Long before the celestial soul-soothing nuance of Spiritualized, and even before the period of relative success enjoyed by neo-pysche merchants Spacemen 3, guitarist Mark Refoy was a member of the short lived band The Tempest. Joining forces with Alex Novak (of future underground cult heroes Venus Fly Trap and Attrition), they recorded 5 Against The House, and, despite the late Steve Strange bigging them up by saying “This is the sound of 1984!” The Tempest spiralled out of control and fizzled out before the album’s release. It’s a shame, for it is something of a lost gem.
I sat there for a while puzzling as to how on earth these tunes failed to make the impact they should have, but then it hit me – The Tempest were never sure just who they wanted to be. They weren’t sure if they wanted to be Duran Duran (see opening track and indie chart hit ‘Montezuma‘), The Cure (‘Better And Better‘ is a dead ringer for ‘Killing An Arab‘ or ‘Jumping Someone Else’s Train‘), early Human League or Gang Of Four amongst others. You can also hear obvious connotations with Orange Juice on debut seven inch ‘Lady Left This,‘ Joy Division (in various places) and the poppier side of both the New Romantic and New Wave Sound. This set finishes tellingly with an extended version of a song called ‘ABC‘ (more clear Edwyn Collins influence), and yes, you can even hear shades of that band’s glossy pop sheen throughout.
It’s fair to say that the music is paramount here, the lyrical content often indecipherable, and when you can make it out, well, let’s face it, lines like “sugar…sugar…sugar and spice and all things nice / shoot it to the left, shoot it to the right” were never going to win any literary prizes, were they? Thankfully though, this fourteen strong set is exciting and interesting enough to get by solely on its musical values. A personal favourite is ‘Big Black Cadillac,‘ which perhaps provided the blueprint for the harder hitting alternative rock style of The Godfathers‘ seminal Birth. School. Work. Death album.
It’s not all unsubtle crack-on-the-head stuff though. Instrumental ‘Clara Bow,‘ for instance, is a terrifically frantic violin charged slab of experimentalism that embraces industrialism and Krautrock in equal measure, while the two more stripped back numbers that follow could feasible be bracketed as something of centrepiece. The slow burning but eventually dramatic percussion led ‘Miss Deep Freeze‘ marks a departure from what has gone before, and the ghostly horns of further instrumental ‘Eat The Wall‘ are what you’d expect Pigbag to have sounded like if they’d decided to follow their near eponymously titled hit with something altogether darker.
In another time, The Tempest would have been huge. All we can do, however, in 2016, is look back in wonder at what might have been.
5 Against The House is released on July 8th on Optic Nerve.
