Opening with Garry trying out his French again, over the same environments as the ’97 Peel Session, this hour long transmission to Fun Radio has the dubious honour of being the band’s very last ISDN transmission of original material in the 1990s. Broadcast around the same time as the John Peel and Essential Festival transmissions, it opens with a similar set, minus ‘Tudor Oak’. ‘The Shining Path’, ‘Trying to Make Impermanent Things Permanent’, ‘Private Psyche and Inner Life’ and ‘How to be a Genuine Fake’ were clearly tracks they were happy with at the time. Additional spoken samples appear over the end of ‘The Shining Path’, and various new sounds are triggered between the remaining tracks. After the Peel Session setlist concludes, it’s onto newer material, starting with ‘Popadom’, the utterly crazy breaks piece filled with boinging sounds, Hawaiian guitar and organ samples. More French speech is layered of the track’s brain-bashing looped outro. The first bootleg of this show to circulate was coated in radio static and this particular section was actually painful to listen to. Over the years, an additional title from this era has done the rounds: ‘He Does as if She Is’. It has been suggested this was a working title for ‘Popadom’. Who knows. The crazy chopped up live ‘We Have Explosive’ follows, leading into the new arrangement of ‘Papua New Guinea’, as heard at the Essential Mix festival a few weeks before. It’s pretty much what you’d imagine a traditional FSOL ‘gig’ would sound like, the breaks of ‘We Have Explosive’ gradually morphing into chopped up drum loops from ‘Papua’ and eventually resolving as the full track as the synth pads come in. It’s a great moment, a double-header that doesn’t make sense in terms of FSOL atmospherics, but works perfectly as a performance. Up next is ‘East Pacifica’, a currently unreleased track, built around string, brass and guitar samples, sounding very much like a 1950s film score piece. The band were very well promoted by Delabel, the French arm of Virgin, and were popular in France as a result; no surprise, then, that they returned the favour by tailoring their French shows for the nation. More French film dialogue samples are layered over the track. As things cut to near silence, the show appears to be over. And then in comes a rock drum beat, and some distorted saxophone samples. Revisiting this broadcast in the mid ’00s, I was astonished to discover these samples – and others later in the track – were used in the Amorphous Androgynous track ‘Theram’; the drum loop later formed the basis of Isness track ‘Chawawah’. Chugging guitar riffs and Hammond organ chords join the piece, and we’re in full psych rock mode here. At the 46 minute mark, the bootlegger’s tape cuts out; thankfully they decided to continue taping, and only a few seconds of the track are lost. The intro of The Kinks’ ‘Sunny Afternoon’ is thrown into the mix, as well as guitar samples that would later appear on Amorphous track ‘Tiny Space Birds’ in 2008. At seven minutes, it’s a beast of a track, and, of all the material here, a signifier of the change in sound. Then they throw in a drum’n’bass track that includes the layers of lush guitar samples later found in Alice in Ultraland track ‘Indian Swing’. After a brief aside for, bizarrely, the “Future Sound of London live via ISDN” ident that usually begins these shows, things get even stranger with a groovy techno track. Ok, so it’s overlaid with ’70s style rock flute and a fairly swinging drum loop comes in, but the combination of these psych sounds with four-to-the-floor drum machines and synth sequences is utterly bizarre. At first I thought this was actually the next show on Fun Radio that had accidentally been recorded at the end of the FSOL show, but it’s followed by an exclusive environment with gurgling synths, waves and reversed vocals. And then that’s it.
If Dead Cities lacks overt ambient tracks, it certainly has no shortage of atmosphere; the new material on display here is arguably the least ambient music of the band’s 90s run, but it finds them largely moving away from atmospherics. The use of guitars, organs and such is a move towards the psychedelic approach Brian and Garry were adopting as an influence at the time which, combined with the chunky breakbeats, slightly strangely aligns them with other big electronic groups at the time. If this material had formed the basis of a new album delivered in 1998, it would have matched up brilliantly with similar records by Propellerheads, The Chemical Brothers, The Prodigy, Lionrock and so on. As it is, such an album never happened, and this transmission is the closest we’ll ever get to a traditional followup to Dead Cities. This isn’t quite such a daunting prospect now that a good quality bootleg has been sourced; the older version – in nine segments, caked in radio static – was a very difficult listen. And so it’s a very important bootleg, and one that I listen to fairly often, due to its large number of unreleased tracks, and its unique position in the FSOL canon.
Tracklist
00:00 Transmission Intro
00:56 The Shining Path
05:48 Trying to Make Impermanent Things Permanent
14:23 Private Psyche and Inner Life
20:13 How to be a Genuine Fake
23:10 Popadom
29:02 We Have Explosive
34:47 Papua New Guinea
40:10 East Pacifica
42:38 Unknown
49:37 Unknown
52:50 Unknown
60:04 End
Fractional Difference 