Music Arcades: In the Nursery: Twins

I'm not quite sure why I got this CD. It was a binge day, that's clear: the same day I got Johnny Cash's Solitary Man, Ingenue, Good Humor, Terror Twilight, The Best of Vangelis and a few others. God, it feels like another lifetime when I used to go to record shops. It was 13 years after I got my first ITN EP, and two years before I met the twins who are In the Nursery (Nigel, the one on the right on the album cover, I think, was the one I saw most often, through mutual friends in Sheffield). But I saw them do a live film soundtrack once at the Showroom — I think it was to Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera, though they did a few live soundtracks, and may still do for all I know (OK, Wikipedia tells me they did The Passion of Joan of Arc last year) — so perhaps that was what gave me the nudge.

It turns out this album is even older than that first EP I'd bought many years before. Maybe I'd have been better off getting some of their later work, because this has that po-faced sturm und drang that typified mid-eighties 'industrial' music — somewhere between Test Department and Miranda Sex Garden — and, though I liked it at the time, it now seems a bit daft. It makes me want apply my tickle test: as mentioned in connection with the similarly stony-faced Sunn O))), this involves poking my fingers into the musicians' kidney area while asking, "Are you ticklish? Are you? Are you??"