Tim tells the story from his record shop days of someone's aunt coming in and asking, "Have you got anything by BOB State?"
This is the other album, with Eye, that always takes me back to those drives across the Peak District in 1991. How does that happen? How does one listen get fixed in memory, while all the others slip away?
Somehow the whole electronic dance music scene of the late eighties and nineties passed me by. I wanted to like it; I was the right age and at the right stage of my career (that is, no one much would have bothered if I'd come into work after three hours sleep, unfit to write my own name); and I was in the right place when it all started.
But I could never find a way in. All the examples I heard were too mindless. Yep, I know that was the point. It's just that I need something that can sustain my interest when I'm sitting down. So when the late lamented Mixing It singled out 808 State in their early days, and made it the kind dance music that you could hear on Radio 3, I jumped at it.
After all that build-up, well, I've always felt it was OK-ish.
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