Balearic - a club scene from the 1980s spinning everything from folk-rock to disco - is flourishing again. Justin Quirk on why the conditions are perfect for a third summer of love
In 1983, Chris Rea released an album called Water Sign. The record was, in effect, little more than a demo, but its drum-machine rhythms and songs infused with the music he'd heard on his endless European tours made it something of a lost classic to some fans of house music. Despite Rea being a byword for middle-of-the-road rock, he forms an unlikely footnote to the most exciting scene in dance music right now.
Balearic - originally a loose amalgam of sounds rooted in the music that was popular in the clubs of mid-1980s Ibiza, encompassing everything from folk-rock to disco - is set to be the trend of the summer. Parties and DJs such as Tropical Hotdog, Afternoon Session and Chew the Fat (all in London), the Balearic Brothers (Brighton), the Balearic Mike/Jolyon Green axis (Manchester) and Phil Mison's Reverso 68 project are all flying the "anything goes" flag of Balearica. It's not just DJs and clubs, either. There is also a new generation of Balearic bands in the UK. Mountain of One combine beats with the influences of Pentangle and Tusk-era Fleetwood Mac, while the shadowy Beyond the Wizard's Sleeve marry Joe Meek-ish samples with pulsating backing tracks. Further afield, Norway's Todd Terje and Germany's Henrik Schwarz are producing Balearic-inflected electronica. Balearic is even starting to influence fashion: the spring/summer collections from Dries van Noten and Gucci embody the Balearic aesthetic in the form of linen trousers, slip-on shoes and soft pastels.
"The contemporary Balearic scene has been quietly developing and is a very exciting musical place to be right now," says Enzo Amico of the Balearic Brothers. "People are disillusioned with the house scene and are listening to a more diverse mix of music. The trend towards bars and smaller parties rather than superclubs suits a more relaxed and varied style of DJing." So, are we about to witness a third summer of love?
For convenience, most people trace Balearic back to the eclectic style pioneered by the DJ Danny Rampling at the London club night Shoom in 1987. Rampling had holidayed in Ibiza that summer, and became obsessed with DJ Alfredo, the Argentinian resident at the island's Amnesia club. His sets, as recreated on last year's Original Sound of Ibiza album, moved effortlessly between the Art of Noise and Yellowman, the Residents and Phuture. Rampling would later compare Alfredo's experimental mixture of "texture and music ... to a Miro painting", but his eclecticism was rooted as much in the realities of playing to a crowd who were both pan-European and in the first flushes of the ecstasy rush. The music at Amnesia didn't need to be fast and rhythmic to be danceable (most Balearic classics hover around 110bpm), and because familiar songs were put into fresh contexts, they shed whatever unfashionable associations they might have had for clubbers used to London ideas of hipness. "It was quite a naive thing," says Chris Galloway of Pure Pleasure Music, Britain's leading Balearic dealer. "You had a lot of classic pop records that became seen as Balearic, and a lot of songs that people could kind of take or leave on their release that were subsequently reassessed."
"In its purest sense it's about music that makes you feel good, makes you smile, and has no pretensions to be anything else," says Amico. The mixture of what Galloway sums up as "big pop records and very underground stuff put together" became, and remains, the defining characteristic of the Balearic aesthetic.
The success of Rampling's Shoom nights sparked off a series of similar parties, such as those organised by Boy's Own, a loose network of clever, funny, music obsessives from Windsor and Slough, including Andy Weatherall, Terry Farley and Cymon Eckel. "It really picked up in 1988-89 and the race was on to find the strangest records that you could dance to," says Eckel. "There was a massive Boy's Own party at Painshill Park in Surrey and It Must Be Love by Madness got played. Being happy and smiley as we were, as opposed to nasty and aggro, it all worked."
While much of dance music culture was (and is) lambasted as little more than pill-munching, repetitive idiocy, the "Balearic network" offered a stylish, knowing alternative based on better clothes and encyclopaedic record collections. "Given the state people were in, it was easy to see how you might end up in a pair of denim dungarees - not that I ever did, I might add - but you wanted to look a bit more well dressed," says Eckel.
The original Balearic players shared a deep, trainspotterish immersion in music, style and vinyl hunting, kicking against what they saw as the lumpen nature of most pop and rock. The critic Simon Reynolds saw the original Balearic lovers as representing an English obsession with class and status: "The antagonism was grounded in an enduring class divide that runs through British pop history," he wrote in his book, Generation Ecstasy. "An upper-working-class hipster superiority complex vis-a-vis the undiscriminating unskilled proles."
"There was a conscious split, as you wanted a point of difference," agrees Eckel. That sentiment is echoed by the new wave of Balearic artists. Questioned recently by a journalist about the grand, almost prog-like nature of their music, A Mountain of One's Mo Morris witheringly pointed out that "you can only hear so many songs about fights in chip shops." .
A Mountain of One are the emblematic modern Balearic group, with feet planted firmly in two vintage musical camps. As well as the 1980s dance influence that underpins the music, they draw on another side that predates Rampling's encounter with Alfredo, rooted in folk, psychedelia and pagan counterculture. "People are, without a doubt, more open-minded at the moment," says Morris. "They want something that is more contemporary and - for want of a better word - abstract, as record companies have just been playing safe for so long."
"Ten years ago, people just wanted the big club records," adds Balearic Mike. "But kids nowadays who are 20 want to hear bizarre things that aren't getting played on the radio."
Balearic Mike also believes new technology has been the key to reviving the attitudes and sounds of the Balearic era. "For a while it was a nostalgia thing," he says, "but the internet's made the world a lot smaller and opened up all these scenes that have fed into the current sound. There's Italy's cosmic scene, which no one in this country knew of until five years ago. There's a whole scene in Belgium that I had no idea about." And because of the ease of access to so many different forms of music, Balearic flavours are popping up all over the place. Goldfrapp's new album, with its pastoral feel and acid-folk overtones? You could call that Balearic. The sophisticated, slow-house of the New Jersey label Italians Do It Better? Very Balearic. Even Kate Bush is in on the act. Her last album, Aerial, with its ambient interludes and massive crescendoes, couldn't have been more Balearic if it was wearing white espadrilles and hoovering up MDMA.
Nick De Cosemo, editor of the dance magazine Mixmag, has a further theory about Balearic. First, he suggests, some of the new bands and DJs function as "the acceptable face of chill-out, and in some ways the acceptable face of the 'Guilty Pleasures' phenomenon." Second, he posits that a scene rooted in the drug revolution of 20 years ago might now be recurring as a partial reaction against drugs. "The whole minimal thing - very discordant, electronic music that is interesting but very challenging - has been dominant for a few years, really fuelled by ketamine, and a taste for disharmony. I think there's probably a search for melody again, something a bit less abrasive for people doing less drugs."
But perhaps the real attraction of the Balearic scene lies - at least for now - in its organic, unmarketed state. Its open-mind and constantly evolving nature makes it difficult to turn into a standardised advertising soundtrack or instore radio staple in a way that couldn't be said of new rave or indie. "In A Short Film About Chilling someone asks [808 State's] Graeme Massey about Balearic, and he says it's just about having freedom in DJing," explains Balearic Mike. "There's loads of artists you shouldn't even own records by but sometimes it just sounds right." In this way, the scene is harking back to a time before every single aspect of youth culture was commodified and marketed. "We started Boy's Own coming out of the matt-black Filofax era in terms of what nightclubs were like," recalls Eckel. "Nowadays you can do college courses in party planning and every aspect of event management. It was much less structured then."
So unstructured that even Chris Rea could and can be celebrated as a house pioneer. "I Can Hear Your Heartbeat's a sweet record," says Chris Galloway. "Danny Rampling broke it first time round. The story I heard was that it was played in a taxi when he was on the way home from Amnesia and he loved it." In the world of Balearic, anything goes.
· A Mountain of One's Collected Works is out now on Mountain Records. Balearic Mike's album, Cosmic Alphonsus Vol 7, is available through piccadillyrecords.co.uk.
This is a great online radio station playing deep soulful tracks such as...
Posts
Listen to radio42 - Music for Lounge-Lovers.
