the shamen: c/d

any news re the recent reformation rumours ?

[app. as a consequence of colin getting on stage during underworlds set]

also, seems that the bands old 'nemetom' site has been restored : http://www.nemeton.com/

I was playing a lot of En-Tact last week, it is amazing how that album (UK version) is 20 years old and still rock-solid from start to finish.

yeah, i need to check that out again
(the uk version = the one with all the big name remixes ? orbital ? )
from my faltering grey cells, was their best album methinks.
though i did like acid house mini lp phorward more at the time.
i think i have bought boss drum in recent years and the remix album, and never actually listened to either of them.
time to go a digging in the archive.

Funny, I had a mini Shamen revival well, in my head, in the past few weeks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En-Tact

I think you mean the US one (which did have the Orbit remix of "Hyperreal" which is flat-out stunning; I never got the US version because I hated the remix of "Pro-Gen" and I already had the "Hyperreal" single)

13."Hear Me O My People" (Orbital - Delays Expected) (Mix by Orbital) – 7:24

this is amazing if i recall correctly.

tis the original UK version thats hidden in the archive.

omg haha

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgpeJV0-qHI&feature=related

xp: yeah that track is BLINDING

I would have had the US version but I've been listening to the Spotify version, whichever that is (it has about 18 more remixes on it.) And now I am going to go and listen to it again, hurrah.

Yes, it's the US version that Spotify has.

Everything just that wubulationtone all over it and makes me instantly happy.

The original "Pro-Gen" has a harder drum loop, which melted my MIND when I heard it in high school; I think it was the first import I ever actively sought out.

The video for Move Any Mountain! I'd never seen it! Wow. I love that whole late 80s/early 90s wacky Stadium House video vibe.

so, the reformation never happened.
shame.
i still think that 'in gorbachev we trust' is the ultimate album that mixed guitar psych and early days acid house machine noise brilliantly with the political paranoia of the day.
bloody hell, just realised, it's the albums 25th anniversary.
while i may feel old and tired, the album still sounds fresh and relevant.

This revive prompted me to revisit The Shamen on Spotify and I'm very happy I did. It's been a very long time since I listened to them.

apparently the gorbachev album is not on spotify !?

and yes, i think its a good time to revisit ..

apart from the HIT, they released a lot of really good stuff ..

the jump in sonics between '.. gorbachev' and 'en-tact' is insane ..

has any other band had such a massive leap between albums ?

charity shop brilliance today.
spotted 'boss drum' in the cd racks, so pulled it out to see condition as I already have it on cd, but hey, for a coin.
and there on the cover, was a sticker : 'limited edition double pack Boss Drum + En-tact TPLP42CL/CDL''
sure enough, there was a perfect cd copy of the US edition of the En-tact as an extra cd, with both full cd covers/inlays so you can choose the album cover you prefer.
happy daze, as I have never heard the US edition in full.
of course, I probably have the remixes on various compilations and such, but for a coin, this was a proper bargain.

If YouTube is any indication a significant section of the listening public are or have been under the impression that the lyrics to LSI are "Love, Sex and Janet Jackson."

I don't know if it's the music, or the associations, but these guys are just my single most go-to prescription for instant, total euphoria and silly, giddy happiness.

I literally keep The Shamen Collection: Hits and Bonus Remixes in the pedastal by my bed, because it is the fastest-acting stimulant and antidepressant I have ever known.

This one works wonders for me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQG1xSdNZVY

The associations feel very silly to me whenever I actually listen to The Shamen but I'm always so glad they're there in the abstract. Utopian early 90s hippy house feels so diametrically opposite from where we are now that it's almost impossible not to look upon it with affection. And I'm not sure any act made the jump from hippy to high street so comprehensively? Like, they were massive and now basically written out of history.

The pop narratives of the 90s really underplay quite how hippy the first few years of the decade were and quite how pronounced the impact on mainstream culture could be, like The Orb had multiple top 40 hits, the Levellers had number one albums, that Swampy dude was a nationally recognised household name. Britpop basically killed all that but even the narratives that attempt to redress the balance in early 90s music tend to focus on eg shoegazing while overlooking how massive the whole hippy thing was. (And maybe with good reason, it's maybe difficult to make a lot of that stuff look cool, or even any good).

'New age' whiteboy ragga toasting, early 90's trippy visuals & *checks notes* an oiled up Jason Statham in speedos and docs = classic

https://youtu.be/wFB3q0mMBK8

There was also the whole free festival/Megadog thing in the early 90s that had very hippy overtones xp

And Ozric Tentacles were much bigger than they had any right to be

I mean just aesthetically there's an awful lot going on in that video.

Like, "great sci-fi Gaian cyberpunk vibes guys, could you maybe a stick a few oiled up buff guys in there as well? There's a bit of space there where you could put them".

Holy hell that video is something!!

PLUR, man. PLUR. Groove IIIISSSS in the Heart.

To this day, I do not know if Mr C was Gay Or Just British

He's married to someone called Xochitl... so I still don't know.

Xochitl is what Mr. C lovingly terms a terricola, or what an alien would call an "earth woman" in Spanish. In turn she considers him an alien because he looks like, in his own words, "the whitest person I know anywhere in the world."

I actually used to know a woman called Xochitl, I'm not sure if that was her real name or whether she just called herself that. She was an original hippie too, American, wrote poetry, kind of on a different planet most of the time.

Just imagine showing that video to anyone under the age of 30. Trying to think if any of the visual elements would translate at all. Maybe post-Grimes, post-Soundcloud rap there are specific bits of bad taste you could get away with again now.

I’m still completely unsure how me and my best friend got into them in Alabama. Maybe MTV? I feel like En-Tact was one of the first CDs I ever owned.

Completely impossible to listen to them now without putting my face in my hands, of course. Matt DC otm about the hippy factor in early 90s charts, although I don’t think there’s such a mystery why it’s not a topic of retrospective discussion. It’s just not cool! We want to talk about cool things!

Buy it is (or should be) fascinating that The Shamen took that brand of 'zippy' cyber hype and psychedelic advocacy so explicitly into the charts. And how silly and funny it was.

I don't know, I'm at the point where I'm too old to care about what is 'cool' or not any more, and I've let go of a lot of embarrassment over music, and just arrived at a point of "this makes me happy" - the hippie utopianism of stuff like The Shamen and Future Sound of London is, at this point, sweetly nostalgic rather than the cringey.

That utopianism may feel silly, but it was born of a kind of optimism? Was it a general political spirit of optimism in the late 80s/early 90s? Or was it just that so many of us on ILX were at the critical music-discovering period of our lives, during that place and time? Nah, I think there genuinely was something around the time that acid house (as defined as "dance music plus hippie utopianism") exploded into popular culture, that felt optimistic enough to allow all that silliness and funnyness to be an OK place to inhabit en masse.

Drugs.

The drug of choice can be a reflection of The Times as much as it can drive the creation of A Time?

(Put an echo on that and play it over a triply best and that could be a Shamen B-Side haha)

Not intended as a diss to say it's silly. Nobody else was quite so on the nose with all that though, certainly not anyone commercially successful. I was more on board before Boss Drum but happy to see them do well.

Utopianism might have been around but for me and my milieu it wasn't by any means simply optimistic, not by that point in the 90s anyway.

The drug of choice can be a reflection of The Times as much as it can drive the creation of A Time?

Yes, but then it's also about availability and ease of supply.

I am OK with silliness. In many ways, I am on the side of silliness.

I just whacked L.S.I on and was amazed/appalled that I knew all of the words to the rap bit despite not having heard it for 27 years.

I don't think I ever listened to the entire Boss Drum album

their website is still online.
was quite possibly the first band website i ever checked in on.
last year i chanced upon the Pro-gen mini-lp on cd for a coin.
14 different versions, followed by a track made of 16 samples and beats so you can make your own.
needless to say, despite that i still love this band a lot more than i should, i have never listened to all of that cd either.

The vinyl version of En-Tact was beautiful, all embossed grays and blacks on the outside then the inner sleeve was all rainbow-colored. It just wasn't good though. The Red Red Groovy album holds up better.

Wait, which version of En-Tact do you mean? The one with the original Pro-Gen was straight fire all the way through IMO.

The Red Red Groovy album holds up better

huh ?

as we have discussed previously, En-tact is all about the original UK cd version.
far far better than the edited US edition.

I mean, the Red Red Groovy album is also good but this iteration of En-Tact is all-time: https://www.discogs.com/The-Shamen-En-Tact/release/72718

i have no idea what the Red Red Groovy album is.

This (from around the same time)?

https://www.discogs.com/Red-Red-Groovy-25/master/24418

ahh - never heard/seen.
seems to be a US only thing.

Hahah OMG the YouTube algorithm just turned up gold?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yHrsPW42-o

^^^it noticed I had listened to a lot of Shamen *and* a lot of Mary Chain recently, and suddenly suggested "do you want to hear some sullen, nasty, viciously funny, Pre-E Colin Angus tearing the Tories a new one?"

Yes, as it turns out, I do.

I vividly remember Jesus Loves Amerika (but i don't love either) from that era because it was on a c-90 tape I taped from the John Paeldo show - as was common practise back then when you couldn't afford music!

Yeah, it was on my Snub-TV 'Save' VHS tape

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsRm_4zTSUg&ab_channel=themosttogain

what is the secret of posting youtubes these days? fuck knows!

it would be easier to tell you what you did wrong if you told us what you did

just c+ped its URL as in formatting instructions

was it a time-continue url?

https://youtu.be/pqrGcz7nM7U

don't think so. I'm not even going to try posting a youtube vid on here again!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsRm_4zTSUg&ab_channel=themosttogain

oh fuck it!

just took the the 's' off http that time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqrGcz7nM7U

👍

btw it appears calz was attempting to post a url with a whole bunch of extra stuff on the end of it

there are plenty of reasons to read yr posts before clicking submit, folks

Calz, it was absolutely fine - you could click through to see the video just perfectly? (I have images switched off anyway, which changes all youtubes to links.)

It's weird how stark the split is between the two eras. Like, post-E Shamen is so much more appealing to my big shiny pop aesthetics - but comparing their 'crystals and UFOs' latter-period lyrics to Jesus Loves Amerika and Shitting On Britain, it is genuinely like it is two different bands. With each passing decade, Jesus Loves Amerika seems to get *more* relevant, politically - but it's bizarre there's only 10 years between "these are the men who put the Right in righteous" of Jesus Loves Amerika and "Mercury UFO, the messenger, from the Lord of Zion / Transcending space to seminate the crystal."

Like, he genuinely seemed like a much happier, calmer, more at peace with himself, less angry and depressed and more well-balanced person after the E, but ... is there something *necessary* about all that anger and rage and pain, to stimulate political awareness and calls to action? (Or was it more, that after a string of successful pop singles, he was a very wealthy man, and didn't *need* to care about politics? That is also a thing that happens.)

((The other funny thing is, 30 years ago, I struggled occasionally with understanding Scottish accents, but now, decades after returning to Britain, I can understand Colin - and even Will - perfectly, but really struggle to understand what on earth the American evangalists are saying in the video? The one at the start, the really fist-pumping bible-banging one, who seems to say 'wibble Tommy!' - what on earth is he *saying*?))

Calz, it was absolutely fine - you could click through to see the video just perfectly? (I have images switched off anyway, which changes all youtubes to links.)

(this was not the case if you have not switched images off btw)

https://media.gettyimages.com/photos/the-shamen-at-tower-records-london-britain-1992-the-shamen-picture-id566776351?s=2048x2048

I remember someone saying the early Shamen were either influenced by, or were 'like' The Jam.

I really can't imagine that being true...

Did the person saying this have any experience of, or understanding of 60s / mod / psych music beyond The Jam, because that is... weird.

Well, I doubted it at the time to the point of not investigating. (Not that I wanted it if it had been true...)

OMG, I have found it... the missing link.

Like, the psychedelic indie of _Drop_ really doesn't make much sense as the starting point for what would become ~The Shamen~ of cheeky rave boshness - but that's because it's not the starting point? THIS is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSsD9qktgIc

The cheese! The europop dance element! The Factory Records funk! The fake New Order synth stabs and sequenced handclaps! But with the occasional big garage-rock guitar riff thrown in. Fa la-la laa la.

Also, the amazing Jesus and Mary Shamen hair. I am in particular awe of Colin's folicular glory here, though Keith makes a faintly hilarious Bobby Gillespie clone:

https://64.media.tumblr.com/e3f66a466acd078605e85c0adfdeac62/efa0211d90d7a2e4-a9/s1280x1920/09907f0e39f1f8c058d3aee1a69d7442eece4560.jpg

colin is back.

https://twitter.com/MoshipMusic

i didn't realise Michael Horowitz was still with us.

this sounds like he might have made it in 1991 and had been sitting on it ever since.

indeed.
not that i have any complaints.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdA94cu0818

"leeeeave your body behind" ah go on then twist my arm