Covers Week, Day 6

The band featured today's version of another cover version  was responsible for the worst fashion crime I have ever perpetrated.  As a result of Age Of Chance's performance of Kiss on the Whistle Test in 1987 I decided that it would be cool to wander about the streets of Lanark and Aberdeen wearing a cycling top but with no bike or bicycle clips in sight.

I remember discussing the performance with Stiff at the time,  both of us thought that their cover version of the Purple One's best song was brilliant but it was the fashion which we thought was really cool and I rushed out and spent a fortune on what I thought was a cool as fuck cycling top, the actual one in the picture above. Stiff would be able to tell you whose top tit was that I shelled out for was a copy of but me I didn't have a clue.

The very top turned up a few years ago when Stiff found it during a clear out, I had given him it when I no longer thought it fashionable (which unfortunately for me was a year or maybe more after buying it and not the next day) and to make matters worse the shirt still fit the bastard whereas it would have had to be at least double the size the have fitted me and even then would have looked absolutely awful.

So, here is another song that the Age of Chance covered brilliantly/ ruined depending on your point of view on their 1986 mini album, Crush Collision.

Age Of Chance - Disco Inferno

It's Friday . . . Let's Dance

When I decided to feature today's track I realised that the Age of Chance had been ahead of their time on more than one occasion in their short career and never seemed to get the recognition for the innovators that they really were, it may have been to do with the ridiculous cycling get up or the rapping in a Leeds accent but I don't think that the band were taken as seriously as they should have been.  Would the Bomb Squad ( Hank Shocklee and Carl Ryder) have remixed a band that wasn't taking their chosen form of music seriously, I don't think so.

Let's look at the evidence, the band although originally grouped in with the C86 movement were the first band to record a track comprising solely of samples. In early 1986 they made a promo of  their cover of Prince's Kiss, which was sent to John Peel who played it on a number of occassions. The track unfortunately never saw the light of day in the commercial world due to the Virgin lawyers being a bit worried about the fact that the Boss or his purpleness, Prince among others may get a bit litigious over the release.

The band were also the first non rap act to incorporate a dj as part of their sound and also have him go out on tour with them.

As mentioned above they were also the first and probably only British indie band to ever be remixed by Public Enemy's production Team (Take It).

However I think that a veil should be drawn over the sartorial preferences of the band even though after seeing them on the Whistle Test I went out and bought a ludicrously expensive and unfeasible tight cycling top as I thought that this was the coolest thing that I had ever seen. I was young, stupid and had far too much disposable income at the time.

The tune posted also shows the band's ability to be ahead of the pack. Timeless is a remix of the  track Time's Up  from the band's second full long player Mecca. When you listen to it now it is hard to believe that it was recorded in 1989 as it was still a couple of years before Progressive House took hold in the UK and it could also be seen as a very early example of Trance.

I have uploaded the bootleg version which appeared three years later, the only difference being that the acid line from Brandon Cooke's Sharp As A Knife ( a track featured here a while ago) has been added to the mix. You may also be able to make out the Pink Floyd samples from The Dark Side Of The Moon.

Age Of Chance - Time's Up (Timeless bootleg mix)

Higher Than Heaven

Age of Chance are probably best remembered for their brilliant cover version of Kiss, which came out in a myriad of covers and mixes in 1986.

The band first came to the attention of most indie fans due to their inclusion on the infamous C86 NME compilation tape. After a couple of Peel sessions the band signed to FON records and recorded the cover of Kiss and a mini album Crush Collision, the re release of which came with a free single sided 12" featuring another mix of Kiss.

In 1987 the band signed to Virgin and recorded an album, the first by a UK group to incorporate a DJ scratching and sampling. One Thousand Years of Trouble was released in September 1987 and was completely novel, no indie band made sounds like this. I had the good fortune to see them around October/November 1987 in Aberdeen and found the live show absolutely stunning, although I was suffering from concussion at the time. DJ Powercut was an integral part of the set up by then and the live scratching and sampling certainly added to the sonic crush symphony the band produced.

During the following year the original vocalist Steve E left during the recording off the follow up album. A new vocalist was drafted in, Charles Hutchinson to completely re vocal the LP. When I first heard the resulting album Mecca, I was completely dismayed, gone was the sample heavy, beat laden, near industrial sound of old replaced by what I thought at the time was a terribly weak soul lite sound. I have had reason to reappraise this album over the years and now find that it is not as bad as I thought and quite a few of the tracks are actually rather good but completely different from the likes of Who's Afraid of The Big Bad Noise? or Take It from the debut album.

The band eventually split in 1991, after a career that failed to trouble the charts but did earn a No 2 position in the festive 50 of 1986 for Kiss which also hit number one in the indie charts the same year.

Posted is the standout track from the second album, Mecca, the soulful Higher Than Heaven. Which was released as a single in 1990 and reached the giddy heights of #53in the UK.

Age Of Chance - Higher Than Heaven 

ps Anybody go a vinyl copy of the Kisspower promo that they want to get rid of, I'm your man.

Where's That Nicked From?

One of the greatest innovations in music in the late 20th century must be the development of the digital sampler. The sampler has been around since the early 70s but came to prominence in the late 80s with companies such as AKAI developing the technology to enable samples to be stretched and looped. The use of the sampler was pioneered by hip hop acts in the USA and by studio boffins and DJs over here.

When I first heard tracks such as Pump Up The Volume and Beat Dis, I couldn't believe how this sort of cut and paste method could sound so good.

During 1987 you couldn't move for tracks using or in some cases completely constructed from samples and a lot of time was spent trying to spot the sample or count how many samples there were in tracks. The possibilities seemed endless, however in the majority of the cases the sampling was lazily executed with the same samples being used over and over again, more often than not James Brown.

Two of the true innovators in the use of this technology were Matt Black and Jonathan Moore aka Coldcut. They were responsible for the first commercially released UK cut n paste record, Say Kids What Time Is It? They were also responsible for the best remix this side of Andy Weatherall in Paid In Full (Seven Minutes of Madness) for Eric B and Rakim and the definitive mix cd 70 Minutes of Madness. After flirting with chart success they set up the Ninja Tunes label which has consistently released some of the best left field dance music around and is still going strong.

James Brown - The Payback Mix - Keep On Doing What You're Doing But Make It Funky (Coldcut Mix)

Coldcut may have been responsible for the first commercially released UK cut n paste record, however the first recorded and aired was by a gang from Leeds who made "Sonic-Metal-Disco" - Age of Chance.

I already had the Crush Collision mini lp and 2 different 12" singles of their version of Prince's Kiss when one night I heard this mental version of Kiss on the John Peel show which had so many different samples it was impossible to spot them all. After hearing it on the show I searched for it for months but with no success. I went on to buy all the rest of their stuff up until they split but never even heard that version of Kiss again. 500 promo copies were pressed but it was never released, due to litigation worries.

It would have been late 2007, when trawling the internet one night I found a site which had posted an mp3 of the track. On playing it back, it was as mad as I remembered and just as good.

Age Of Chance - Kiss (Kiss Power mix)