Monday 11 January 2016

Envy (1986/7) C46


I wrote a bit about Envy here, and if you've been following this blog you may be familiar with Apricot Brigade, their earlier and probably slightly better incarnation. I wasn't actually aware of being in possession of any recordings of Envy until I was looking through a couple of compilation tapes of all sorts of shit and noticed I had this, which was nice as I thought nothing had endured from my brief couple of months of pressing buttons in this band. It isn't actually a C46 so much as one side of a C90 also featuring some crap I recorded in Wales on an art college field trip and er... FLM by Mel & Kim taped off the wireless (and which is surprisingly better than I remembered it being) - but a fair few of the tapes I've slapped on this blog are listed as C46, C90 or whatever mainly so as to indicate duration rather than to attribute origin. Sometimes the material doesn't even all come from the same tape, but listing them as a C60 or similar just seems tidier (and besides, who cares?)

Anyway, tracks one through to sixteen comprise a rehearsal conducted around Andy's house at some point during the summer of 1986, most likely August; and the title My Sorrow is just a guess as I have no memory of the song or what it was called. I could have edited out all of the pissing about and false starts, but I didn't want to so if you want just the songs themselves shorn of mysterious silences and Rajun noodling about on his guitar, just delete anything which isn't actually a song once you've downloaded it. Unfortunately the tape upon which I recorded this stuff was kind of fucked and a bit stretchy in places. I've done what I could to clean it up, and I think it's listenable, but it should probably be noted that any tremelo effects you can hear weren't our doing.

After I was chucked out of Envy, Andy was replaced by Rajun's brother, Prez, and this line up recorded a fantastic five track demo tape in 1987, produced by Tim Beeby and Dave of DTS Studios (it says here on the cover). I was going to supplement the rehearsal tracks with the five later studio recordings but by ridiculous coincidence, that tape is also fucked. I managed to digitise A Suicide but the other four sounded like they'd been drinking cough syrup; which is a pisser, but I suppose at least I rescued A Suicide, which is nice because I honestly think it's a work of art, easily the best thing this band ever wrote.



Tracks:

2 - Twenty One Years
4 - Pale Orchid
6 - We Will Fall
8 - Cut So Deep
12 - Cut So Deep II
14 - Cut So Deep III
16 - My Sorrow
17 - A Suicide


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