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LES FLEURS DU MAL
One of the great lost groups of post-punk, The Blue Orchids were formed in 1979 by guitarist/singer Martin Bramah and organist Una Baines, both refugees from The Fall. Acid-doused and brazenly mystical, the Orchids' hypno-swirl of clangorous guitar and incense-and-belladonna keyboards could hardly have been more at odds with the early Eighties. Misfits, then, but The Blue Orchids were far from failures: indeed their 1982 debut The Greatest Hit (Money Mountain) topped the independent charts.
Beyond the sheer thrill of their ramshackle trance-rock, The Blue Orchids tapped into something: currents of disaffection and withdrawal from Thatcher's enterprise culture that would later surface, substantially transformed, as crusty and rave. "Dumb Magician" critiques the disenchantment entailed in the pursuit of worldly success: "The dumb magician/Sees behind the scenes/The strings attached to all things/'This gets me that'... Try so hard to get your foot in the door/Get what you ask for and nothing more", then affers the defiant call to transcendence: "The only way out is UP". An anthem for a new psychedelia, the song was a rallying cry for dreamers versus schemers (the entryists of 'new pop' , with their cult of ambition and buying into mainstream notions of glamour); It makes you wonder if it was partly aimed at the group's Rough Trade labelmates Scritti Politti. "A Year With No Head" is either about 12 months wasted in a futile attempt to lead a conventional life, or 12 months wasted, off your head.
"Low Profile" imagines a subsistence-level bohemia eked out beneath society's radar, and makes this quiet refusal seem heroic - Bramah chanting lines like "no compromise in the name of truth" over an inexorable rumble of rhythm and a gold-dust rush of sound as (vain)glorious as Felt's similarly-themed "Primitive Painters".
Essentially, what's rehearsed on The Greatest Hit is the Nineties slacker ethos: defeatism as dissidence, opting out and acknowledging no rules except "the law of dissipation" ("Bad Education"). But the Blue Orchids don't have that Gen X curse of irony. Bramah and Baines' lyrics teem with pagan poetry and ache with naked pantheist devotion: "Get down on your knees/Justttouch the flesh of the breeze/And feel release", "With heads that burst when we salute heaven", "Ate the fruit of surrender/Surrender to no one'. They even based a song around a Yeats poem, one of just two tracks from The Greatest Hit not included here.
"Visions of splendour, two left feet' goes "Sun Connection", one of the group's most awe-struck, awe-inspiring songs. The lyric perfectly captures the Orchids' uncanny merger of sublime and stumbling. They started raw with the burst-levee roar of the singles "Disney Boys" b/w "The Flood" and "Work" b/w "The House That Faded Out" (the latter particularly stunning with its stabbing rhythm and disjointed feel). The Greatest Hit is consummate, perfectIy poised between primitivism and polish.
Tracks from the EP Agents Of Change - where the Orchids wore their inspirations on their sleevenotes with the confession that it was "completed under extraneous influences working upon the psyche" - err towards state-of-graceful mellow (the piano-rolling "Release" is enjoyably reminiscent of The Stranglers' "Don't Bring Harry ") but remain beatific beauties.
At once anachronistic and ahead of their time, The Blue Orchids flashback to the keyboard-driven garage-punk of The Seeds and ? And The Mysterians, and flash-forward to the acid-rock nouveau of Loop and Spacemen 3. There's even a faint glimpse of a near-future Manchester: the drug-hazy "Lazyitis" of The Happy Mondays. Pulling together almost all of the group's output, A Darker Bloom gives you a chance to discover a remarkable, if sadly compact, body of work. If only they'd released as many records as The Fall...
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