Sunday, 25 March 2012

North London Spiritualist church, AKA Electric Music.

This is the North London Spiritualist Church:

Mizhenka photograph, taken with cat camera. 

This is 'North London Spiritualist Church' the 2000 album by Electric Music AKA:

North London Spiritual Church

The NME called it one of the 'peripheral, unorthodox musical pleasures of Y2K' and the Scottish Herald said it was one 'of the year's most understated but rewarding albums'.

I am as tongue-tied and uncomfortable talking about music as I am happy talking about books and pictures, but I am listening to it on Spotify as I write this post and it is good. It's on iTunes too.

It was also unlucky, caught by the Hornsey Road singularity where nothing goes as planned.

Electric Music had signed to the Beastie Boys' Grand Royal label. It went bust.

Then Karl Bartos of Kraftwerk, whose side project was called 'Electric Music' made them change their name. Have to say, 'Electric Music AKA' is a better answer to that problem than 'London Suede' was.

Then they were thrown out of their North London studio Scabby Rd. This is how they told the story to the Herald:

'It was effectively an old shed with lots of power points up an alley, and during the whole time we were there we never paid for electricity, it had been set up in the past to run off one of the meters upstairs, and I guess they used a lot of electricity and had never noticed. We, of course, were completely skint, and dreading someone finding out, but one day we came back and the guy upstairs had installed one of these sensor lights that go off when someone breaks the beam. ''Unfortunately, he must have used one of our fuses, because when we went into the studio, none of the lights worked any more. The actual studio gear did, so recording continued for a while by candlelight, before we had to give the studio up because we ran out of money.'

They're called Boo Hooray now and in 2010 released 'Haunted'. I wonder if they're still local?

3 comments:

  1. haha, "scabby road". I like it.

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  2. Did you notice the little crosses in the church gardens? I keep meaning to photograph them next time the gates are open.

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  3. Definitely a candidate to be added to The Word Mag Album Cover Atlas, somewhere between The Kinks, Eno and Joe Meek.

    http://www.wordmagazine.co.uk/album_atlas/

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