There Goes The Cure - Another view on the One Dove myth

Plus Alex Kassian, Pavement, Modern Nature and more

La forêt noire, Anna Jane McIntyre, Photo by Jinyoung Kim

Few things in music are as mystical as failure. Why on earth did so few people appreciate the divine quality of Nick Drake’s records when he was alive? Why did the Velvet Underground only shift a few thousand albums during their life time? We love these kind of questions, which suggest baffling mystery and frustrated ambition, and there is perhaps nothing more satisfying than a lost classic, re-discovered.

In electronic music, Glasgow’s One Dove occupy this kind of position. The group’s one album, Morning Dove White, is largely seen as a work of Balearic genius that slipped through the cracks of musical history. A recent (excellent) Pitchfork Sunday Review of the record, for example, pondered why the record disappeared from public view for so long.

It almost pains me to be able to answer this question with some degree of certainty. I say “almost”: I actually quite like a musical mystery answered, even if it may scrape back some of the magic. In this case, my only real insight into the matter is being alive and of record buying age in 1993 when Morning Dove White was released.

One Dove were a three-piece band from Glasgow who made their debut (as Dove) in 1991 with Fallen (Darkest Hour) a kind of progressive house / chill out tune on the city’s esteemed Soma Records, later home to Daft Punk. The band consisted of Dot Allison on vocals, keyboards and programming; Ian Carmichael on keyboards and programming; and former Altered Images member Jim McKinven on keyboards, programming, bass and guitar.

The band signed to Boy's Own Recordings, which re-released Fallen in 1992 including the epic “Nancy and Lee” remix by Andrew Weatherall. They followed this with Transient Truth, which again featured production by Weatherall, as well as separate Sabres of Paradise remixes; then White Love in July 1993 and in September 1993 arrived Morning Dove White.

One Dove’s main audience, in the UK at least, were frazzled ravers, looking for music to take the edge off things a little after a long night out. And if you were among that raved-out group in 1993, then I imagine you look back on Morning Dove White as a classic of youth. I was too young to be a raver in 1993, although I had an interest in dance music. I was also a record buyer with limited budget and an eye for a bargain. And this is how I came across One Dove.

One Dove may have originally released music on Soma. But Boy's Own Recordings, to whom they subsequently signed, had a deal with London / FFRR, making One Dove into a major label act. And FFRR were pretty keen on pushing One Dove into the mainstream.

And this, essentially, was where the problems started. FFRR wanted One Dove to reach way beyond their frazzled core base, leaning heavily on the band’s connection with Weatherall. But One Dove weren’t made for mainstream appeal. The result is an album that never really felt confident in the way it wanted to go.

Weatherall and the group themselves produced Morning Dove White and a lot of the songs bear Weatherall’s unmistakeable touch. The version of Fallen that opens the album, for example, is the Weatherall remix (although it isn’t credited as such) and this is followed by the very Weatherall-esque Guitar Paradise Mix of White Love and the Cellophane Boat mix of Breakdown, both strung out, dubbed up and adventurous. This is Morning Dove White at its best.

But FFRR was a major label. And at some point major labels are going to want to tidy things up. And so they brought in US record producer Stephen Hague to create the pristine radio mixes of Breakdown and White Love that end the album.

One Dove resented this, with the release of Morning Dove White delayed for a year as band and label fought over Hague’s work. The impasse was apparently broken when One Dove agreeing that Hague could only remix their singles if they were in the studio with him at the time. (The radio mixes, incidentally, are fine, nothing to write home about, the band stripped down to their pop house essentials, like Saint Etienne or even Dubstar, a few years later.)

These disagreements are typical of the perilous journey to Morning Dove White. Matthew Schnipper's review of the album for Pitchfork mentions both the vast amount of remixes that were released around various One Dove singles - not that unusual in the age of chart-hyping multi CD releases - as well as “early album leaks with alternate mixes”, which I vaguely remember. (In fact, I still have a cassette promo of the album, which has a slightly different track order, although I think still the same mixes.)

It felt, in other words, that there were too many different forces pushing and pulling at One Dove at the time, with FFRR aiming for superstardom, Weatherall resplendent in his production pomp and One Dove with their actual name on the record.

You can see confusion this in the album’s track list. Morning Dove White is only 11 songs long but White Love features three times - including the radio version and a piano reprise - and Breakdown twice. This could be evidence of the wonderfully malleable nature of One Dove's music. Or the fact that no one quite knew what to do with the band. (That the version of Morning Dove White currently on Spotify repeats track six, My Friend, as Transient Truth, which is meant to be track seven, really doesn’t help matters.)

And yet Morning Dove White’s main fault - for me - is the record’s incredibly clean production. The keyboard lines sparkle obscenely (see the angelic intro to There Goes the Cure), the “dub” bass lines are rounded and polite and the drums sound afraid to make too much of a fuss, over here in the corner, ticking away. The record sounds, in fact, a lot like New Order’s Republic, another Stephen Hague record that was released in 1993. That is no insult. But it’s not really what we were promised with One Dove. I’ve always wanted to blame Stephen Hague for the album’s sheen - but it is a widespread malaise, above and beyond his singles mixes.

(If you want a compare and contrast, try Weatherall’s Sabres Slow’N'Lo remix of New Order’s Regret, which was the lead single from Republic. Bernard Sumner’s vocal aside, it sounds very Morning Dove White.)

Worse, the only thing that didn’t appear polished to within an inch of its life on Morning Dove White were Allison’s vocals, which frequently sounded like they were recorded at the bottom of a well, blurred and indistinct in a way that allowed little personality to emerge. (See, for example, the chorus on Fallen, which sounds like your neighbour’s radio might be on the blink.)

Morning Dove White also suffered from incredible expectations. The album was widely expected to be a follow up to Primal Scream’s epochal Screamadelica album, on which Weatherall had weaved his magic two years earlier. So the bar was set incredibly high. It didn’t help that Screamadelica escapees Jah Wobble and Andrew Innes also featured on the One Dove album, while Sirens essentially sounded like Come Together lite.

(It may feel like I am putting too much emphasis on Weatherall’s work with the band to the detriment of One Dove themselves. That’s not my intention: as Schnipper points out in his Pitchfork review, the original, pre-Weatherall version Fallen has most of the song’s key elements and a lot of charm. But One Dove did so much of their music with Weatherall that the two are hard to disentangle. And Morning Dove White was promoted as much as a Weatherall album as a One Dove record.)

Whatever had happened with the album’s recording, FFRR still had to sell it. As a result, One Dove were everywhere in 1993: in the press, on TV and the radio and in our record shops, where their records went for the irresistible price of 99p, a wide-spread tactic in the age of chart hyping. For a teenager, with limited budget, this was a great thing. I bought a lot of One Dove records and tapes in 1993, for very little money. And I got excellent value for my 99ps, courtesy of bonus remixes, extended versions and more.

Sadly, though, my enthusiasm wasn’t shared by the record buyers of Norwich. One Dove did OK - the album got to number 30 and the singles White Love, Breakdown and Why Don't You Take Me to 43, 23 and 30 respectively. But FFRR evidently expected a lot more and my city’s bargain bins were flooded with One Dove 12 inches, that stubbornly refused to shift, no matter how much the shops reduced them.

None of this, of course, was One Dove’s fault. And none of it affected the quality of the music. And yet seeing One Dove records stuck to the bargain bins inevitably affected how I viewed the band. It didn’t help then, when One Dove were still a functioning act; and it doesn’t help now, three decades on, when they are considered a classic lost band. Nick Drake, I am pretty sure, was never in the position where Norwich record stores were unable to even give away his records.

Just to be clear: Morning Dove White is a great record and One Dove an excellent band. Morning Dove White could, I believe, have been far better, if it was wilder, more gnarled and unhampered by record label interfering; but the music we actually have is often brilliant. The problem, really, is mine.

People make a mistake in associating the price of music with its quality. Spending €50 on a record doesn’t mean you will love it more than a low-quality MP3 of a song that once saved your life. And yet this is precisely the error I made with One Dove. And even knowing I did so, the misconception remains hard to shake off. Every time I listen to Morning Dove White I see those 99p 12 inches in record shop bargain basements and I cringe a little.

Again: not One Dove’s fault. But I do think it is worth airing an alternative view of the band’s one album, one that helps to understand why the record was buried for so long. FFRR chucked loads of money at One Dove, the album underperformed and I think the label was probably a little embarrassed at its failure.

So yes, Morning Dove White is a lost classic, unavailable even to stream for many years. But it was also a heavily-hyped major label release that FFRR spent a ton of money on. Morning Dove White is a record of adventure, style and poise; but it is also a bit of an overcooked breakfast that falls in between several stools and would have been a lot better without a major label hand on the tiller. Which is a cautionary tale.

One Dove went into the studio to work on a second album but nothing was ever released and the band split, frustrated by record label politics. Maybe the band would have made a classic. Maybe not. But you can’t really blame them for splitting. One Dove’s records sound angelic; their major-label story hellish; and in between the two lies their cruel reality.

To end this on a positive note, though, how about some suggestions for other Morning Dove White - ish records from the time?

Some vaguely similar albums from 1993 for those who got too close, man to Morning Dove White

Ultramarine - United Kingdoms

The Black Dog - Bytes

Seefeel - Quique

B12 - Electro Soma

Reload - A Collection of Short Stories

Kruder & Dorfmeister - G-Stoned

Saint Etienne - So Tough

Sabres of Paradise - Sabresonic

Björk - Debut

The Fireman - Strawberries Oceans Ships Forest

Slowdive - 5 EP

Jah Wobble’s Invaders of the Heart - Visions of You (The Secret Love Child of Hank and Johnny Mix) (A single, I know…)

Some listening

Alex Kassian / Spooky - Orange Coloured Liquid Part 1

It feels appropriate in a week where I write about One Dove that I should also give mention to another act that is totally 1993, namely Spooky, the British duo who once gave progressive house a good name. (And who I wrote about in the early days of this newsletter.)

Orange Coloured Liquid is a drifty, swirly ambient number from their debut album Gargantuan that Alex Kassian - fresh from his E2-E4 remake - has chosen to update for 2025, adding (on Part 1) a swaggering breakbeat that feels like exactly the sort of thing Spooky would have done back in 1993, had they thought about it.

The result is one of those gorgeous ambient house numbers that you don’t tend to see these days - although 90s fans could argue that you might still see in the desert - that is perfectly equidistant between chilling and dancing. Thanks to Shawn Reynaldo for the tip. I’d say subscribe to his First Floor newsletter but I sure you do anyway.

Modern Nature - Pharaoh

Modern Nature’s excellent 2023 album No Fixed Point in Space was way out in the cosmos, full of impressionistic, semi-improvised space folk jams that smelled of the East Anglian countryside that Jack Cooper had re-located to.

For Modern Nature’s fourth album, The Heat Warps, Cooper has pulled back into focus, recruiting a second guitarist that allows him to give reign to his every Television vision of glory. On Pharaoh, the record’s addictive first single, dual guitars built a simpatico cat’s cradle of melody around a rolling post-punk groove, in a way that crackles with electric energy. The sound is very different from No Fixed Point in Space but the level of inspiration remains the same.

Sparks - Running up A Tab at the Hotel for The Fab

Of course, the only real tag you need for Sparks is “Sparks Music”, so outré is the Mael bothers’ work, from album number one to album number 28, MAD!, which was released last week. Within that, though, you can probably say that MAD! is one of Sparks’ more dramatic albums - yes, even for them - one that borrows a little from high-end, expensive-synth-plus-treated-guitar, very 1980s production of Trevor Horn and co. in pursuit of this theatrical goal. And the fabulously named Running Up A Tab at the Hotel for The Fab is maybe the high point of this tendency, with its huge, nervous synth stabs, rolling stadium rock drums and Duane Eddy-ish guitar, not to mention its outrageous emotional plot twists. Fab indeed.

Pavement - Whitchitai-To (LA Rehearsal Session)

Alex Ross Perry’s film PAVEMENTS is a suitably bewildering glance into one of the most enigmatic bands of their generation, mixing documentary footage, a full-blown Pavement musical, a fictionalised take on the Pavement story starring Joe Keery as a faultless Stephen Malkmus and - as I will never get bored of mentioning - a snippet of the Radio Primavera Sound interview that Johann and I did with the band in 2022.

The film’s soundtrack does a decent job of encapsulating the off-key oddity of the film itself, mixing live tracks from the band’s most recent reunion tour and rehearsals with brief clips from the film, Jukebox Musical Versions of songs from the Slanted! Enchanted! Pavement musical, one Peel session (the mighty Circa 1762, which I once stayed up late to tape off the radio) and Snail Mail’s cover of Shoot the Singer, from the semi-fictional Pavement Museum in New York.

I suspect the album’s ultimate destiny will be as a live album, with fans stripping out the other songs to create their own bespoke playlists. Which is fair enough. But the album as is is charmingly balanced: the live songs show Pavement at their loosest, while the Jukebox Musical songs offer a vision of Pavement as improbable Broadway stars, way off at the other end of the spectrum.

The film clips are cleverly woven into the musical framework, used as commentary on the film itself and what the film says about Pavement 2025. So, for example, the rehearsal version of Our Singer is followed Joe Keery’s Screen Test, at the end of which he comments (as Malkmus), “Is this what it’s all going to become? Bands like us doing ginormous corporate commercial things?” Which is kind of funny, given Keery’s huge Netflix fame.

I wouldn’t listen to a whole Jukebox Musical of Pavement songs more than once. But it feels strangely satisfying to end the album with Slanted! Enchanted! Finale! (Jukebox Musical Versions), in which excitable Broadway actors give it their furious all to a string-backed medley of several of Pavement’s best-known songs, both saccharine and unexpectedly moving.

The soundtrack’s gem, however, is a previously unreleased cover of Jim Pepper’s languid jazz fusion hit Witchitai-To, taken from the band’s LA rehearsals, which is perfectly wistful, longing and drifty, in a kind of Here-style, like a blistering of tears shed over an old flannel shirt.

Africa Express - Otim Hop

Maybe it’s the ongoing festival fever but I have just noticed that the Cruïlla festival in Barcelona - where I once saw an absolutely fiery set from Lauryn Hill, after her DJ was booed for coming on late - has added Damon Albarn’s Africa Express to the line up for 2025. They will be doing a set in celebration of their new album, Africa Express Presents… Bahidorá, which is released two days after they play Cruïlla, on July 11.

The two songs previously released from the record - Mi Lado and Kuduro - are fabulous beasts, where sharp electronic sounds meet pop songwriting and the globe-trotting inspiration of Damon Albarn, who is definitely one of the most musically open-minded pop stars of his generation.

Otim Hop, which came out last week, features Bootie Brown, K.O.G., Tom Excell and the one and only Otim Alpha, the pioneer of Acholitronix, a genre that mixes electronic music and Acholi traditional instruments. It is utterly addictive, the sound of a fresh breeze up your shorts on a warm summer’s day. The presence of Bootie Brown (and, of course, Damon Albarn) gives Otim Hop a Gorillaz-ish tinge, if Gorillaz were brought up on shimmering Ugandan lakes.

The new Africa Express album was inspired by the group’s trip to the Bahidorá Festival in Mexico in 2024 and features a mind-boggling line up from Abou Diarra to Nick Zinner of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. At Cruïlla they will be joined by Baba Sissoko, Bootie Brown, Django Django, Eme MalaFe, Joan As Police Woman, Jupiter & Okwess, La Bruja de Texcoco, Luisa Almaguer, M.anifest, Mare Advertencia, Mexican Institute of Sound, Moonchild Sanelly, Otim Alpha himself and Poté, which makes it into potentially one of the most fascinating gigs of the Barcelona summer.

Given that the Sex Pistols plus Frank Carter combo will also be at Cruïlla - not, sadly, with Africa Express although what a combination that would be - as will St Vincent, I may have to make the short trip Cruïlla ways.

Things I’ve done

Line Noise podcast - With Nadah El Shazly

I spoke to Egyptian-born, Montreal-based producer, vocalist, composer, and actor Nadah El Shazly ahead of her Primavera a la Ciutat gig on Monday June 2. (Which, actually, will have passed by the time you read this. Sorry. It was great BTW.) We spoke about Misfits covers, missing Cairo, Egyptian electronics and her gorgeous second album, Laini Tani.

The playlists

“When you playlist, playlist hard; when you work, don't playlist at all.”

So said Theodore Roosevelt and he surely knew what he was talking about. Luckily, I have two playlists: The newest and bestest 2025; and The newest and the bestest. Do follow them for all the best new music.