Friday 10 May 2013

It's Friday . . . Let's Dance



When I started this series I initially posted anything that vaguely made you want to dance and celebrate the fact that the weekend had arrived. The first few weeks featured northern soul tracks but it sort of evolved into tracks that fitted in with my definition of dance music, ie the use of computers, drum machines and keyboards to make music to jig about to or attempt to.

Today's track sort of deviates from what has become the norm, in that it is dance music but it has been made by guitars then remixed into a more floor friendly form which was then tagged as "indie dance", a term I've always hated.

Soup Dragons were the epitome of Indie from 1985 when they were formed in Belshill, Lanarkshire. They released their music on very indie labels and their first album was called  "This Is Our Art, Useless, Boring, Impotent, Elitist and Very, Very Beautiful". Then they jumped upon the indie dance bandwagon, hitching a ride with the next big thing had some success, appeared on Top Of The Pops and were much maligned for it.

Here is an example from Discogs, in a passage about Loaded " The sample serves as a statement of intent not only for the song, but also the then-forthcoming album "Screamadelica", and essentially, the entire Ecstasy era. The success of the resulting rock/electronic hybrid went to number 16 in the UK charts and set the template not only for Primal Scream's future career but for the uncountable number of indie bands from that moment on (The Farm and The Soup Dragons were two early and obvious adopters of this new approach)" You can almost here the contempt of the writer when mentioning The Farm and Soup Dragons or am I reading to much into it but they were derided as band wagon jumpers and scensters.

Only they didn't and they weren't. Today's track was doing the rounds at the end of 1989 at least 6 months before Loaded hit the streets.

Have a good weekend people

Soup Dragons - Mother Universe (Love dub)

7 comments:

Swiss Adam said...

I'd long forgotten about this one and I can't tell if its better than I remember or worse. It also settles a discussion from several years ago where some of us were trying to remember who had a song that started 'She's in love with heaven above. This was pre-mobile phone internet days.

davyh said...

The NME taking the piss out of "There's always been a dance element to our music' and 'I'm Free' being
the song of my mate Mart's stag weekend in Blackpool is all I remember about them. Can we have some Northside next week, LOL x

Anonymous said...

Love a bit of Northside me. But I also liked Soup Dragons for both Mother Universe and I'm Free and The Farm.

Swiss Adam said...

Sing LSD

Swiss Adam said...

That copy of the Face turned up today (ebay £2.99 free p&p). Just read about Glasgow's scooter clubs. You weren't a member of The Cuntbusters were you?

drew said...

I'm with you Ctel.

SA - no but I always wanted to join the Animals Fae Na Namboo.

The chop on the double page spread was a belter. always liked that.

Btw - the guy who wrote the article was Stuart Cosgrove, one time head of Channel 4 and regular gobshite on tv and radio up here.

Swiss Adam said...

Realised flicking through that many the writers are now on broadsheet newspapers- Kathryn Flett for one. The chopper looked cool, as did the burgundy brogues.