Imagine, you’re bass player in one of the happening punk bands of the time, and on the strength of that success, you persuade the record company to let you make an electronic solo concept album, with the theme of a politically united Europe.
Sound feasible ? Well, I guess it helped that he was French and in The Stranglers, but even so…
Predictably, it fell through the cracks into obscurity, but serendipity dropped a copy into my hands recently, and I was somewhat impressed.
Opening with a list of people he’s descended from (Charlemagne, Napoleon, Adolf Hitler (!)) voiced over a synthetic drone, it goes on to paint a future vision of a European nation state that stands independantly from the U.S. and Russia.
It was merely a dream at the time, but drenched in intuitive foresight, and leaving aside the Nostradamus element (from a guy who was probably smarting at the U.K’s patronising myopic view of his homeland), it actually sounds like the future too.
Dirty synths and even dirtier basslines (naturally), rumble and twitch, pummeling a trough of post-punk electroclash almost 30 years too soon.
Yeah, 1978 was a hell of a year…