Winging It
This month’s exhumed sonic reliquary: velvet, Lethean pop for ravers coming down.
One Dove
Morning Dove White
BOY’S OWN RECORDINGS, 1993
An album that soundtracked the end of the acid house honeymoon – for the few that loved it – had a suitably decadent beginning. “I was playing at a club in Rimini as part of some Balearic charabanc,” remembers DJ/producer Andrew Weatherall of a night in 1991, “and at about 6am when it finished, the owner opened up the back of the club onto the beach and said we’d be carrying on on his yacht. Not quite a Roman Abramovich super-yacht, but sound enough – and off we went. So there I was, spangled and enjoying the view, and a young lady came up and started singing in my ear. ‘I’m Dorothy Allison and I’ve got a band in Glasgow,’ she said. Then we landed and stumbled back up the beach.” Her band was called Dove, a trio of Allison, Jim McKinven (formerly of Altered Images and Berlin Blondes), and Ian Carmichael (producer and occasional keyboardist for Sarah Records janglers The Orchids). They’d only released one song, Fallen, on Glasgow’s Soma label – but that song’s dub space, insinuatingly whispered vocal and harmonica lifted from a Supertramp record had captured the bittersweet mysteries of the morning after the rave better than almost any, and caused quite a stir. Weatherall, meanwhile, was on a high in every sense, having – despite next to no studio experience – just marshalled Primal Scream into completing their ecstasy-soaked, era-defining Screamadelica. With Allison giving up her Glasgow University biochemistry
“IT WAS THE ANTIDOTE TO THE WAILING DIVA THING.”
Andrew Weatherall
degree to work full-time on music, the first collaboration to come out of the yacht introduction was reworking Fallen for the renamed One Dove. “I was nervous!” says Carmichael. “Andy [Weatherall] came to my studio in Glasgow and I was late, so he was waiting outside when I got there. I thought he’d be really pissed off, but the reviews for Screamadelica had just come out, so he was reading the papers on the doorstep and was obviously delighted.” The remix happened quickly. “It was instinctive and spontaneous,” says Carmichael. “The whole time I was watching recording levels on my old Revox ¼-inch bouncing into the red, and splicing lots of sections of tape together with shaking hands; it was terrifying for me. I thought the whole thing would be a mess, but when we played it back at the end and heard his version of Fallen it was miraculous.” This quickly developed into a smooth working relationship, the results released on Weatherall and friends’ Boy’s Own Productions. The three would write, send tracks to Weatherall, who brought in associates like Jah Wobble and Primal Scream’s Andrew Innes for embellishment. Surprisingly rapidly, given the fervid times – “I remember next to nothing of the process, I’m afraid,” says Weatherall, “or indeed of those years” – it fell together into an extraordinarily coherent whole. “Every song we came up with went on the album,” says Carmichael, “we were buzzing the whole time as each one came together.” The sound blended the ambient dub voguish at the time with a rich streak of country heartbreak – something the group nodded to when they covered Dolly Parton’s Jolene as a B-side for the Why Don’t You Take Me single – with everything wreathed in a sonic velvet complementary to Allison’s softly breathed mysteries. “There were no histrionics,” says Weatherall. “It was the antidote to the wailing diva thing we’d all embraced in house music.” It’s a gorgeous, lingering dream of an album with a dark heart, and as a suitable partner for Screamadelica it’s puzzling that it didn’t sell like hot disco biscuits, particularly as Boy’s Own now had the backing of a major label, London. “It’s easy to blame the record label,” says Weatherall, “so let’s do just that. The album came together nice and quickly – if they’d just have put it out, said ‘Here’s a cool new band’ and let them get on with it, one suspects the second album would have been where they got big.” But London kept Morning Dove White in limbo for a year, insisting on more pop mixes of the album’s singles by Stephen Hague. Those single mixes are actually superb, but, as Carmichael says “maybe they put a lot of the hardcore Weatherall fans off.” William Orbit remixed too, sonically prefiguring his work with Madonna and All Saints. Despite a promising performance from the singles, MDW didn’t become the hit London wanted, and the stress took its toll. The second album – made without Weatherall – was painful, the band’s relationship disintegrated, their “failure to become the new Eurythmics” led to the label shelving the album, and they split in 1996. Allison would go on to record solo, working with Death In Vegas, Pete Doherty and Scott Walker. McKinven still plays and DJs in Glasgow, and has released occasional projects, including the fantastically moody electro guises Organs Of Love and Women Said on the connoisseur’s imprint Optimo Music. Carmichael worked with trip-hoppers Lamb for some time, produced Bis and The Pastels, and maintains an ongoing relationship with The Orchids – as well as being a director of the School Of Sound Recording. MDW, a couple of B-sides and some leaked second album demos on Soundcloud are the only remaining monument to their time together: just a glimpse of what might have been, and as such, evocative of the pleasures and regrets of its era.