Here’s a thought bubble: “When have you gone too far down a rabbit hole?” My answer: “When you start finding yourself flogging a dead horse.” So, before, excuse the pun, I dig any deeper: How many moons ago was it that I went down one exploring the nocturnal pop music influence of Glasgow’s own The Blue Nile?
While I doubt many of you, on the strength of that mix, would go on to rush to your favorite record shop and buy a Deacon Blue album. Perhaps, some of you (kind of like me) could try find a nugget of a record that was missing in my too brief compilation to keep that feeling going. One who did so was a fellow reader who shared a special one with: it was It’s Immaterial’s 1990 sophomore release, Song, a humdinger of a Liverpudlian take on Scotland’s quietly unique sound. So, rabbit holes be damned, I thought I’d build on their generosity and share another little-remembered gem for those foggy, rainy, April days when we need something like Botany 5’s Into The Night.
As you can imagine, 1991, the year that Botany 5’s Into The Night must have been a heady year for those looking to experiment with pop music. At the cusp of the rise of house and techno, deep into the pull of rap-influenced soul music, and keen to the stylings of the burgeoning lounge scene, many strokes for different folks were simply out there to try on for size. Edinburgh’s Gordon Kerr, Steven Christie, David Galbraith, and Jason Robertson weren’t immune to this.
Initially beginning in the mid-80s as the group, The Botany 500, a homage to the then iconic menswear line, spoke of a band with a stronger affinity to another Glaswegian crew, Edwyn Collins’s sophisti-post-punk group, Orange Juice. However, tying their horses to such a copyrighted brand name would only bring them legal trouble, forcing them to change their name and their hand on the direction they wanted to creatively take.
In 1986, the year they released their first and only single, “Bully Beef”, David Galbraith took the initiative to explore another sound burbling in Scotland. As Dolphin Club, David would create a proto-next-gen version of that “Blue Nile” sound where jazz, dub stylings, folk, and ambient intermingled into pop that was unlike little else. 1986’s ultra-rare Out of the Blue proved prophetic.
In some weird or parallel fashion, he was unknowingly assuming his ascendancy to assume the “Callum Malcolm” role of this group. With Botany 5, he’d find himself responsible for transforming this crew’s sound and music into something that could go beyond what their standard bearers trafficked in. Just three years later they’d find themselves in the studio with the real Callum Malcolm, floored by The Blue Nile’s Hats trying to tap into some of that spectral magic he’d added to their musical muse’s totemic release. Surely, they could expand on those ideas?
Together with vocalist Gordon Kerr, David Galbraith (now going by Dave Marin) wrote a song called “Love Bomb”, a pop song that had that “Blue Nile”-esque brew but also had a different flavor, rooted in dance music that could also work outside of mainstream radio. Under the tutelage of one of Warp Record label’s earliest infamous crews, LFO, somehow this chill ambient pop song, became a dancefloor heavy that the Virgin label thought they could make a hit on overground stations.
Sessions for Into The Night would present Botany 5’s wonderful twist to a certain sound. Rather than hide their dance influences, they’d roll them into that atmospheric vision presented by Hats. In the year of Massive Attack’s fiery trip-hop masterpiece, Blue Lines, Botany 5’s taps into a certain zeitgeist with Into The Night presenting a mirror vision, a “cool” comedown with equally hazy deviations. Opener, “Rise Angel”, a composition made up of some hyphy sample loop and those squiggly synths heard on releases by The Orb, The KLF – musical exemplars of that period – were now appearing on something with clearly, delineated, verses and choruses. You can imagine Richard Branson’s record stiffs were thinking what the heck do we do with this? Is it adult contemporary, club music, or something else?
A video was made for “Love Bomb” that completely undersold what was on the rest of the record. On it, a couple of shy kids from Edinburgh are dropped into the least-Scottish scenes one could imagine, rendering their intriguing Talk Talk-on-molly ballad into something meant for the stupider side of Ibiza-leaning music. It would chart in the low side of the Top 100, basically sealing their fate when the early ‘90s sweep of low-selling bands got escorted out of record contracts during huge record label consolidations.
Bully to all who actually journeyed on to give Botany 5’s actual full-length a spin. On it, just a track after, they’d hear gorgeous songs like “Gift From The Past” that captured Gordon Kerr’s imaginative meanderings and the rest of the crew’s awfully tasteful (or wonderfully understated) slinky grooves. Others like “Satellite” would point at the edges of burgeoning neo soul scenes that one would be hard-pressed to find outside of London and America’s East Coast. Stuck in between time and styles, Into The Night slipped through cracks that were, somehow, uniquely theirs for the time being. In the end, rather than being “The Blue Nile with trainers on”, they were an evolution their progenitors would have been wise to take.
I just find it fascinating that in that slipstream washing away New Wave, hair metal, and MOR rock, for grunge, techno, and Brit Pop, there was little room for a kind of group that pointed towards some third way to storm the charts. In hindsight, songs like “Shadows And Dreams” pointed to a limit. What one could appreciate as awfully understated and graceful, perhaps, wasn’t meant for a time when the cultural propulsion was toward angst and artifice.
“Nature Boy”, ends that album on what could have been a wonderful sign pointing to just what could have been. Bittersweet, joyful, and quite elegant for its time, this was a different sort of dance music for a different era, where the dance floor was one’s own bedroom (or found sharing an earbud with that significant other). Suffice it to say, we might not have heard it then, but surely we can hear this much clearer now.