There are a handful of genuinely pivotal moments in Brian and Garry’s career – ‘A.S.T.’; ‘Papua New Guinea’; the launch of FSOLDigital – and this is absolutely one of them.
“I suggest that you, er, reach down inside yourself there and try and find something that’ll keep you awake just a little while longer, because this transmission coming up may just, er, rekindle your will to live.”
It’s been a while since we last heard that sample. But this isn’t a return to the 3D Headspace Tour. Immediately after the opening Silent Running sample comes Garry saying “A monstrous psychedelic bubble, colours exploding in your mind” in a, frankly, slightly annoying voice, followed by “The Future Sound of London DJ live via ISDN from London.” It’s quite jarring. Then comes a recording of Deepak Chopra talking about mind, body, soul and ego. It goes on for quite a while, with flutes and synth sweeps in the background. Ok, it’s a bit different to your usual FSOL sample, but they have always gone for evocative dialogue. And then begins ‘Streets of Calcutta’ by Ananda Shankar. A 1975 track, starting with Hammond organ and going into a sitar freakout. The chances of anyone listening to this in Manchester in August 1997 having heard the Fun Radio transmission two months before are staggeringly low; it’s possible a handful of people might have been at the Essential Festival. Either way, it’s only with hindsight that we can trace a direct line from tracks like ‘Popadom’ and the proto-‘Theram’ played earlier in the summer to this show. Most fans would have been a bit baffled. Surely FSOL are about futuristic electronica, not ’70s psychedelic instrumentals. To be fair, the Kiss FM shows of 1993 were full of older music, and there’s a secondary direct line between the 1995 Essential Mix, with its blend of funky post-punk, hip-hop, The Beatles and Barbara Streisand and this show. After spending a 18 months working with IDM and drum n bass styles, this show finally picks up on the funkier extension of the ISDN era we heard in June 1995.
The opening track is followed by a snippet of the Walker Brothers pop classic ‘The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore’, and suddenly it’s into a Pink Floyd track from their 1969 soundtrack More. This was clearly a favourite of the band at the time, with several of its instrumental pieces appearing throughout this mix, and even being sampled on tracks from the period. The track backs an unknown reading of a D.H. Lawrence poem, ‘To Women, as Far as I’m Concerned’. Up next, more late ’60s psychedelia from The White Noise, a group featuring David Vorhaus and BBC Radiophonic Workshop members Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson, whose debut album is regarded as one of the key works of electronic tape music of the 1960s; it’s quite so out of the blue, as ‘The Visitation’ from the same album was played several times in 1993; nevertheless, it’s the poppiest track from the album used here. Samples of HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey – “I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do” – lead into a John Barry soundtrack piece, a jazzy, brass-led instrumental, which also includes dialogue samples from the 1996 ISDN tour. This is quite an interesting blend, and makes the show stand out from later Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble mixes by still having very strong links to FSOL transmissions from the ’90s. The inclusion of samples from Knights, a film sampled heavily on the Dead Cities tour, over the following Wizards of Ooze track (the first post-’70s track on the mix), and the 3D Headspace Tour environment briefly used near the end of the track continues this vibe: FSOL embracing new (old) sounds into their soundscape.
The groovy vibe continues with ‘Cosmic Sea’ by Mystic Moods, a track that would appear several times on early ’00s mixes; as an instrumental jam track, it’s not a million miles away from some of the Fun Radio tracks; in contrast, ‘2000 Light Years from Home’ by the Rolling Stones is a very long way from typical FSOL fare. The two tracks are linked by the ‘More noise please’ Steven Jessie Bernstein spoken sample from the 3D Headspace Tour. There follows a really quite sinister version of children’s nursery rhyme ‘Rain, Rain Go Away’ and it’s back into instrumental groove territory again, with a Spencer Davis Group b-side. A lot of the material for the show came from the pair’s scouring of second hand markets, particularly around the Brick Lane era near Garry’s home, where they were finding intriguing old records full of what were, to them, new sounds. After another brief snippet of ‘The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore’ comes a particularly daft Bukowski quote about a woman with a body like a submarine, with a snippet of Hendrix’s ‘Voodoo Child (Slight Return)’ in the background, itself another track used throughout 1994 transmissions. A brief unknown track comes and goes, and it’s finally time for a run of slightly more contemporary music, starting with Sun Dial’s ‘Exploding in Your Mind’ – almost certainly an inspiration behind the mix title – followed by some Chemical Brothers beats and classic Primal Scream, the latter track mixes seamlessly into a David Axelrod piece from the 1968; for the longest time I thought they were all the same track. The poem that follows, ‘Feeling Fucked Up, comes from Etheridge Knight’s collection Poems from Prison. Then comes the strangest contrast in the whole show: Harry Nilsson’s baroque pop miniature ‘Without Her’ leads straight into the breakcore of Shizuo. The flutes in the track are somewhat in line with the tone of the show, but overall it shows a continuing interest in electronic music even in context of everything around it. The next track is by Jean Jacques Perrey and Gershon Kingsley, and I love it: a 12 bar blues with animal sounds. It’s totally daft and has been one of my favourite things since I first heard it when the bootleg of the show surfaced online in 2000. Then comes a double-header of the Chemical Brothers beatmatched into The Beatles in what sums up the direction the band were going for at the time: it’s an inspired mix and works perfectly.
The second part of the mix opens with more Deeprak Chopra, quoting the Bhagavad Gita, and leads into more ’90s psychedelic rock from Wizards of Ooze and Turn On. “Dope, drugs, weed, grass, toot, smack, quackers, uppers, downers, all arounders. You name it we want it!” and “Wanna get high? samples come from the film Up in Smoke. Another track from the FSOL vault follows, Randy California’s ‘Downer’, as previously sampled on ‘Snake Hips‘. A couple of film samples about television follow – from Up in Smoke and Videodrome – and lead into a couple of more traditionally FSOL sounding pieces, a piece of early progressive electronica from Bo Hansson and 23 Skidoo’s ‘The Gospel Comes to New Guinea’. After some orchestrated ’60s songs from Glen Campbell and that obscure group The Beatles comes one of only two FSOL tracks in the show, ‘Trying to Make Impermanent Things Permanent’. Testament to how well they were doing at creating music like that found in the mix, it fits in perfectly; anyone not aware of its origin would no doubt just think it another psychedelic jam. After some more David Axelrod, the show makes a brief, somewhat unexpected detour into Lifeforms territory, with the inclusion of ‘Bird Wings’ and a Silent Running sample frequently used throughout the 3D Headspace Tour. The John Williams track sampled in ‘Smokin Japanese Babe‘ and ‘Are They Fightin Us‘ is another reminder that a lot of this music was already in FSOL’s DNA, merely being brought much more to the fore at this point. A second Ananda Shankar track features numerous spoken samples from the Dead Cities tour. Another strange pairing follows: the scuzzy lo-fi breaks of Simon Wells’s Headstone Lane project from his EBV release, and the easy listening pop of ‘Everyone’s Gone to the Moon’ by pop mogul, producer, former DJ and, er, convicted pedophile Jonathan King.
The final run of tracks heads into quieter, slightly more lo-fi territory, from the Moog jazz of Dick Hyman to a montage of further pieces from Pink Floyd’s More soundtrack, Pearls Before Swine’s Dylan-aping and the opening track from the first Soft Machine album, plus the Bill Hicks ‘Drugs’ environment from 1994 broadcasts. Michael LeGrand’s ‘Theme from Summer of ’42‘, another Essential Mix ’95 track is joined by a Shawshank Redemption sample from the 1996 tour, leading into the transmission’s final track, an easy listening cover of The Doors’ ‘Light My Fire’. The “you were right…” sample takes its rightful place at the end of a show once more time, before a lot of phased noise and the snoring from the end of The White Noise’s ‘Game of Loving’ bring the show to a close.
Despite its unconventional nature, there were very tentative plans for the mix to be released as a covermount CD with Mixmag, but they never came to anything; as Garry told Future Music, “it probably won’t be ever released; it’s a mind fuck. It’s basically got 60 tracks in an hour that we’ve fucked with, turned them backwards, all sort of things. There’s Jonathan King, The Byrds, loads of stuff. Some of the artists are going to find it highly objectionable but it’s a great piece of work.” Instead, it acted as a template for what they were intending their next album to sound like: psychedelic instrumentals, breakbeat-led electronica with cut up live instrumentation, the odd bizarre lyrics, all linked together by samples and environments. After the lounge music revival of the mid ’90s, there was more than a touch of psychedelia in the air by the final years of the decade, signified mostly clearly by The Chemical Brothers who were dabbling in their own ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’-inspired instrumentals and collaborations with Noel Gallagher, of all people.
I love this transmission. It’s my favourite of the band’s conventional DJ mixes (only the FSOLDigital-focused EBS7, 14 years later, beats it), the blend of psychedelic music, electronics and ambience a totally unconventional approach that works really well. Later MPB shows have aspects I enjoy, but this first one’s combination of what would become the Amorphous sound with FSOL environments and samples works brilliantly. It’s not overlong or too dense in the way many of the Kiss FM shows sound to me. It also introduced me to a lot of psychedelic music, a sound I only had limited knowledge of before, largely The Beatles and The Moody Blues. At a time when I was discovering lots of unconventional rock music, this show had a huge impact on me. God knows what fans and Kiss 102 listeners thought of it at the time; yes, there are FSOL staples on there, but also things like Pearls Before Swine and Harry Nilsson, which are a staggeringly long way from what anyone would expect.
And that’s it. The end of the show marks the end of The Future Sound of London as Brian Dougans and Garry Cobain’s broadcast system experiment. Although the pair would continue to release music, much of it FSOL, they would never return to the album/multi-part single/ISDN radio tour approach again, and their 21st century output would be very different, more fractured, nowhere near as obvious the public eye, less focused on technological innovation, and largely music-first, almost abandoning the ultra-media concept. It’s a very strange way to bow out, and almost uncertainly one nobody would ever have expected. Almost exactly seven years since the release of A.S.T., it’s musically a world away from that debut 12″, an astonishing development working through acid house to UK hardcore, ambient techno, deeper ambient soundscapes, trip-hop and jazz-infused breakbeats, IDM, drum n bass, psychedelic big beat and ending on a DJ mix taking in ’60s pop, Indian classical music, psychedelic rock, film scores and easy listening. Of course, the psychedelic FSOL album that was due to follow never happened, and it would be four more years before new material began to trickle out. A very, very long four years, thankfully made easier by the internet allowing for bootlegs to be shared. But for now, we say goodbye to the 1990s incarnation of the band and their incredible legacy. Messrs Dougans and Cobain, you did well.
The mix was released as part of the launch of The Pod Room on 15th November 2008 with cover art by Lysa Bartlett, but has since been removed. Since then, it has been added to the Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble Mixcloud page, retroactively retconned as an Amorphous Androgynous mix.
Tracklist
Part 1:
00:00 Transmission Intro
01:51 Ananda Shankar – Streets of Calcutta
06:34 The Walker Brothers – The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine (Anymore)
06:51 Pink Floyd – Dramatic Theme
09:09 The White Noise – Love Without Sound
13:09 John Barry – Fancy Dance
15:10 Wizards of Ooze – Doodah Dip
19:30 Unknown
20:50 The Mystic Moods – Cosmic Sea
23:45 The Rolling Stones – 2000 Light Years From Home
29:17 The Spencer Davis Group – Waltz for Lumumba
33:13 The Walker Brothers – The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine (Anymore)
33:50 The Jimi Hendrix Experience – Voodoo Chile
34:38 Unknown
36:14 Sun Dial – Exploding in Your Mind
38:15 The Chemical Brothers – Where Do I Begin?
38:45 Primal Scream – Higher Than The Sun
41:20 David Axelrod – The Smile
44:37 Harry Nilsson – Without Her
46:55 Shizuo – Sweat
49:38 Ry Cooder & Buffy Sainte-Marie – The Hashishin
49:55 Jean Jacques Perrey & Gershon Kingsley – Jungle Blues from Jupiter
51:16 The Chemical Brothers – The Private Psychedelic Reel
54:34 The Beatles – Tomorrow Never Knows
57:13 End of Part 1
Part 2:
00:31 Wizards of Ooze – Helga
02:23 Turn On – Triple Cause of Poetry
06:05 Unknown
07:53 Randy California – Downer
11:04 Bo Hansson – I Skuggornas Rike (aka Fog On The Barrow-Downs)
12:31 23 Skidoo – The Gospel Comes to New Guinea
16:48 Glen Campbell – By The Time I Get to Phoenix
19:22 The Beatles – Within You Without You
22:33 The Future Sound of London – Trying to Make Impermanent Things Permanent
30:25 David Axelrod – The Mental Traveller
32:10 The Future Sound of London – Bird Wings
32:32 Unknown
33:16 John Williams – Raga Vilasakhani Todi
36:27 Ananda Shankar – Dancing Drums
41:44 Headstone Lane – Beers
43:22 Jonathan King – Everyone’s Gone to the Moon
44:35 Dick Hyman – Give it Up or Turn it Loose
47:35 Pink Floyd – Quicksilver
47:47 Pink Floyd – A Spanish Piece
48:36 Pink Floyd – Up The Khyber
50:52 Unknown
51:30 Pearls Before Swine – Playmate
54:00 Soft Machine – Hope for Happiness
55:08 Michael LeGrand / Royal Philharmonic Orchestra – Theme from Summer of ’42
57:48 Helmut Zacharias – Light My Fire
1:00:46 Unknown
1:01:58 White Noise – My Game of Loving
1:02:47 Transmission end
Fractional Difference 