CHAPTER 6

 

 

 

 

#95: WORLD OF TWIST

"Sons Of The Stage"

from the seven-inch single "Sons Of The Stage"

Released: March 1991

This record - for it is much more a record than a song - begins like the remnants of a sixties song newly uncovered behind some awkward plasterwork at the Scotch of St James's. Lurking low-pitched Hammond organ and bath salts-calming electric piano materialise over what is thus far the ghost of a pulse. Discrete Moog white noise button sound effects flutter around like bashful Red Admirals. So far this might have come out on Vertigo Records circa March 1970.

 

Then, however, a modestly insistent rhythm and riff make themselves known, and we are gently reminded that we are no longer in the sixties. A voice appears which is far more in keeping with Howard Jones, including the sarcastic one-octave-down spoken response ("Your head is gone and your body's shaking"). They are playing in this club and the line between musicians and audience is not readily definable. The further their audience's minds are blown - and the audience may be responsible for that blowing - the more the musicians are...transfixed or transported?

 

Their conclusion is "There is nothing you can do because there is no solution/You gotta get down to the noise and confusion." The world is a mess, the singer seems to be telling us (as the semi-random Moog flutters reinforce), but all we can hope to do, since it is unchangeable (and therefore, by implication, so are we), is to celebrate the chaos (the singer's midway ecstatic "OW!"), thrive in it and learn from it. Learn what? A different way to live?

 

The song's quiet radicalism is subtly sneaky. As you dance to it - as, in the spring of 1991, you really had to - you realise that it is not quite like anything else that's preceded it, including the fluffy Pollocking of the Manchester School of Practised Derangement. The drums are slippery, rarely On The Beat. The song finally disperses into a wistful, synthesised coda worthy of...Camel, perhaps, or Ashra. It dares to leave response and rationalism in your hands.

The trouble is, nobody really got this song, or the one before it ("The Storm") or World Of Twist per se. They were perhaps too knotty a group to engage any real attraction. They formed in Sheffield in 1985 and several of its original members transferred to the bucolic yob-art of Earl Brutus, including James Fry, the elder brother of Martin. Their singer was their former drummer, one Tony Ogden, and it may be that he didn't quite have the spark that would render unsuspecting lovers intrigued, or that the group's songs did their best to avoid or conceal hooks. There isn't really anything to hold on to in "Sons Of The Stage," which in many ways is the song's main point. Their solitary album Quality Street was misproduced and the singles traduced to their own shadows. Both Ogden and drummer Nick Sanderson died long before they should have done.

In the context of early 1991, however, which emotionally was something of an undecided year for me, London felt newly glamorous and purposeful and I wish I had then been worthier of it. This song, however, was a key element of the times - the group are cited in Saint Etienne's "London Belongs To Me," released later the same year, in a fantasy world where they already had three number ones - and showed me how a satisfactorily-enclosed world could yield unexpected opulence.

(To memories of Hampstead, the Everyman cinema, the long-gone fish restaurant on Heath Street whose name I cannot recall, Italian restaurant lunches on Kensington Church Street, Hyde Park Corner in the deep snow one curious Wednesday afternoon, David Lynch encomia and above all to the best friend I ever had in my professsional career, with whom I have had no communication since 1994 and who will here remain unnamed but who I hope is still with us and happy.)