Once upon a time there were British music weeklies. In 1991 there were still three more: Melody Maker, New Musical Express (Nme) and Sounds. Their job, in those years without the internet, without social networks and without blogs, was to create hype, that is, feverish expectation on new bands and new musical scenes. The word hype I had already heard it in a 1988 piece by Public Enemy, Don’t believe the hype, but it was one of the many things they said that I didn’t understand at the time. I think I finally understood what that meant hype in 1990 reading Melody Maker, which in Rome was found almost only in the newsstands of Via Veneto, melancholy fragments of Sweet life.
In 1991 the hype for World of Twist it was skyrocketing: their debut album had not yet been released but the weeklies were talking about their singles and especially their ramshackle live concerts. The critic Simon Reynolds in the review of their show at the Astoria in London wrote: “Futuristic shock waves of glutinous moog invest us in a plastic bliss. The kitsch earthquake is coming and will make your eyes pop out of their sockets ”. In short, it was no longer in the skin. Me first.
World of Twist was formed in Sheffield around 1985 but theirs line up it has always been more unstable than a radioactive isotope. People came and went: they either fought or just forgot they were in a band. In the very first team of World of Twist there was also James Fry, the brother of Martin Fry of Abc. In 1989 the members of the group stabilize: Tony Ogden (singer), Gordon King (guitar), Andy Hobson (keyboards and synths), Julia aka MC Shells (swirls and marine sounds. Yes, exactly) and Angela Reilly (visual effects) . Drummer Nick Sanderson would join a little later giving a straighten up to the chaotic and, as Reynolds wrote, “glutinous” sound of the band.
In 1990, after the release of a first ep, they were signed by Circa records, a subsidiary of Virgin. All the money from the advance is spent on special effects for the concerts: self-propelled faces that portray the members of the group, a gigantic volcano that shoots flames (immediately abandoned because it was too dangerous and because it did not enter, even disassembled, tour bus), a rotating spiral and various trinkets of psychedelic retrofuturism. World of Twist have not yet focused on their sound but they have certainly fine-tuned their image of extras escaping, in a daze, from an episode of the Doctor Who of the sixties. In the first television appearances they have something of Andy Warhol’s Velvet Underground: a pulsating and narcoleptic sound, a lot of foil wrapped all over the place, on the instruments, on the arms, on the face, plastic, bubbles and smoke. The World of Twist of 1991 is a happening for the rave generation, the last gasp of the Manchester scene, the last good ecstasy before the explosion, on a transatlantic scale, of britpop. And speaking of britpop: the Gallagher brothers are in Manchester at the same time and think, for a very brief moment, to call their band not Oasis but Sons of the Stage, as one of the first, enthralling hits of the World of Twist. The love for that song has remained over time because Beady Eye (the band formed in 2009 by Liam Gallagher) recorded a version of Sons of the stage as the b-side of a single from 2011.
Retromania
Like all crazy things, World of Twist doesn’t last long. When it comes out Quality street, their debut album, eagerly awaited by the press and fans, they are already blown. Yet it is an album that, listened to again today, is the fragment of a parallel universe in which World of Twist could have been the greatest of all. They had the songs, they had the aesthetics, they had the vision. They had everything but the ability to focus on the reality they lived in.
Quality street is a masterpiece of eccentricity and retro mania right from the cover, which recalls the Victorian characters of that famous purple can of chocolates that was found in many supermarkets, including Italian ones, along with other British delicacies such as After eight and Digestive biscuits. Gordon King, the guitarist, recalls: “The day we took the cover photos was the best we had together as a band.” The group, dressed and combed as a companion of Victorian gentlemen, hopes for a quiet day: it is July and in Manchester we are dying of heat. The streets, on the other hand, are full of European kids on study holidays who make noise and make fun of them. Among the props there is also a very dangerous velocipede that among the laughter is experienced by all at the risk of the neck bone. “My best memory of that day”, concludes King, “is Andy dressed as Benjamin Disraeli looking seriously at electronic music titles in the window of a record shop”.
Quality street he didn’t have time to go out, on 28 October 1991, thathype around the World of Twist it deflates like a soufflé. The inexcusable flaw of the disc is not in the songs but it is in a wrong mastering that flattens the sound. What was intended to be a torrential, enveloping and three-dimensional record, once put on the vinyl seems to arrive like a message recorded from an answering machine on the other side of the world.
Too bad because the great pieces are not lacking: in addition to Sons of the stage (produced by The Grid, aka Dave Ball of Soft Cell) there is the magnificent The storm and the deliberately gooey and vaguely kitschy Sweets, in whose video also appears Bob Stanley of Saint Etienne. To complete the offer, as varied as in a box of Quality street sweets, there is also an ultra-psychedelic cover by She’s a rainbow dei Rolling Stones.
World of Twist had it all: great pieces, a strong aesthetic, a magnetic presence, a sincere love for the progressive rock (perhaps the least cool music to love in the early nineties), a passion for sixties pop, glam rock and psychotropic substances. All this was not enough and thehype British immediately went on to grind its great story of the mid-nineties, that of the rivalry between Blur and Oasis. The World of Twist album (finally remastered properly in 2014 by the willing 3 Loop music label) is there to remind us that in a parallel universe we could have had Blur versus World of Twist instead of Blur versus Oasis. Then yes there would have been a laugh.
World of Twist
Quality street
Circa, 1991 / 3 Loop music, 2013