Don't believe what your parents tell you the real Sixties
and Seventies were all about chase scenes involving
Routemaster buses and bowler hated criminal masterminds;
zero-gravity orgies under binary star sunsets, and
futuristic consumables that merely to gaze upon would caress
away the dust from the minds eye, unleashing lysergic
rainbows. At least, that’s how it was if you were a piece of
library music.
If the past few years have seen
compilations such as Barry 7’s Connectors pay tribute to
that optimistic world where there was a synth sound to
describe every facet of modern life, Other Channels imagines
its flipside. Instead of springing from the studio ready to
swing in suburban sitcoms, gad around with adverts or spend
a morning with the testcard girl, this could be the library
music that was left on the shelf, forlornly gathering dust
with only the paranoid mutterings of public information
films for company.
The Ghost Box ethos is one of
hauntology, reanimating the lost promises of new towns,
atomic technology and postwar utopianism as ghosts to join
with an older England of folklore and paganism. But having
previously fished around in the collective nostalgia pool in
his King Of Woolworths guise, here Jon Brooks flees to the
suburban fringes of the label's fictional epicentre,
Belbury, holing himself up in a fortress of analogue synths.
Inside is refuge from the brave new world where the crisply
paternal voices who deliver links between educational
programming and those warning of impending nuclear attack~
"Civil Defence is Common Sense" are chillingly similar.
Mogadon Coffee Morning blinks repeatedly in an attempt to
focus upon snippets of gossip and talk of soft furnishings,
but is lured away by woozy noodling that spirals languidly
like synchronised swimming for the unconscious. You're not
even safe inside your mind, though: Fire, Damp St Air,
suggests a psyche infiltrated by TV films, where bereft yet
sickly strings battle with consoling clarinets for the
emotional high ground.
Pluck up courage to venture outside,
and in the fields behind Belbury, Hocusing For Beginners
recalls the innocent companionship of One Man and His Dog.
In town, the sight of thin blue skies over the concrete
curves of the newly built OUcampus lifts the heart. But the
mock-Tudor shopping precinct is jaunty with mandatory
festivity as syntho-trumpeters quack and fol-de-rol through
Celebrate Michaelmas NOW!. Better to go home, take your
pills, and wait for instructions
