Sleeve by Neville Brody.
After mentioning Clock DVA’s Thirst (1981) a couple of days ago I’ve been playing the album together with Pow-Wow ever since. 4 Hours was Thirst‘s accompanying 7-inch single, a marvellous slice of rumbling post-punk angst. The B-side, Sensorium, includes the words “Uptown apocalypse” among its lyrics, a phrase that’s also the title of the second track on the equally marvellous Music For Stowaways (1981), an instrumental album by the post-Human League, pre-Heaven 17 offshoot British Electric Foundation. This isn’t a coincidence; the latter number was co-written by Clock DVA’s Adi Newton, and features him playing guitar and synth, Newton having been in The Future with BEF’s Marsh & Ware prior to the formation of Clock DVA and The Human League. And to further complicate this tangle of Sheffield connections, 4 Hours was reissued in 1985 in 12-inch format on Cabaret Voltaire’s Doublevision label. I bought almost all the Doublevision releases but this was one I missed. (Was the title of Cabaret Voltaire’s Sensoria derived from Sensorium? Maybe…)
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Pow-Wow by Stephen Mallinder
• Old music and old technology
• Neville Brody and Fetish Records
how about the fact that REM ripped off arguably the main image in the lyrics of “4 Hours” of the piano falling (“The Great Beyond”)? mind you, Adi will have gotten that from somewhere else himself…
I’ve never paid much attention to REM so that’s outside my remit. Falling pianos make me think of Tex Avery cartoons before anything else.