the shamen: c/d

http://ireallylovemusic.co.uk/music/15%20Sixteen%20Samples%20%26%20Beats.mp3

Thanks mark e! Looking forward to hearing what ilxors do with this.

I have that Eat Static album on tape somewhere. My favourite Planet Dog band was Timeshard iirc. And my favourite of the pile of dubious 90s trance tapes is, or was, "Moment of Truth" by Man With No Name.

I need a Megadog thread on which to mention the house party at my then gaff when we had a couple of dog related DJs in the front room and MMM playing for hours in someone's bedroom turned into a psychedelic womb.

this sounds AMAZING btw

my very first promo groove back in 2004 was a box full of Eat Static cds.
and thanks for the reminder of Man With No Name, 'Earth Moving The Sun', is totally in this ballpark albeit via a chunk of trance.

Just leaving this here: Spongle v Eat Static

https://open.spotify.com/album/1ypZz7SSbmsNrmvZhyhAsg?si=zlG7xzE1QYGMy4kiNq5Mtw

Also Eat Static did this slightly minimalist Autonomic style dnb track as recent as 2017 and it’s great

https://open.spotify.com/track/51VFhURcYmMPa97RsDFmkn?si=CwWBjkSrRFu-XDFr0aKC2w

the best planet dog group was children of the bong

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8CRQvVwAns

lmao

i mean "best"

but yeah this is all time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHhLDx1OmwI

No one wants to be the one to start the ~Hippie Bobbins~ thread, haha, even though we all acknowledge the need for it? I do not feel qualified to start said thread, as I literally only know what Megadog is through adverts - and snarky disses - in Select Magazine, as this is degenerate music for Crusties, while also having very colourful and groovy adverts in the back, that looked like the amazing psychedelic sort of shirts you could buy in Camden Market, but dissolved in unfixed dye soup after one wash? I was of that generation where music was something you read about and saw pictures of, ages before a poorly dubbed cassette would arrive in the post from relatives in England.

My own ~Secret 90s Techno Shame~ was ... (oh god I hate this label so much - it was cringe at the time, and has only got more cringe with the years) ::whispers:: Ethno-Techno, like I would eat up anything that sounded like Transglobal Underground and Natacha Atlas. I see Shpongle has also ended up in the 'Ethno-Techo' section on Wikipedia so...

My thread, is your thread, amiga omegas:

Safe Space for Crusty UK Hippie-Bobbins a la Shpongle, Megadog, Planet Dog, and all the other dodgy stuff excavated on the Shamen thread

Such a nice, Scottish boy, so good to his Mum:

https://media.gettyimages.com/photos/colin-angus-of-the-shamen-pictured-with-his-parents-aberdeen-scotland-picture-id537483357

Why am I *like* this, why can't my brane just be normal ;_;

Oh, phew, found it! Matt DC's memory is not flawed, just displaced. There totally was a (not Glasto but MTV) video for Phorever People, featuring Alice in Wonderland imagery and the singer(s) floating about in a swing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAq3iyDnCQI

I've fallen so deep down the rabbit hole I've been watching interviews and I'm just so smitten. I'm struck by just how Jesus Jones-y their pre-Phoward material was. They very easily could have been EMF. They compare themselves to Renegade Soundwave in the interview (plus a clip) but at moments their Jesus Loves America stuff sounds like Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste-era Ministry? Was not expecting that!

The other thing that struck me was how high, and soft, and girly Colin's speaking voice is. I genuinely thought he was a girl the first few times he spoke. (Excuse me, but I find that very phwoar!) But it also highlights something about his *singing* voice that I find so interesting and compelling. Unless he's deliberately trying to do ~rawk voice~ he has a very high, flutey, choirboy voice with a tonal range that I really love (I particularly like male vocalists who sing high).

It was really striking on live Glasto version of Phorever People, that the singer (is that Jhelisa Anderson? It's starting to really bother me, how often in dance music, it's always really easy to find out the name of the male producers, and even the male rappers, but it's often quite hard to find out the name of the (usually Black) female singer who does the hook which makes the song worthwhile?) was singing quite far down in her low range, for a powerful, gospel-bluesy tone, while Colin Angus was actually singing a higher harmony above her, but weaving in and out of her voice. One of the things that really scratches my sweet spot about the Shamen, is those really close, weaving-in-an-out harmony vocals ("I can move, move, move any mountain") - but with Anderson taking the low part and Angus taking the high part, together they create this really super-genderless, fluid, male-female-androgynous tone which really excites me.

Really enjoyed You And Me & Everything when it popped up in that MTV clip. Industrial beats plus 'eastern' melodies is very often a winning combination. Sicker acid sounds than their later stuff tbh. Also it reminds me a lot of Escape From New York's Fire In My Heart.

https://youtu.be/t1hxR1ijoN4

That video might be very slightly NSFW.

That's Jhelisa yeah. Her own solo career was a kind of late 90s electronic neo-soul thing - the various remixes of Friendly Pressure in particular mean you're much more likely to hear her in a credible DJ mix than you are to hear The Shamen. Beautiful Swimmers and Monki have both dropped her stuff in the recent past.

The Sunship remix in particular is an established UK garage banger and DJ Boring released a remix just a couple of years ago.

I will look for more of her stuff, she sounds interesting.

Reading through the band's history, and how many different singers they worked with, and watching the early videos vs the later ones, I was suddenly struck - like, Colin Angus is an accidental frontman who never wanted to be a frontman. He comes across as this gentle, kinda nerdy guy who happens to be very good at writing great pop songs - but there was this continual attempt to find someone else to be the *face* of the band, or front the band. (But again, very Hütteresque, he is really the only constant through their varied history.)

Like, even in the Will Sin years, it's quite obvious that he was doing 'bass player as frontman' - he was quite extraordinarily good-looking, more like 'should be playing the romantic lead in a Merchant-Ivory production' levels of good-looking, than the 'bass player in a Scottish indie band' levels of good-looking - and had the Rock Star Haircut and stage presence.

Speaking of haircuts, I looked up what the word was for that 'not entirely rock / not entirely dance / lots of samples' genre that was so prevalent around 89-91 and the interwebs has supplied me with GREBO - PWEI, EMF, Jesus Jones all being given as examples of popular GREBO groups. Will Sin *totally* had the Grebo Haircut (mostly long, shaved at the sides, dreadlocks right at the back) and so I'm thinking it very very likely there was a Grebo element to their music... hee hee hee...

Oh good lord, yes, are there any more joyful words in this universe, than "sunship remix" - I have totally heard this song around...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46IM2--jn8Y

I think that's not quite right, Grebo was the pre-grunge grungey rock sound of early PWEI and Gaye Bikers on Acid and etc, I think

Can't remember if there was a genre tag for the samply PWEI/EMF/Jesus Jones sound

Grebo being a variant/corrupting of "greaser" I think

Wikipedia put Jesus Jones firmly in Grebo!

And my memory was, it was a contraction of 'greasy bastard' - maybe the Shamen were too clean.

I guess wiki says more PWEI, Neds Atomic Dustbin, Carter USM, rather than Jesus Jones/EMF/early Shamen

But this is totally a grebo haircut, this is the platonic ideal, of a grebo haircut:

https://kaisermaschine.files.wordpress.com/2019/07/gettyimages-537483165-2048x2048.jpg?w=458&h=672

I don't think there was another genre descriptor anyway so they might as well go under that one, tho that wiki article seems to list ever 1990 indie band in the UK more or less

These guys totally LOOK like grebos, TBH

https://resources.tidal.com/images/a21060bf/7b47/4cb8/a8c1/1de6a11a131c/750x750.jpg

Yeah I must admit I don't remember JJ looking that way at all

i'm fairly sure will sinnott would have given you a good old glasgow kiss if he'd heard he was being called a grebo.

i heard JJ soundcheck one time. they were just playing the sampler parts and it sounded incredible. then they all joined in and it was just awful. they should have sacked the band and just toured the akai s1000.

Well, he shouldn't have had a grebo haircut if he didn't want to be called a grebo!

I'm trying to explain this videos, and like, there are megaliths, and flowers, and everyone's wearing robes - except for when they're inexplicably dressed like they're about to graduate from Starfleet Academy, and then Jheslisa captures Mr C and the Cute Scottish Blokey and... traps them in a wicker cage on the banks of a Scottish lake and does Bill Drummond / the Lord of the Isles turn up to set them on fire? No! She rips off The Green Man's leafy cloak so that he is revealed as a space alien and...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DzGgIURySI

help me.

I found a copy of the 'Phorward' 10" in an actual record shop yesterday and was enjoying it this morning - can definitely hear that at that point they could still have gone off in a more industrial direction rather than the one they did take.

Was also tickled that it was produced by an ex-member of Fiction Factory.

funnily, at that time i don't think anyone would have mistaken it as a grebo cut. i had a slightly similar thing going on with my hair around then and was deffo anti-grebo af.

this thread inspired me to listen to a few shamen songs i hadn't heard in 25 years. former favourites, 'you, me & everything', 'transcedental'and 'hyperreal' sounded really dated and clunky to my ears though the first two still had some sort of naive charm while some others such as 'omega amigo' and 'possible worlds' really surprised me by how fresh they still sounded.

OK, so what does “grebo” mean to you, because it sounds very different from what is described in that wiki / stuff I read years ago in the music press?

(What’s wild is I just went and watched the video You Me & Everything - total recognition, I knew this song from college radio and dancing at the local punk club, but I had NO IDEA it was The Shamen?)

To me grebo was associated with the Wonder Stuff and Neds Atomic Dustbin. It was the opposite of sexy

Those bands didn't look too similar to grebos but I feel to be true grebo music it has to have some electronic 'dance' or hip hop element which they mostly didn't AFAIK.

Also I think at the time I was perfectly capable of finding girls with dreadlocks wearing Doc Martens with thick stripey leggins attractive so...

So we’re saying because Oor Willie had cheekbones like geometry and eyes like Sin, he was too attractive to be a grebo?

I did GIS ‘grebo haircut’ and it kept showing me photos of Jesus Jones, and, erm, Skrillex? So I am no closer to enlightenment ha ha ha!

I cannot believe, in a music journalism climate that was obsessed with genreficaion that there could be *such* a distinct - and successful - sound that had no name?

NV OTM, grebo was Gaye Bykers On Acid and the pre-drum-machine version of PWEI

i heard JJ soundcheck one time. they were just playing the sampler parts and it sounded incredible. then they all joined in and it was just awful. they should have sacked the band and just toured the akai s1000.

anecdote of the day

OK, so what does “grebo” mean to you, because it sounds very different from what is described in that wiki / stuff I read years ago in the music press?

It is quite ludicrous that I could care less about this after so long, so can only apologise for being such a pedant about something so trivial. I will blame it on a love of historical accuracy (and extreme pedantry).

I concede that in a 'spot the Grebo' ID parade Will Sin might well have been frequently fingered as a Grebo, but there were very slight semantic differences such as the fact that WS would almost certainly never have been seen dead in the kind of shorts a Grebo might have worn. On a much deeper level it would have been a philosophical difference. Will was enlightened. He was a prophet of the E-culture, a new Utopian and hence several rungs up the "evolutionary" ladder from the Grebos.

Of course, many Grebos went on to embrace the E-culture, either genuinely or cynically, but to have still chosen to be a Grebo in say 1991 seems like a very Luddite like choice. Why on earth would anyone want to go to that party when THIS party was possible?

But in all honesty, I can totally see why you might think he was.

He was a lovely man. The weekend he died there was a wake for him in Glasgow's School of Art. Several hundred people turned out for it and the amount of love in that hall was almost overwhelming.

I watched THX-1138 recently without knowing that’s where the “my time is yours” sample from Omega Amigo came from, and fell down a bit off a Shamen rabbit hole afterwards. Agree that ‘Omega’ really holds up. And yeah, no way would Will wear those fucking awful grebo shorts! An important distinction.

I'm sorry, Stirmonster - like, this is difficult, that I'm just talking about records and videos and genres, while you're talking about friends and people you loved. I meant no insult to your friend at all. They seem like they were geuinely *lovely* people (which is a big part of my re-attraction to this music, right now.)

I thought there had to be a lot more to the word, where I would say "oh, it seems like it's this genre" and someone's response could be "he would violently assault you for assigning him to that genre!" - like, I'm trying to say something like "song X has a bit of a Baggy beat" and someone reacts as if I'd said "musician X was a right Chav!"

And your responses are showing me a bit that a Grebo was a type of person, rather than a genre of music, that Grebo music only became so because 'Grebos' listened to it? Rather than 'Grebo' Music having any genre-hallmarks, like 'combination of hard rock riffs, samples and dance beats'. I'm still no clearer as to what Grebos were, other than: unenlightened/uneducated, wore bad shorts, erm... the opposite of art students?

I guess there is no term for the type of music I'm thinking about, even though it *sounds* quite similar and shares sonic hallmarks - because it wasn't a 'scene' as such, it was 3+ unconnected bands sharing certain stylistic hallmarks, who all happened to have *massive* hits in the States at around the same time.

I mean, I'm both taking the piss out of, but at the same time *marvelling* at the 'it is so much what it is' performance of the videos?

But the idea of a young man, standing on top of a mountain, reaching out his hand and unironically proclaiming "I need your love, sex, intelligence" - there is something incredibly charming and appealing about the total lack of irony in this declaration of 'I love you for your mind'.

(And even moreso, when countered with the performance of Mr C, who basically *is* a living insinuation, a human wink-wink-nudge-nudge, and every word that seems to come out of his mouth is cockney double-speak - but the contrast between Mr C's quicksilver clever-clever-ness, and Colin's complete unironic sincerity makes the latter seem more believable?)

I need to stop thinking about this so much.

Please don’t, this thread is one of the more interesting ones on ILM

^

Are you sure? Coz I totally feel like I'm just monologuing here about my latest ~musical crush~.

The genre thing is so perplexing to me (I fully admit, I just don't *think* in genre, it's not an instinctive way of conceiving music, for me. I am forever hearing/seeing things in things that seem to me like they should go together, but it turns out they don't.)

Another cute interview with Will / Colin, where they're talking about what *they* are into at the time, and they're namedropping Meat Beat Manifesto, as something they love. At the time, in like 1991/92, I never would have associated The Shamen with MBM, because MBM were, to me, - along with Renegade Soundwave - music that I encountered being played at a Goth / Industrial / EBM nightclub. They were ~on the cusp of Industrial~ in the same way that music like Front 242 and Nitzer Ebb were, but in a more kind of acid house-y, kind of dubby way?

But now, with the ears of 2020, I go back and listen to MBM's Satyricon, and I feel like "holy hell, this isn't industrial at all - this is kinda techno, kinda dub, with weird zombie samples over the top that made them superficially fit in with Skinny Puppy and Ministry - but listening to it now, I can hear, YES, this is what The Shamen were clearly attempting to do, in the period that I (rather dismissingly) refer to as sounding kind Jesus Jones-y. While JJ were very much trying to do a "kind of MBM ~throw everything in a blender~ sampledelica, but with a standard Rawk Band a la The Wonder Stuff or Ned's Atomic Dustbin playing on top". The Grebo label for JJ comes from the Rawk Band element, but the element I'm interested in, is the Meat Beat Manifesto Sampledelica which shows up in The Shamen around the Gorbachev era onwards.

It's so strange, how one's pre-conceptions about 'what genre this belongs to' can influence *what one hears*.

(Also, I'm going to listen to a lot more Meat Beat Manifesto, because they are scratching that itch.)

(Also, I'm going to listen to a lot more Meat Beat Manifesto, because they are scratching that itch.)

RESULT

part of the "JJ = Grebo" thing could be cos they were on Food alongside Crazyhead, who were definitely part of the Grebo scene, and so the 2 bands would have probably played a few gigs together.

No need to apologise!

Meat Beat Manifesto massively crossed over into the rave scene with "Radio Babylon" and a host of follow up 12" singles. RSW likewise with "The Phantom" and "Ozone Breakdown" and then a host of relases after that.

Here is a 1991 TV advert that was broadcast across the STV region in a late night slot for a 2 date Shamen Synergy show at Livingston Forum. Note MBM supported both nights.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmUiuy6se5A

Progeny, not Synergy. I guess Progeny was Synergy V2.0

OK also, I think I'm getting to the bottom of the oiled-up Jason Statham thing, too? Bear with me, this is kinda involved.

I started trying to listen to their very first album, Drop, and it's hilarious, it's all tremolo guitars and 12-strings and droney psych bits, it honestly sounds like The Telescopes and the videos look like the stuff they'd project on the walls at Sonic Cathedral? And there's Colin in his black turtleneck and his VU leather jacket and his John Lennon specs and beatnik love beads, and let's not kid about - you, sir, YOU were a Dirty Dronerock Boy!

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/bDRc5tPdHLE/hqdefault.jpg

Fie! I have been FULED into thinking you are a shamanic psychonaut raver; you own diodes, admit it.

Anyway, so one of the singles from their dirty dronerock sonic cathedrals psych era:

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

Knature of a Girl - like 87/88 was the height of the Feminist Sex Wars. And their explanation was: The subject of the song concerns how female sexuality can be distorted and abused in the name of the feminine ideal. But their onstage projections during the song contained images of strippers (you can see a little tiny clip in the video, girls in bustiers walking about with whips - very ~of its time~).

They faced the same criticism that Jane's Addiction faced, as we discussed on the other thread - we know you are *trying* to depict this free, groovy, psychedelic sexuality for all, but, since you are cis *men*, you cannot use these images of ~exploitation of women~, even to make a point about it, without falling into the trap of ~participating in that exploitation~? They switched the videos of actual ~sexy ladies with whips~ with far more explicit *drawings* of dominatrixes with whips, and they were confused as to why that was seen as artistic, and clearly fine, while videos of the live women, had not? Poor Colin.

In the end, we threw all that lot out because basically British audiences were too thick to understand what we were trying to do.

Colin, Colin, Colin. Sigh. It's about positioning. It's not that the British audiences were too thick, it's more that you were too ignorant to understand how power dynamics work. I *know* you were trying to make a groovy point about ~Male Supremacy~ warping female sexuality, but if you are coming from the 'up' side of a power dynamic, there is no 'outside' to power. You are still participating in the system, and by using ~pictures of naked chicks~ you are still reaping the benefits of the system you are trying to criticise.

But I am *QUITE* sure that someone in their party must have made the exact same point that was made on the Jane's Addiction thread - why does it always have to be naked girls? Why can't you show your groovy, free sexual expression by using naked boys as go-go dancers and not just girls?

BANG! VIDEO FOR THE NEXT ALBUM HAS AN OILED-UP, NAKED JASON STATHAM AS A GO-GO DANCER.

(And lots of the videos and live appearances for Ebeneezer Goode had girls in latex catsuits, and boys in latex catsuits, and Mr C in a Codpiece. Like, OK, sure, yes, we are making a point about our groovy, free sexuality by including the boys in it too. I will allow it.)

wow, those Progeny / Synergy V2.0 shows look absolutely mindblowing.

Why was I stuck on a farm in Upstate NY. Why.

Right, Meat Beat Manifesto have an album on Spotify called In Dub... and if that's an acid house sampledelic take on Tappa Zukie then I'm gonna die of happiness.