An ode to The Shamen, dance rock pioneers who never got their due
An ode to The Shamen, dance rock pioneers who never got their due
Plus Seven Davis Jr., Jeremy Barnes and Julia Holter
I just wanted to write a short intro to this article to say, yes, it is totally indulgent but please do bear with me and give it a read. If you’re British, you may know of The Shamen through Ebeneezer Goode and all that surrounded it. If you’re not British, you may not have even heard their name. But they are a very important, underrated group and I wanted to explain why, below. So please give it five minutes of your time. And thanks for reading.
An ode to The Shamen, dance rock pioneers who never got their due
For underground musicians, chart success can be a double-edged sword, which brings in money and fame as it destroys your experimental credentials. Few bands know this as much as The Shamen, the Scottish psychedelic indie band turned rave pop stars, who are best known these days as the jokers who smuggled a pro-ecstasy song to the top of the UK charts via the leaden punning of Ebeneezer Goode.
There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. There was undoubtedly something subversive in what The Shamen achieved with Ebeneezer Goode and when people think of the band it is generally with a wry smile and a warm heart.
But this rampant chart success - and The Shamen were genuinely massive in the 90s - means that the group’s background as psychedelic warriors and dace rock crossover pioneers gets lost under a litany of naughty-naughty camera winks and nostalgic delights. Because way back before the Happy Mondays dropped the W.F.L. dance-floor mixes and The Stone Roses released Fools Gold, The Shamen were mixing up electronic sounds with guitars, rock vocals and political intent, making them a genuinely revolutionary band. As their pivotal album, In Gorbachev We Trust, turns 35, what better time to celebrate them?
“The Shamen started out as a guitar band, gorging on fungal fruits and tuning into psychedelia,” the band’s guitarist, vocalist and leader Colin Angus told The Guardian in 2012. You can hear this on their 1987 debut album, Drop, a work of elegant psychedelic rock, which suggests 60s acid trips, more than 90s acid house. “As the personnel changed,” Angus continued, “we played around Scotland and picked up a few tricks with sequencers, samplers and drum machines.”
The first fruits of this came in 1987 with the single Christopher Mayhew Says - the name a reference to a British MP who was filmed taking mescaline in 1955 - which uses drum machines and samples in a kind of pop-industrial mash up. But the real revelation came a year later, when Britain was in thrall to the first wave of acid house.
According to Mr. C, the DJ and MC who would later join The Shamen, the band’s manager, Charles Cosh, stumbled across one of the legendary acid house parties in Clink Street in 1988, after he had moved to London to try to get The Shamen a deal.
“He came every week,” Mr. C told Skiddle. “He got onto the boys in Scotland and said, ‘Look, you guys are a psychedelic band, there's this new thing going on in London called acid house, it's not like anything you've heard before, it's the future, you need to come and check it out.’”
And check it out they did. By the spring of 1988, The Shamen were installed in north London squats, attending acid house clubs like Spectrum, the Trip and Base, as well as outdoor events like Sunrise. “This was the heyday of so-called acid house...We'd started using synthesisers and computerised rhythms, and felt we had a synergy of rock, rap and dance,” Angus told The Guardian.
This sound formed the base of much of The Shamen’s January 1989 album In Gorbachev We Trust, a record in which The Shamen sound stuck between two (or perhaps more) camps. Songs like Jesus Loves Amerika or Monkees cover Sweet Young Thing follow the Christopher Mayhew Says formula of drum machines and samples used for texture, closer to hip hop in sound than acid house. In other places - notably album opener Synergy (with its not exactly subtle chorus of “MDMAzing”), Raptyouare and Transcendental - The Shamen appeared to have thrown their lot in entirely with acid house.
What is incredible about these songs is that they sound exactly like what they are: a rather earnest Aberdeen indie band discovering the flash of acid house. Imagine an indie singer laying his vocals (and occasional guitar) over an early acid house song, with its simplistic drum machines and burbling 303s, and you will arrive at precisely what The Shamen were doing on the acid-y half of In Gorbachev We Trust.
It is such a brilliantly audacious, utterly unselfconscious, move that you can only take your hat off to The Shamen for doing so, particularly as half the band left in protest at their new direction, leaving Colin Angus alongside newcomer Will Sinnott to plough this new furrow.
These songs might sound ridiculous if it wasn’t clear that The Shamen were putting their all into this new acid house directions. On these songs, there is no half way house, no 303 burbling away in the background for texture, to see how it would get along. The acid house influence is right there, foregrounded in neon dayglo, for all to see like a raver in eye-burn tie-dye. LCD Soundsystem, to take one modern band feted for crossing the line between indie rock and dance, have never made a song as dance-y as The Shamen’s Raptyouare. And perhaps they never will.
The mini album Phorward, released in May 1989, would see The Shamen leave behind their psychedelic rock and industrial influences to throw their lot in entirely with acid house. The six songs on the 10-inch vinyl release essentially reprise the acid house indie style of Gorbachev’s Raptyouare and Transcendental - quite literally in the case of Phorward’s Reraptyouare, an updated version of the Gorbachev tune.
And, if the album’s title wasn’t enough of a clue that the band were intent on shifting up their sound, the record also features a locked groove, while the CD version of the album includes remixes of four Phorward tracks by renowned British acid house DJ Eddie Richards, with his takes on Reraptyouare, Phorward and Splash 2 worked into an audacious “Acid Megamix” of the kind you wouldn’t find on many House Of Love records.
In just two years The Shamen had made the leap from rather sweet psychedelic rock act to full-on rave lords and they would consummate their acid nuptials with the Synergy tour, which stretched from 1989 to 1990, in which they were joined by DJs including Eddie Richards, Mr. C, Paul Oakenfold and Mixmaster Morris, as well as live electronic acts such as Orbital.
The idea of Synergy was to introduce ravers to live acts and live music fans to DJs, although the experience ended up far closer to that a rave than the bog standard indie gig of the time. The stage was now very much set for En:Tact, The Shamen’s 1990 album.
En:Tact was the record that saw The Shamen become pop stars in the UK, spawning one vast hit in Move Any Mountain and a more modest chart hit with Hyperreal. And it is a brilliant piece of work, an album where the dance and rock sides of The Shamen coin were perfectly aligned, before they tipped over into headlong dance absurdism on 1992’s Boss Drum and its accompanying single Ebeneezer Goode.
The instrumentation on En:Tact is largely electronic, bar the odd burst of guitar on songs like Possible Worlds and Make It Mine. But you can still imagine Colin Angus composing a song like Move Any Mountain or Omega Amigo on his trusty acoustic guitar before whipping them away to the studio, and the album’s songs still largely adhere to the verse-chorus-verse structure of rock.
The album’s psychedelic sound and lyrical conceits are a charming callback to the psych rock band that The Shamen were, just five years previously, with a song like Evil Is Even a link between the psychedelic rock era of the 1960s and the dance-based psychedelia of acid house. Evil Is Even reminds me, for some elusive reason, of the psychedelic showmanship of Arthur Brown, whose 1960s hit Fire would later be sampled to great effect by The Prodigy.
At the same time, there is something very un rock in the way that both the songs on En:Tact and En:Tact as a whole seem to float around in an amorphous tangle, with no actual, definitive shape. Take Move Any Mountain: look up En:Tact on Spotify and you will find this song as side one, track one, the kind of logical position you would expect for the album’s greatest hit.
But Move Any Mountain wasn’t even Move Any Mountain, at first: it was a song called Pro>gen, which was first released in 1990, remixed by Paul Oakenfold. It was then re-released in summer 1991, as Move Any Mountain (Progen 91), led by a remix from the Beatmasters, with a bewildering variety of mixes of the song, spread over the various single formats.
Notable by its absence from both releases - as well as from En:Tact - is an un-remixed version of the song. There is, in fact, no “original” version of Pro>gen from which all of this stems (or if there is, it’s not available to the listener), a state of affairs that speaks to the fluidity of the song in dance music, the power of the remixer and also, perhaps, to the flexibility of thinking in the psychedelic Shamen camp.
The same applies to En-Tact, which came with slightly different track listings on CD / cassette and vinyl editions on its original 1990 release, and with another new track listing in the US. (This is the version that now appears on streaming platforms.) What’s more, several of the songs on En:Tact pulled off the same trick as Pro>gen, appearing in remixed form (by 808 State’s Gaham Massey, Eddie Richards and more) with little to no trace of an “original” to cling to.
Messing with a song is one thing; but messing around with the track listing of your album is entirely another, the kind of provisional, ever-shifting move that simply wasn’t done among rock acts in the summer of 1990. I can’t have been the only person who bought En:Tact in the early 90s to be disappointed that it didn’t quite contain the songs that I was looking for. But such was the way of The Shamen, a band who seemed to live at the edges of genres and logic itself.
If I ultimately forgave En:Tact, it was because of the incredible strength of the songs, which fuse the mysterious, winding edges of the band’s early guitar work with the vast choruses they would wheel out on Boss Drum.
En:Tact hit hard: has there ever been a song that better channels the I-can-do-anything! lightning strike of dance-floor revelation than Move Any Mountain? Has there ever been a more irresistible push to keep moving than Hyperreal? A better ode to living together in spiritual harmony than Possible Worlds? (Well, yes: Joe Smooth’s Promised Land. But Possible Worlds is still a great track.)
It is an album that perfectly captures the raw feeling of an acid house world. There’s the psychedelia, the shining optimism, the slightly messianic air (Hear Me), the indelible belief in futurism, the teeth-grinding momentum and the slightly unsettling moments of unease, all wrapped up in a production that has a steely, ever so slightly cheesy, whiff of funk to it.
Then - and sensitive readers are advised to look away now - there’s Mr. C’s rap on Move Any Mountain, which perfectly captures the slightly naive, open-eyed and sincere charm of the rave MCs.
Mr. C, a London DJ and MC who performed with The Shamen in the late 1980s before joining the band permanently in 1990, is a controversial figure in dance music, his cartoonish performances with The Shamen on Boss Drum coinciding with both the band’s commercial peak and critical low.
But, while he’s certainly not a skilled MC in the hip hop mode, his rap on Move Any Mountain captures the optimistic spirit of the age quite brilliantly. It comes in the grand tradition of the rave MC, a figure whose role is to hype the crowd by reflecting their feelings back onto themselves. En:Tact may have come out just after peak rave but this former indie band from Aberdeen captured the ever-so-slightly ridiculous spirit of the rave era to a tee.
Tragically, The Shamen’s Will Sinnott drowned in May 1991 when the band were in Tenerife filming a video for Move Any Mountain, while singer Plavka Lonich left the Shamen a few months later, leaving the band’s equilibrium terminally unsettled.
Colin Angus decided to continue, with Mr. C coming to the fore and the result was Ebeneezer Goode and then Boss Drum, a platinum album in the UK with a slight whiff of novelty. By that point, though, the idea that The Shamen had come from the world of credible indie pop was forgotten. And so The Shamen never really got their due, as another Scottish band, Primal Scream, rose to take the indie dance crown.
Some listening
Seven Davis Jr. - Don’t Take It Personal
On the press release for his fifth (ish) album, the ever reliable Seven Davis Jr. says he has been told he is “too R&B for Hip Hop, too Hip Hop for R&B, too R&B Hip Hop for House and too House Music for Techno”, which, while probably frustrating for him, is absolutely perfect for those days of rootless, dilettantish listening we all have from time to time. Don’t Take It Personal, co-credited to John Cale for (I imagine) a brief sample of the Welsh musician that opens the song, is what happens when a slinky house beat meets old-school synth clank and brilliant interlocking vocal lines.
Jeremy Barnes - The Funeral Table
In a review of Peter Strickland’s black comedy Flux Gourmet, Peter Debruge of Variety said that the film comes “about as close to triggering the gag reflex as a film can without actually jamming a finger down your throat”. Which, admit it, definitely makes you want to see the film. I haven’t don that. But I have heard the soundtrack, which features Roj! From Broadcast! Cavern of Anti-Matter, Nurse With Wound, Heather Trost and more. It is part disturbing drones, part ice-y indie filmic elegance, part sonic experiment and part orchestral chime, with the latter best represented by this emotive and rather epic string-led number by Jeremy Barnes, which feels like Sabres of Paradise’s classic Smokebelch after a few rough years. The Funeral Table is best heard at the end of the soundtrack, where it brings relief from the terror of drones. (Or, perhaps, in the film: who knows?) But on its own it will give you three minutes of quiet snuffles.
Julia Holter’s new single sounds like Kate Bush in jazz fusion mode goblin-ing out to the mechanical rhythm of a stuck printing press, while a fretless bass takes an elaborate stroll nearby. For Holter, this probably counts as pop - and all the near power to her for it.
Well this is typical: the moment I make a new playlist, on the grounds that the old one is far too long and unwieldily for practical human consumption, lots of people decide to follow the old one. So, for the moment, I am keeping up with both. The original newest and the bestest has 1,674 songs from the last three years; the newest and the bestest 2024 has a very manageable seven songs from this year. Pick your weapon. (Or go for both.)
Twitching around
Yes, we’re back on the Radio Primavera Sound Twitch: every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday from 11am to 1pm CET. Today we had interviews with Cariño and Tiemei, plus we talked film. You can check it out here. Or why not tune in live? It’s in Spanish. Which makes it all the better.
Superb piece Ben, thank you.
- For me, there's a Before Move Any Mountain, where I'm full snob indie kid, ostentatiously hating dance music; and After Move Any Mountain, where I'm hit with the force of revelation: this is the ONLY music I want to listen to (ah, but where to go next in 1991? Our Price forced my hand - The Grid and System 7 came next...)
- Slightly concerned I left some of my brain down the front at Glastonbury when they played that Terrence McKenna jam.
- Oh, and Omega Amigo is the ONE.
Great piece, Ben. I was unfamiliar with the pre-Mr C era of this band, and thought Ebenezer Goode was a bit of a novelty record so it’s good to get the backstory. Also, I think you nailed the role of the Rave MC - reflecting the crowd back to itself. It may not be stunning lyrically but it’s simple & effective for the time & place.