Outward Journeys

Today's musical accompaniment is from another Ghost Box album that I've been playing recently, Outward Journeys by The Belbury Circle. The music is all early 80s synths and Tomorrow's World optimism, sequencers and driving rhythms, a homemade version of the future. The Belbury Circle is the paring of two of Ghost Bx's main artists, Jon Brooks of The Advisory Circle and Jim Jupp of Belbury Poly (you can see how they came up with the new name). Two of the songs feature vocals and synth from genuine 80s pioneer John Foxx. Journeys and travel are a recurring theme throughout the nine songs with references to cat's eyes, transport, departures and heading home in the song titles.

Cloudburst Five is a three and a half minute burst of joy, bullet train rhythms and melodic bass runs with synth toplines that sound like they've come straight from the theme tune a semi- forgotten sci fi TV series about a pair of time travelling secret agents who turn up to fight invisible enemies in a quarry in Wales with help from a group of children in parkas and some Roundheads.

Cloudburst Five

Hollow Earth

Long Meg and Her Daughters is a stone circle near Penrith, a megalith constructed somewhere between five and three thousand years ago, pictured here on Sunday afternoon when we visited in the Cumbrian drizzle. Long Meg herself is twelve feet high, lying outside the circle and decorated with some Neolithic carvings. Her daughters number fifty nine stones, some upright and some toppled. Legend has it that if you count the stones twice and get the same number bad luck will befall you. So we didn't count them. 

Ghost Box Records have been releasing albums since 2004, drawing on parts of British culture familiar to people born between the 1950s and 1970s- eerie public information films (where children often died in terrible and unexpected ways such as drowning in slurry pits on farms or playing in fields near pylons), library music, weird synth soundtracks from Open University programmes broadcast in the middle of the night, British sci-fi programmes and strange folk stories. As such some of their output is right up my street. Earlier this year one of Ghost Box's key artists, Pye Corner Audio, released an album called Hollow Earth, an album that forms a soundtrack to a descent into the earth, through caves and chambers. The synths sound like they date from Cold War East Germany (or early 60s Derbyshire). The individual tracks all work well but Hollow Earth is best taken as an album with the record forming a narrative, hints of rave and disco and house evident. It takes you down into the depths and then up again, finally drawing breath. 

Hollow Earth

Mind How You Go Now

Like a lot of other people who grew up in the 1970s one of my recollections is of government public information films where various everyday happenings promised death or at least severe injury- rugs on floors, plugs, roads, water, electricity, the countryside in general. A few years ago I was in a record shop and having been aware of the Ghost Box record label saw an album by The Advisory Circle ( the work of Jon Brooks). The man behind the counter recommended it, saying it was inspired by public information films alongside with musical influences like Broadcast, krautrock and soundtracks. I bought it on the spot. It's undoubtedly retro but there's enough going on for it to be much more than an exercise in nostalgia. The synths are warm and clean, the drums pitter-patter. It's haunting in places, evoking that world of Sunday afternoons, grey skies and damp British weather. This album and the whole series Ghost Box series of albums are beautifully packaged too if you need another incentive.



This clip compiles some of those public information films and in the grimmest of ironies features Jimmy Saville warning people about danger.