So here we are diving deep into the seasonal holidays with a second “holiday” entry following one posted on Christmas Day. For me this period offers 2-3 weeks where a lot of the usual things I have to do vanish for while and therefore I have a lot of time to do other things]. With that comes this entry — one I’ve pulled out about a somewhat unknown gem by a group that had a brief activity for a couple of years or so in the first half of the 80s and then disbanded — a group like many other underground, homegrown groups who took up synthesizers. The genre known as minimal synth/wave can offer nuggets of memorable and often catchy tracks by artists who were generally only around for a brief fragment of time, often putting out one or two releases before vanishing into thin air (or moving onto do another musical project).
The group here is called Aaah! — a somewhat strange yet playful name but easily direct and memorable at the same time. Offhand it seems like a thoughtless blurt, but then again perhaps the band had some internal sense of humour that prompted the group’s name, or was chosen due to some incident or observation by the band’s members to take up such a name. Maybe it was a practical decision, much like companies in the yellow pages naming themselves something like AAA Plumbing, so their listing sits at the top of the list for those readers looking for services without much time to do so might pick the first company they see when the open the directory. There’s a story there somewhere, no longer how short and mundane it might be.
Based out of St. Austell, Cornwall and having only released two 7″ singles in their initial run for a few years in the first half of the 80s, the A side of their first single — a track entitled “Slip Away” — threaded its way through the underground circuits at the time and established some minor legacy. For all of the almost two decades that I’ve lived in the UK it’s a song that has occasionally come onto my radar, whether by mentions of folks, recommendations, being occasionally inserted into a DJ mix or even covered by other artists I’ve crossed paths with. One musician I’ve had interaction with in years past, and someone who was actually active in the 80s would be John Costello, who covered the song for a 2009 release (see clip below). Also included below is the B Side to this first 7″ which is a track called “Duty Calls”.
With the music blog culture that started to appear online in the late 2000s, some of the band’s material would appear as shareable downloads on notable music blogs that specialised in lifting the carpet on the synth/post-punk underground from this earlier time, such as the American blog Crispy Nuggets.
Like a good number of underground synth tracks from this era, it’s likely composed on whatever analogue synths would cross paths with the musicians at the time and likely pulling influence from the emerging electronic music scene artists would be exposed to. It also has a super upbeat tempo — likely somewhere in the gabber zone of 200 BPM — with an energy pulling from punk but also with a great sense of propulsion. Threaded through the synths is an electric guitar with a clean, likely Fender tone, that meshes well into the electronic instrumentation. There’s probably other artists that have similarities, such as another UK group Das Kabinette and their somewhat self-titled “hit” entitled “The Cabinet” but it’s presumable that both bands were probably not aware of each other’s existence at the time.
What makes this track stand out for myself, as well as likely many others who listen to it, is how the verses transition to the chorus through a series of tension building chord progressions and the vocals build momentum from the spoken word style in the voices to a full powered delivery that soars in the chorus.
With little information about the group, the vocals could be done by synth player Henry Kent or guitarist Kez Stone. Again, just providing information here based on the pieces that I have. Kez Stone would appear to still be active, moving onto a group called Artistic Control after Aaah!, of which I’ve put a clip below of that band’s track “Dance With Me” from a 1985 BBC performance. With Stone on vocals, it’s a track with a darker post-punk tone and tribal embellishments, while still retaining a lot of electronics including a few synths and Simmons toms paired up with an acoustic drum kit.
And with still being active, it would appear Stone was instrumental in a compilation re-release of Aaah!‘s material a couple of years ago on the Dead Wax label. Entitled Works In The Lab, it’s a vinyl LP release that includes the already released tracks from both of the band’s initial 7″ singles released in the 80s as well as extra and unreleased recorded material.
There’s a good number of other UK artists from this same general underground that I’ve come across in my years living here as well, and in some cases striking up a bit of a friendship with them. Alan Rider, a profilic zine writer with origins in the original punk scene in Coventry, is such a person I’ve had interactions with and very friendly to communicate with. Rider had performed and recorded music since the eighties, including synth/post-punk duo Stress and the more band-oriented, magical tribal post-punk of Dance Naked — a band started with Rider’s partner Kleo Fanthorpe that I had the pleasure of working with around ten years ago while I was still living in London, providing some art direction, photography and design work for their 2014 release on aufnahme + wiedergabe entitled Point Of Change.
As I start to close up this entry, writing this reminds me of a conversation I had with someone recently about artists that meant a huge thing to some people but only to a select group of people, mainly as those artists were only around for a brief moment in time. Being actively involved in music for, um, a few decades now and having played and attended many shows as both a performer and a punter, I’ve seen countless bands and artists that have blown me away with an impression that lingered on for ages. These artists might have only be seen by a small and lucky group of people who happened to be in that place/scene at the time and likely had one release — in many cases difficult to find nowadays — before the power of momentum sort of split them apart.
For me, this is the for what were a lot of bands that were contemporary and new in the 1990s going into the 2000s. There’s comments on this littered throughout these pages.
However, these gems always get discovered by someone at some point, and in some cases prove inspiring enough to have someone with faith in the music to re-release it, sharing the magic to new music fans as time rolls on.