Buried Treasure

Since the huge commercial success of Peter Jackson’s ‘The Lord Of The Rings’ movies, it’s been easy to forget the significance of the JRR Tolkien novel to the 1960s counterculture hippies.

“If you’re very good I’ll invite you for tea and play ‘The Death Of The Clayton Peacock’, which would be the nicest thing that could possibly happen, and then we’ll go and feed the ducks.” 

“You have to play this album,” says Vincent, a fellow record dealer in Lincoln where my secondhand vinyl store lives.

Side-projects can be a complicated affair, particularly if you’re a fan of the precursory band. Acolytes find themselves talking up a lesser-known record they might not actually like very much, but a perceived obligation of support results in them writing cheques their misplaced loyalty can’t cash.

Die Doraus was Andreas Dorau, who was only 16 when he recorded 1981’s ‘Blumen Und Narzissen’ (‘Flowers And Daffodils’) with Der Plan’s Kurt Dahlke and Frank Fenstermacher for their fabled Neue Deutsche Welle label Ata-Tak.

As Darren Price’s ‘Under the Flightpath’ landed on my desk, I was about to fly away.

Somewhere, out there in the infinite multiverse, is a parallel reality version of Duran Duran.

An album can be revelatory in any number of ways. Perhaps it arrives at the right time in your life to be particularly resonant, or it might reveal a whole area of music you didn’t realise existed.

The artists that live on the fringes, the forward (or sideways) thinkers, have always drawn me in. This fascination really kicked in at university when, in the early 2000s, I presented a radio show with Erotic Volvo of Birmingham wrong-pop band Misty’s Big Adventure. As a kind of musicologist of the weird, his selections were never predictable and often a revelation.

Though Hefner survive in the collective consciousness as the exemplar of an indie guitar outfit, the band deployed vintage synths and drum machines on later recordings. Which means that this, The French’s ‘Local Information’, isn’t quite the without-precedent one-off it might first appear.