Forty Minutes Of One Dove

After last week's Dot Allison mix I thought I should go back to the source and do a One Dove mix. One Dove's album Morning Dove White was finally released in October 1993 after a year of hold ups and wranglings about whose mixes and which versions should be on the final record, Stephen Hague's radio friendly sheen or Andrew Weatherall's lengthy dubby productions. We all know what history tells us about those kind of arguments. I bought it and played it a lot, an album that can transport me back to the flat I lived in then with a friend and the times we spent listening to it, the smell and hum of the gas fire, the ashtray filling up with cigarette butts. It sound-tracked our post- club arrivals back home, the winter of 1993- 94, a couple of break ups, us making our way into adult jobs, all that kind of stuff. I've listened to it ever since, an album that continues to give alternately shivers and a warm glow. Weatherall's production, on the back of Screamadelica, is expansive, restless, superbly chilled out but warped too and oddly timeless. The moody/ elegiac songs of Dot Allison, Jim McKinven and Ian Carmichael were clearly good to start with but once Weatherall and Hugo Nicolson got into the studio and began working on them they went somewhere else, sprinkled with the magic dust of the early 90s. Stephen Hague's mixes are possibly a little too shiny in places (and kept mainly for the CD version) but the vinyl is an album to rank alongside the best of the 90s. I once said here, many years ago, that it was brilliant but felt slightly flawed, like there was something missing. I'm not sure what that was or what I meant now. The album's cast included Weatherall's Sabres Of Paradise mates Gary Burns and Jagz Kooner, Jah Wobble's bass on There Goes The Cure, Phil Mossman (Sabres guitarist and future member of LCD Soundsystem) and Primal Scream's Andrew Innes. It's never been re- issued on vinyl. Copies on Discogs are currently starting at £80. Mine is most definitely not for sale. 

Putting together a One Dove mix without just sequencing a bunch of songs from Morning Dove White pointed me towards the remixes and B-sides. I couldn't find room on this mix for either Weatherall's majestic dubbed out odyssey, Breakdown (Squire Black Dove Rides Out) or their spaced out cover of Jolene- a second forty minute mix should happen at some point- and there are several Sabres remixes of Transient Truth not included below, the mighty Old Toys and Old Toys Dub are both stunners. The ten minute Guitar Paradise version of White Love looks like a glaring omission too. And if Fallen feels little like it was just tacked onto the end, then that's because it was. I just couldn't not include it in one version or another.

Forty Minutes Of One Dove

• Why Don't You Take Me
• Skanga
• Transient Truth (Squelch Mix)
• Transient Truth (Death Of A Disco Dancer)
• Why Don't You Take Me (Underworld Remix)
• Fallen (Nancy And Lee Mix) 7" Edit

Why Don't You Take Me is from Morning Dove White and was a single in December 1993, the now London Records owned Boy's Own label putting it out as the third single from the album and hoping for a hit. The Glaswegian dub reggae of Skanga was a B-side (along with Jolene, not included here). 

Transient Truth was also from Morning Dove White and released as an official 12" (with the Old Toys mixes) and a white label promo, both in 1992. The white label contained four Sabres Of Paradise remixes of the song, the two included here plus the Paradise Mix and the Sabres Fuzz Dub. I've no idea if the Death Of A Disco Dancer remix is a reference to The Smiths song of the same name. 

Underworld's remixes of Why Don't You Take Me are both up there with their best from the period, released on double blue vinyl along with a Secret Knowledge remix. Underworld's Up  2 Down remix is a long thumper. The one I've included here is dubbed out Underworld style and is magnificent. 

Fallen is where the One Dove story starts, Dot's breathless vocal and the ambient/ dub/ acid house music initially built around a Supertramp sample which led to legal action and the offending harmonica  being removed. Weatherall's remix for the 12" came with the title Nancy And Lee Mix, which sent many of us scurrying back to our parent's record collections looking for Sinatra and Hazlewood albums and singles. The version here is an edited one from a  February1992 7" single and I include just because it's such a great song it can even survive having four minutes chopped off it. 

Looking at all of the tracks I've left off this I think part two may have to come sooner rather than later.