I know ‘Balearic’ has become a lazy journo buzzword over the last few years, but it’s impossible to deny that the White Isle exercises some kind of phantasmic hold over any number of disparate synthetic hand-drum botherers – indeed Scando-disco kingpins like Todd Terje have been pretty much dining out on Balearic edits for a while now. Oakey and Rampling’s 1985 spiritual awakening at Amnesia has long since passed into music lore, as have Alex Paterson’s epic proto-chillout sets in the White Room at Heaven, where “throwing down a banger” sometimes actually meant playing Manuel Gottsching’s E2-E4 in its entirety. Indeed, I think it may be the “rare groove” element of Balearica that makes it so enduringly appealing - arguably the perfect Ibiza record is built for a view, real or imagined - an impossibly wide Mediterranean seascape backlit by a molten sunset, perhaps – rather than the dancefloor, and as such, need not conform to any rigid genre types. This democratisation of the record box means dusty crates marked ‘dodgy 70s yacht rock’, ’holiday resort disco’ and ‘krautist meandering’ are all fertile ground for the Balearic digger, and the prospect of unearthing some forgotten gem and scoring maxo-nerdpoints is always just around the corner. It also explains how the absurdist whimsy of Penguin Cafe Orchestra’s Music for a Found Harmonium can sit happily alongside the plaintive guitar wankery of Chris Rea’s On The Beach in any throwback on-the-terrace-at-the-Cafe-del-Mar set.
p.s. it was Yeasayer’s uber-Balearic ‘Sunrise’ that got me thinking about this.
Going to start this series with some of the obvious ones, just to get them out the way y’know.
Chris Rea – Josephine (Version Longue) (1985)
Sun-lounge disco perfection. Sangria at the MOR tiki bar.
Art Of Noise – Moments In Love (Full Version) (1984)
High-brow sonic collagists give birth to “chillout”, probably by accident. Caspa did a solid dubstep refix of this last year.
Linda Di Franco – My Boss (Extended Version) (1986)
Don Was (of Was (Not Was))-produced bit of vampish pop fluff, with some plastic sax skronk and heavily accented cod-rapping. Recently given a much needed reissue.
