Talk:Disco Inferno (band)

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Disco Inferno were ceaselessly innovative and adored by critics. They were possibly the only band brave enough to take up the gauntlet thrown down in the late Eighties by pioneers like The Young Gods, Loop and My Bloody Valentine. "We were the only guitar band that took on technology and stayed a guitar band," commented Ian Crause. Moreover, where their forebears eventually found themselves mired in esoteric concerns or self-destructive perfectionism, Disco Inferno produced three albums' worth of consistently evolving, challenging music. Indeed, more even than the Young Gods - whose use of technology always seemed curiously futurist - Disco Inferno's music soundtracked the great, inconsolable vistas of the future. Anyone could pick out the reference points - Joy Division / early New Order; the taut, fractured, spiralling guitar of early U2; even Public Enemy and The Byrds - but the music remained essentially out of time. Eventually though, thoroughly disheartened by commercial indifference, the band imploded - tired, it seemed, of leading an expedition where no one wished to follow.

Formed in East London in 1989 when its members were only fifteen, the first line up also included Daniel Gish - better known as keyboard player with post-AR Kane explorers Bark Psychosis. A series of gigs in South and East London in front of largely indifferent parochial audiences honed their sound: aching guitar lines that sometimes appeared to teeter on the point of collapse; driving, stuttering drum patterns and Ian's alienated, elegiac, desolate vocal.

Reduced to a three piece by 1990, the band formed Che Records with Cheree's Nick Allport to release their own records. Their first single, Entertainment, - described as 'just about the most breathtaking, far-reaching record you'll hear this year', the equally well-received Open Doors, Closed Windows LP and the Science EP which followed it are now collected on the album In Debt (Che 4 CD), with an extra track, Broken, which had been previously released on a flexi with Ego Bruising Fanzine.

In Debt marked the end of an era: fired by the machine gun soundscapes of Public Enemy, the band embraced technology. The 1992 single Summer's Last Sound marked the move from Che to Cheree proper. The label collapsed in early 1993. The record - a Melody Maker Single of the Week - was an extraordinary swansong. Combining shimmering arpeggios, birdsong, dislocated melodies and murmured voices, it was a glistening statement of intent. "The technical possibilities were available to anyone ," Ian says now, "anyone who had the guts to go out and buy the equipment could do it."

Rescued by Rough Trade, the band released the appropriately titled A Rock To Cling To single to enormous acclaim. The Last Dance followed in May 1994. Writing in Melody Maker, Taylor Parkes hymned "the extremes of beauty and despair… they sound like drowning, the noise in side the womb as the mother turns cartwheels." The album it preceded - the cheekily titled D.I. Go Pop - was recorded in early 1993 but not released until a year later. Here the most fragile of melodies wrestled with dense, harsh soundscapes created from samples of - for example - breaking glass and running water, looped and beaten till they bled. Ian had wanted the samples to be integral to the music rather then simply set-dressing: "I wanted to use samples as a narrative device." Disoriented and disorientating, the album provoked ecstatic reviews: "D.I. Go Pop is the proverbial dog's bollocks,' wrote James Robert in the NME, "Fuck it, I'm addicted, let's do it again".

The Second Language and It's A Kid's World EP's grew out of early sessions for the band's follow-up. "No other band can make you feel so scarily alive," wrote Neil Kulkarni in Melody Maker of Second Language. Kid's World sampled the opening drum riff from Iggy Pop's Lust for Life to delirious effect and then… Well, the rest was not quite silence.

During the recording of Technicolour, the band made a 'conscious decision to become more accessible'. Paul's love of Scott Walker and The Beach Boys and Ian's fondness for The Smiths, Kraftwerk, the twelve string Richenbacher REM sound and - perhaps surprisingly - the vast production Owen Morris had given Oasis had resulted in a more open, melodic Disco Inferno. More than ever, they were pulling pop music into strange and lovely new shapes.

But the problems created by several years of minimal sales began to take their toll. It seemed that there was no place for the avant garde in the rapidly changing 'indie-rock' marketplace. On top of this, there had been arguments within the band over publishing and Ian and Paul hadn't spoken for six months. Despite having just recorded possibly their best work, they split. In the short time between finishing Technicolour and the split, Ian had produced - in a feverish two weeks of writing - half an album's worth of new material. He'd also devised a way of creating a 3-D recording - a system of microphones which would create fields of sound which could move in and out of each other. Sadly, none of this would be released. Technicolour slipped into limbo. They had formed to prove it was still possible to be original; now the brightest, bravest and best had been crushed on the brink of what might have been their greatest innovation.

Paul and Ian did not resolve their differences. Ian and Rob will be playing with their new band Floorshow later this year. Looking back now, Ian says "That amount of failure has changed me as a person. It's made me more cynical, more cautious." He pauses. "Those songs are just simple pictures, a five year old child's crayon drawing. They have a cartoon quality… it's not real."

Disco Inferno Discography

Entertainment - Che - 7"

Open Doors, Closed Windows - Che - LP

Science - Che - 12"

In Debt - Che - CD Compilation Album

Summer's Last Sound - Cheree - 12" and CD

A Rock To Cling To - Rough Trade - 12"/CD

The Last Dance - Rough Trade - 12"/CD

D.I. Go Pop - Rough Trade - LP/CD

Second Language - Rough Trade - 12"/CD

It's A Kid's World - Rough Trade - 12"/CD

Technicolour - Rough Trade - CD Album