British Electric Foundation – "Music For Stowaways" (Virgin – TCV 2888) 1981

Retro-Futurism always requires an amount of outdated tech that was destined for the garbage can,and there was a lot of this in 1981.In this case a cassette only release of instrumental versions of future hits destined to be thrown into the garbage can,alongside the cassette, the 8-track Tape,DAT,Mini-Disc,and lately, the compact disc and any hope of getting subversive elements of the underground yoof culture regularly in the charts. I smell the stale whiff of a Bob Last influence going on here,and I 'm not wrong either;the Scottish Bernie Rhodes gets an executive producer and design credit on this luxurious cassette packaging featuring the other two in the original Human League. It's Heaven 17 before Heaven 17,minus the vocals,an old trick that Last tried with The Fire Engines to try and get the mug punter to buy the same songs twice. A trick adopted by those smashing chaps in the music industry by making your music reproduction system fashionably obsolete. Then endlessly reissuing the entire pre-1990 back catalog on Compact Disc,followed by the 'deluxe' editions, then the 'super-deluxe' version...and so on!

Thankfully,after many thousands of quid later, we have now realized that Vinyl was the superior product after all.40 minutes of anything is now recognised as 'enough',and the cassette was much more than just kitch,it was convenient!So now we are buying back all those records that we sold to buy the CD's! Not to mention the now hilarious fact that New Order once released a Mini-Disc only version of one of their insipid tunes!? ....although I can't laugh, I once shelled out £300 quid on a Portable Phillips Digital Compact Cassette(DCC) recorder, which was virtually obsolete before I got it home.....a bit like the British Electric Foundation actually.

Ian Craig Marsh,the 'hip' one, and Martyn Ware,the one who looked like he worked in a paper merchants office, thought they were the talent in the mark one version of the Human League;when actually none of them had any talent.....which is no bad thing I suppose considering the nature of most of the groups featured on these hallowed pages.....but they did have a promising idea to make pure electronic music that could conceivably get one into the British hit Parade. Trouble was, they had no idea how to make a tune...the exception of course being..."Being Boiled".If they had kept it like that there would have been no need to inflict "Don't You Want Me Baby" on an innocent planet.

Yeah, the Human League split up into the Human League mark 2, and the British Electric Foundation,or B.E.F. who obviously still hadn't any clue how to write a tune,so got laden with the task of making a bunch of pointless instrumentals, which evolved into making more cassettes with guest singers such as Billy MacKenzie and ...whoops....Gary Glitter,in their "Music Of Quality And Distinction"(no Irony involved) series;sadly also responsible for resurrecting the career of one Tina Turner,a crime only topped by their own Heaven 17 project which evolved out of all this noodling ,and a desperate need to out-do 1981's chart darlings,Phil Oakey's Human League.

Being an owner of the largely disappointing pre-split Human League oeuvre, i was hopeful that B.E.F. would flourish without their Front man and his distracting lop-sided barnet (Barnet Fair = 'Hair' in cockney-ese); but,although they must have had a hefty advance from Virgin,and spent it on every synth a young man could possibly buy in 1981,its a tad uninspired;but awash with the kind of analogue gloop and tang that could allow even Gary Glitter to make a come back.....well, maybe not? Although I do feel it's my responsibility to warn my loved and admired readership that this tape also includes some judicious and malicious use of a slap-bass! 

One non-fictional weapon that has yet to be threatened upon the west by Vladimer Putin....once known as the Mark King of the KGB's in house white boy Funk outfit, "The Bass-Slappin' Slap heads". There was once a rumour that the USSR had a division of Stanley Clarke clones armed and ready with fretless basses to invade the Baltic states....thank Christ for our children that impending economic collapse and a certain Nuclear accident put paid to that despicable horror.

There is,however, intelligence that the Chechnyan Jaco Pastorious Fan club have mobilised and are approaching Donetsk as I type.Humanitarian corridors have been set up.

*****This ISN'T Fake News!*****

Tracklist:

Uptown:

A1 The Optimum Chant4:10
A2 Uptown Apocalypse 3:12
A3 Wipe The Board Clean 3:46
A4 Groove Thang 4:06

Downtown:

B1 Music To Kill Your Parents By 1:26
B2 The Old At Rest 5:37
B3 Rise Of The East 2:50
B4 Decline Of The West 7:05

DOWNLOAD to stow away HERE!