Another piece for my pal Russ's Lunchtime For The Wild Youth zine, this time focussing on records released in 1986. You can buy the hard copy and read all the reviews at Merch | Lunchtime For The Wild Youth (bandcamp.com)
DR CALCULUS – DESIGNER BEATNIK (10 Records)
Stephen Duffy is one of Britain’s most underrated songwriters. He may have found a late-career payday writing for Barenaked Ladies and Robbie Williams, but most of his work is unknown to the general public: a founder member of Duran Duran, he left a year before they signed to EMI, making him the yacht-rock Pete Best; as Tin Tin he had a couple of glossy pop hits with albums to follow, which are treasured by the popnoscenti but mostly forgotten; he’s made 12 albums with The Lilac Time, who in their late-80s heyday were a literate folk-pop outfit, a sort of Fairport Convention for polo-necked Lloyd Cole fans; he made a beautiful album of French cinema-influenced chamber-pop nostalgia which even a co-credit for Nigel Kennedy couldn’t convince punters to splash out on; and he was in Me Me Me, with Alex James and the drummer out of Elastica, although that’s an exception because it’s shite.
But of all the obscurities in the Duffy back catalogue, none is less known and more deserving of love than Designer Beatnik, the sole album by Dr Calculus, a shockingly prescient chunk of ambient house funk pop collage surrealism which sounds so far ahead of its time, I had to double check it was actually released in 1986 (at which point I discovered some of it was recorded in 1984, and had to have a little sit down). This knowingly arty ecstasy-influenced soundscape – the back cover cheekily places “m.d.m.a.” after the titular doctor’s name – predates almost any piece of club music detournement you can think of, coming a year before The JAMs, and two years before any of Akin Fernandez’s Irdial Records acts, and a few years before The Orb hit their stride. Only the Situationist Synclavier* of The Art Of Noise is a true pop-angled experimental predecessor here, and the debt is clear from the style of the sleeve, which was designed by Stephen and his brother Nick (who is also in The Lilac Time, do try to keep up at the back).
The 11 tracks generally fall into two camps, the strangely danceable and the proto-chillout. The former throws magpie lyrics or vocal samples over rectilinear electro drum machines and meaty horn parts, courtesy of members of Pigbag’s brass section, with a few psychedelic flourishes; the latter layers field recordings, woozy pitched percussion, and the sort of post-Miles doleful horn lines that would have made a 1993-vintage Wire reader drool, and they still sound contemporary today. ‘Moments of Being (Reprisal)’ lies somewhere between Penguin Cafe Orchestra and Global Communication and captures an extract from a chat with a bikini model talking about boredom and Special Brew, and the title track boasts a gorgeously striated trumpet with full-on phaser and what might be a couple of backpackers catching up in North Africa.
But the album still finds time for oddities like ‘Man’, a loving parody of acid jazz before the genre really existed, and ‘Perfume from Spain’, a sleng teng rhythm in so many inverted commas it can barely stand up straight, with the poshest white girl rap imaginable - although it also features a verse by Junior Gee, one of the UK’s first rappers, whose 1983 track ‘Caveman Rock’ is a nice Newcleus-esque footnote in British hip-hop history. Oh, and the album’s lyrics, if that’s the right word, steal from Hamlet, invoke a yuppie eroticism with lines like “You are my neon love in the hot baths”, and revel in pop-art Burroughs non-sequiturs like “Sacred heartbeat outlaw. I wanted to be a painter. Hello honey, I’m home”.
If you want to hear an album that sounds as though it might have been made by some uber-trendy producer last month, whilst also capturing the open-eyed optimism of mainstream songwriters discovering cheap music technology in the 80s, seek out Designed Beatnik. And remember, as ‘Dream Machine’ puts it, “the film begins when you leave the cinema” - which might be profound or a piss-take, you won’t be entirely sure.
*AoN used a Fairlight, rather than a Synclavier, so far as I know, but why waste a nice snappy bit of alliteration?
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