to be anything like as interesting as promised, and Stevo's thing had seemingly vanished off the map. Excepting a vaguely recalled clip of something trading as Blowzabella on some youth TV show, it had all gone quiet. I suppose it may be significant that this apparent disappearance probably coincided with my giving up on music papers, but I don't know, and the subsequent history of Some Bizarre is a strange and obscure tale populated by artists you've never heard of - Monkey Farm Frankenstein and others.

That said, I'm not sure I'd actually heard of Stex, but Johnny Marr of the aforementioned Smiths plays on this record so I assume it will have been paid at least some attention, even if I was looking in the wrong direction at the time; and I assume from the scarcity of posthumous information on the internet (a realm wherein one may learn even the birth dates and respective shoe sizes of all three members of Naffi Sandwich if you look hard enough) that they're probably still owed at least fourteen of their allotted fifteen minutes.

I say they're but, so far as I can tell, Stex was he, and specifically a he of Lewisham - which is actually where I was living in 1992, but never mind. Stex seems to have been something to do with the developing garage scene, and I gather that, aside from Johnny Marr twanging away on a couple of numbers, we also have the involvement of an Altered Images dude, with Dave Ball possibly twiddling something or other. Spiritual Dance is uptempo bluesy soul of a kind which was admittedly fairly common in 1992, but done with the sort of feeling which connects it firmly to its roots, and which therefore distinguishes it from the formless, generic pish gratuitously emoted by all of those Alexander O'Neal types. Guitars chop and chunk like Nile Rodgers, and the computer bass squelches with a warmth I hadn't even realised I'd missed, and the mood is uplifting without getting stupid, whilst smouldering like Imagination's New Dimension, or the broody opening bars of Diana Ross's Love Hangover; and really it's just a fucking tremendous soul album, a lost gem in every sense. Stex may have seemed an odd labelmate for Einstürzende Neubauten, but if you listen close it becomes difficult to miss the kinship with The The and even Cabaret Voltaire's funkier material.

What the hell happened, Stex? You should have been fucking massive.