B-Film: Hidden Treasures – Album Evaluation

The ill-fated first album by melancholic synth-poppers B-Film by no means made it to the file racks. However now Hidden Treasures is out there to listen to for the primary time. Robert Plummer declares remembrance day.

What we’re gonna do proper right here is return… again in time. Not simply to the previous that truly was, however to another previous that may have been. One wherein B-Film, unfortunate Nineteen Eighties electro-wavers from the Some Bizzare secure, bought to understand their potential by issuing their now long-lost debut album.

That file didn’t safe a launch on the time: Some Bizzare founder Stevo struck gold with Smooth Cell and The The as an alternative. But when a scene is lengthy gone and the quantity of music it produced is finite, devotees will hail any undiscovered gem. That offers this assortment the aura of a time capsule, buried in a vault since 1982 and now lastly unearthed greater than 4 a long time later.

One of the best of those tunes are nonetheless match-fit for the twenty first Century – in spite of everything, darkish, synth-laden pop has hardly gone out of trend within the intervening years. The album will get off to a sprightly begin with the surging bass-driven Citizen Kane: “Gimme my Rosebud again!” yells frontman Steve Hovington because the six-minute stormer nears its shut. Equally, the songs that emerged as singles on the time – equivalent to Marilyn Desires and Remembrance Day – proceed to beguile the ears.

Cream of the crop is the wistful Nowhere Woman, their quantity 67 UK chart hit, which makes alienation sound just like the sweetest form of love. “And I attempt to get by way of/And I attempt to discuss to you/However there’s one thing stopping me from getting by way of.”

Another tracks present their age extra readily. That features All Fall Down, with its references to “mad cowboy” Ronald Reagan and the 12 months 1984 – nonetheless sooner or later at time of recording. B-Film’s badmouthing of that individual former B-movie actor is sufficient to induce nostalgia for the political monsters of yesteryear: they’re definitely out-trumped by these of in the present day.

With its Arctic electronics and lyrical anomie, this file reveals all of the glacial sang-froid of its time. Again then, it was the peak of the Chilly Conflict and Britain’s artier pop practitioners have been feeling the chilliness. Spandau Ballet sang about The Freeze, whereas one in every of The Treatment’s doomiest LPs featured a observe entitled Chilly.

Even so, having one tune named Polar Opposites and one other referred to as Ice on the identical album is overdoing it. The latter observe addresses one other annoyed love affair, this time with a lady whose “refrigerated coronary heart” resists all makes an attempt at thawing it out. Like many different pale younger minstrels of their period, B-Film had a factor about unrequited affection.

The unique 10-track album ends with a uncommon gradual quantity, Starting To Fade, on which the band sound uncannily like stablemates Smooth Cell. CD purchasers get one other seven tracks, together with 12-inch variations of all three singles and their B-sides.

So may issues have been completely different if Hidden Treasures had come out when it was first conceived? Effectively, the almost certainly final result is that the file would have been damned by faint success, alongside efforts by contemporaries such because the Comsat Angels or the Chameleons.

In the end, this file isn’t going to make the writers of 80s pop historical past revise their settled verdicts. Nonetheless, as an enchanting footnote to a decade that also exerts an enormous gravitational pull on in the present day’s music, it undoubtedly calls for consideration.

What’s extra, the band’s saga ought to function an inspiration to any struggling artists whose work ended up entombed within the file trade’s oubliette. There’s a lesson for them right here: eventually, for those who hold the religion, every thing will certainly come to mild.

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You’ll find B-Film on-line right here: https://www.b-movie.org/. They’re additionally on Instagram as @b_movieband.

All phrases by Robert Plummer. Extra writing by Robert Plummer might be discovered at his creator’s archive. Robert Plummer can also be on X as @robertp926.