Unauthorised item in the bagging area

Thursday 12 November 2020

Still Waters

I've got a lot of time for for dance music veterans A Man Called Adam and it's not just due to us sharing a name. In the summer of 1990 their laid back Balearic house song Barefoot In The Head stuck a chord with me as did their album a year later, The Apple (rhyming slang I think, the apple corps = the score, as in 'do you know the score?'). In the last few years they've had a bit of renaissance with last year's Farmarama album and a slew of remixes. Sally and Steve have now followed this with a twenty track release, fresh out now on Bandcamp, a round up of rarities and oddities from the duo's whole career taking in demo versions, mixes, edits, a commission for the British Museum and collaborations with people such as the recently departed Jose Padilla, The Idjut Boys and Sensory Productions. There's so much going on across the twenty songs that it's difficult to take in in one sitting but there's a freshness and a flow in the music, ambient sounds, early 90s Ibizan rhythms and a very Balearic state of mind. Right now, this one with Jose Padilla is hitting the spot...


The album, Love Forgotten, is here. Their calling card, the endlessly giving Barefoot In The Head is present on it in a remixed form. There's a sample on Barefoot In The Head, some lines from a 1967 poem by Rod McKuen, where he 'puts a seashell to my ear and it all comes back'. Rod and Anita Kerr recorded the album The Sea with the San Sebastian Strings, a dreamlike slice of 1967, hippy spoken word and easy listening strings. This is where the sample comes from...

It's the sort of album you always expect to turn up in a charity shop or at a car boot sale. I'm sure the thrift stores and flea markets of the USA are full of copies of The Sea, dumped in the 1990s. As it is, over here, I'm still looking. 



4 comments:

londonlee said...

Can’t say I’ve seen a copy in the past but I’ll keep my eyes open in the future.

Swiss Adam said...

It sounds like a charity shop record to me Lee but I may be wrong. A lot of the copies on Discogs are US based sellers. I would guess it was popular in California in the mid 70s

londonlee said...

They don't really have much in the way of charity shops over here. There's Goodwill but the vinyl selection of the one near me is all old and tatty rubbish. The vintage clothes shops that sell vinyl tend to charge way too much for it

Echorich said...

Chock full of goodness!