Just Desserts Blancmange

Rip It Up, Issue 71, 1 June 1983, Page 12

Just Desserts Blancmange

Kerry Doole

"A lot of people take this business far too seriously. You're only on this planet once; you've got to enjoy it and see it for what it is . worth, which is basically a big joke." The sense of life as a cosmic comedy infuses the music and lyrics of Blancmange, a likeable English duo who recently made the English charts with the manic synth-oriented pop of songs like 'Feel Me' and Tiving on the Ceiling' and their Happy Families album, recently released in New Zealand. You could see this band as a bastard son of a weird mating of the 852 s and Orchestral Manoeuvres, but keyboardist Stephen Luscombe, on the phone from New York, wouldn't define its sound to save his life. ' - "I hope we re more diverse than people give us credit for. We want to create as many moods and atmospheres as we possibly can. On this new single we're working on, 'Blind Vision', we use a kind of Gamelan sound combined with a Philadelphia horn sound. There are so many different musics you can refer to. Notice I use 'refer to' rather than 'steal'." Prior to joining forces with vocalist/lyricist Neil Arthur four years ago, Luscombe was active in the experimental/improvisational music scene in London, working

' with people like Brian Eno, drummer John Stevens, and those bizarre mock-classical musicians, the Portsmouth Sinfonia. "After I met Neil, I more or less continued on the same path of doing what I felt like. It is only - really in the last eighteen months that we started doing songs. These" are based on the disciplines we'd learnt from doing more exotic musics. The songs just happened naturally; we never sat down arid said we wanted to be pop stars." With a background like; this, you might expect Stephen Luscombe to be a serious musical conceptualist. You'd be wrong. "I'm not concerned with coming across like Martin Fry or Green (Scritti Politti). I think that's so unnecessary. You get on with music and do it, you don't just sit and eulogise about it until nobody can understand what you're saying. 'To be honest, I'm not really concerned with how people see us. We enjoy winding people up. Sometimes we'll sit with a journalist who is not quite in key with what we're doing and we'll just send him up. Then you'll read the article and we'll come across as a real pair of thickos." Blancmange's extravagant sense of humour is apparent on their recent videos. The Middle Eastern feeling to 'Living on the Ceiling' prompted the duo. to head for the pyramids and camels of Egypt.' ■'ll was actually cheaper to shoot the video there than in England, as the Egyptian Government gave us a lot of help with money and resources. They saw it as a promo for their Tourist Board." The fact that most of the Blancmange entourage came down with tropical bugs was perhaps not the publicity the government wanted. For the current single, 'Waves', the duo stayed closer to home, Penzance on the Cornish coast. "Neil went out on a boat, I went up a lighthouse and we had some peculiar looking mermaids splashing about on the rocks. It turned out to be quite funny, while the" song is quite serious. The sea was very rough so the whole crew got sick and I nearly fell off the lighthouse. Apart from that, we came home unscathed!". .