Out - Tough Enough

I had planned to offer up the Sunfeast/Craving 12" by Play Dead offshoot M.A.D., but it turned up just last month on the Ad Nauseum blog; if you like Play Dead or the Danse Society then you shouldn't be without M.A.D. I don't know how I missed that blog before, but there is a lot of good music there. So, moving on to my next 12", here is "Tough Enough" by Out (1984). "Tough Enough" is one of the songs from the Illuminated catalog mixed into the Heavy Duty Breaks megamix LP; this 12" has the vocal mix on the A-side (6:36) and a dub version on the B-side (7:06). It's not as good as the only other track I know of by Out ("Business As Usual" on the Breaking the Back of Love comp), but it's a serviceable bit of midtempo 80s UK electrofunk. And for crate diggers there are plenty of useable drum breaks and synth and bass fills. Once again I have no idea who the band members are besides the songwriting credits of A. Sharkey and P. Butcher. My Lethal Poor post was wildly successful in drawing two of the three band members out of the woodwork; can lightning strike again? Please leave any info on this band in the comments. Download the vinyl rip here or here. (Sorry about the high levels and clipping on the A-side, my soundcard can't attenuate the phono preamp input enough on some of these hot 12" mixes. Guess I shouldn't have cheaped out and bought a preamp without an output volume control.)

400 Blows - Pressure, Runaway/Breakdown

A recent visitor left some enthsiastic comments about 400 Blows, who are part of the Illuminated megamix album Heavy Duty Breaks, so I thought I'd offer up some more. 400 Blows may be best known today for "Black and White Mix Up" (a rather ridiculous remix with Mad Professor of "Groove Jumping") on Andrew Weatherall's exquisite Nine O'Clock Drop anthology of eclectic 80s dance music, but they left a pretty decent body of work beyond that. I have always thought of 400 Blows as the poor man's 23 Skidoo, following in their footsteps from dub to electro-soul and being almost but not quite as good. Which is still really good! 400 Blows' first album, If I Kissed Her I'd Have To Kill Her First, is already available on Rho-Xs (with great albums by A Certain Ratio, Rip Rig + Panic, This Heat, and more in the same post!), but I have a couple of 12-inch singles to supplement the album. The first is "Pressure" from 1984 (and the first LP), a mostly-instrumental song with a killer dub bassline presented in three versions plus the found track "Perspective 2". The second is from 1985, the electro-soul double-A-side of "Runaway" (a Rockwell cover, of all things!) with lead vocal by Cheryl Lucas, and the original "Breakdown" sung by Linda Duggan, in two versions each (remixed from the Look LP). That's eight tracks in all, packaged in a single zip file; get it here or here.

Youth & Ben Watkins - The Empty Quarter

As referenced in my previous post, here is the first collaborative album by Martin "Youth" Glover and Ben "Juno Reactor" Watkins, The Empty Quarter. Released in 1983, it is an all-instrumental affair, and a more abstract album than their next one, Delirium, as befits its status as a soundtrack (for the play Street Captives by Jonathan Moore). It does have some of the more "foreground" musical elements that would play a greater part on Delirium, though. "Incompressible Megalasaurians" highlight's Youth's funk bass playing (which was also a staple of Brilliant's sound at the time), and "Repulsion" sounds more than a little like a Goblin soundtrack piece. Playing cello on the album is Adam Peters, who would subsequently team up with Watkins as The Flowerpot Men (later Sunsonic); "Three Go Down To Brighton" sounds like an early draft of the Flowerpots' B-side track "UG". Full performance credits are:

Youth: bass, percussion, keyboard
Ben Watkins: keyboards, drums, guitars
Adam Peters: cello
Kate St. John: oboe
Steve Irwin: percussion

Get it here or here.

VA - Breaking the Back of Love (1985)

The Breaking the Back of Love various-artists compilation was released by Saderal in 1985, featuring the kind of Gothic funk acts that Illuminated was known for. In fact, some of the acts were even on Illuminated, and had been featured on the previous year's Illuminated megamix, Heavy Duty Breaks, an excerpt of which appears here as "Heavy Duty Brakes." Here we also have The Leather Nun's notorious fisting song, "F.F.A.," retitled as "F.F. America." But there are also some little-known gems here: Colour Me Pop's "Beat Me Till I'm Blue" chugs along nicely with some bongos and a lead bass, and Out's "Business As Usual" builds on a catchy synth hook for a song that could have been an alternative club hit if the stars had aligned right. The cover model is Lilly A.K. (I think), who has two songs on here. "Passionate Strangers" is a soaring, fast-tempo number that reminds me of another forgotten classic, "Life's Illusion" by Ice the Falling Rain (coming here soon), and "Take Me Now," with Youth, sounds like Food-era Brilliant (no surprise there). Who was Lilly A.K.? Whatever happened to her? She sings two songs on here, she sang some backing vocals on an Edward Ka-Spel album, and other than that I've turned up nothing. If you have any further information on her, please let me know in the comments. The full track listing is:

A1 400 Blows Pressure
A2 Lilly A.K. and Youth Take Me Now
A3 Portion Control Raise The Pulse
A4 Out Business As Usual
A5 Colour Me Pop Beat Me Till I'm Blue
A6 The Leather Nun F.F. America
B1 Lilly A.K. Passionate Strangers
B2 Sex Gang Children Into The Abyss
B3 Colour Me Pop Go
B4 Heavy Duty Brakes Heavy Duty Brakes
B5 Dormannu Degenerate

I've added two bonus songs, stragglers by bands already on the album : "Tough Enough" by Out (from a 12" single) and "The Girl Who Shares My Shirts" by Colour Me Pop (the A-side whose B-side is "Beat Me Till I'm Blue"). Get it all here or here.

Heavy Duty Breaks (Illuminated megamix, 1984)

Here's an album that Illuminated Records put out in 1984 that is comprised of a 15-minute label roster megamix on each side: the songs segue from one to the next without dropping the beat (with continuity provided by a beatbox). Each clip is a teaser for the full-length version. Illluminated had an impressive lineup of "gothic funk" bands; here are the songs included in the two side-long mixes:

Side 1
400 Blows: Pressure
23 Skidoo: F.U.G.I.
Out: Tough Enough
Dormannu: The Dread
Zazou: M'pasi Ya Pamba
400 Blows: Grove Jumping
23 Skidoo: Coup
400 Blows: Declaration of Intent

Side 2
Executive Slacks: Our Lady
Data: Blow
Portion Control: Raise the pulse
Data: Blow
Portion Control: Go-Talk
Power to Dream: Faith Healer
Tara Butler: Up against the wall
Power to Dream: Faith Healer
Sex Gang: Dieche

Get it here or here.