Wednesday, April 30, 2025

CHAPTER 57

Move Any Mountain - Wikipedia

 Selling Runcorn By The Pound: 15. Telly Savalas Looks at Aberdeen – East of  the M60

#44: THE SHAMEN

"Move Any Mountain"

from the single "Move Any Mountain - Progen 91"

Released: July 1991

 

 

One Monday lunch break towards the ending of March 1990, I bought three newly-released twelve-inch singles. At the time you could still do that from high street record shop chains. The identity of one of them has become lost to history because towards the ending of March 1990 I had no idea that I would be writing a book about that time nearly half a lifetime hence. The second was "Step On" by Happy Mondays and it was a good idea and a better groove in that context. The third was "Pro-gen" by the Shamen which was really nothing more than a groove, albeit a rather hymnal and elegiac one. Its capacity to hypnotise was, I found, sufficient.


Towards the ending of March 1990 music was all about new and brighter things occurring in the immediate future tense, and maybe for most people who weren't me "Pro-gen"'s re-emergence in July 1991 as "Move Any Mountain" was fixedly still the sound of what then was deemed "now." Those nows? There was a palpable song, the main singer monotoning his determination like a newly hungry Midge Ure. There was also a stiffly irritating rapper blethering on like MC Motivator about people's capacity to be what (not who?) they wanted to be - whereas hardly anybody gets that chance, and perhaps that was the kernel of rave's success, the one-night opportunity to flee indwelling mediocrity in the partial knowledge that one never could. Possibly even more irritating is the rap performed by the main Shaman, whose Aberdonian diphthongs regularly irrupt the tinkly cloth of his Boy Scout pep talk.


By the summer of 1991, though, how many recognised that "Move Any Mountain" now effectively served as its own elegy? There had been another Shaman, whose name had been Will Sin(nott) and who drowned while the band was away in the Mediterranean shooting a video for the song (not long after the video had been shot). Hence the sound of now was in fact a memorial for a better future which frankly yet firmly refused to come to pass. Perhaps that's why its innate sadness places it here rather than "Pro-gen" itself, which maybe even the surviving Shamen don't recall - in either sense - any more.





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