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The Red Shoes
by Anthony Adverse (ÉL Records/ 1988)
Purchased in an HMV sale on a soggy February afternoon in 1992, this album
proved something of an exotic departure from my then staple musical diet
of indie and post Madchester grooves.
I'd often perused the ÉL Records section within HMV's Oxford Street
megastore. Indeed, I was always intrigued by the covers which adorned
albums by the likes of Louis Philippe and the King of Luxembourg, which
for me suggested a refined European sensibility which pre-dated the rise
of greasy rock and roll (I seem to remember one Él Records cover
being a loving pastiche of a Gitanes cigarette packet). Unfortunately
though, at this time, my sense of musical adventurism was kept in check
by limited funds, meaning that I'd usually choose to hedge my bets with
more obvious choices. But Anthony Adverse at the knock down price of £3.49
- how could I resist? Particularly as the characteristically evocative
cover depicted Ms Adverse as a strong-jawed piece of posh totty clad in
fencing gear and generally looking like something out of a later episode
of The Avengers. Yes please!
When I first played the album, however, I wasn't sure what to make of
it. In fact, I have to admit that it did take two or three more years
for The Red Shoes to truly make sense to me. Partly, this was
due to the fact that ÉL Records was well ahead of the game. After
all, the label – which was once described as being 'like a glass
of blue milk' by one wag – was peddling a defiantly English and
Euro-centric aesthetic well in advance of the modish Brit-pop explosion
of the mid-to-late Nineties; a period in musical history when many influential
movers and shakers turned their back on the United States and were taking
influence from obscure Italian film soundtracks and the like.
At that time, I was running a cult bookstall in Camden with my pal, Paul
C, where The Red Shoes served as the soundtrack to many a pulp
paperback purchase. In retrospect, I acknowledge that The Red Shoes
served as the first significant injection of camp into a record collection
which had up until then, been rather bloke-ishly unreconstructed. And
it was a revitalising shot in the arm from which I've never looked back.
Dedicated to Emeric Pressburger and featuring some florid prose on the
cover about the kinship of "Romanticism and Artifice", The
Red Shoes is an appropriately effete blend of loungey, Sixties-inspired
orchestrated pop, featuring harpsichords, lilting Latin rhythms and even
Andrew's Sisters' style close vocal harmonising. Unquestionably, it's
a heady brew which, in my experience, has proved too rich for many a palette.
Oh, and it has to said that though Anthony's voice is strong, she ain't
no Dusty Springfield that's for sure.
Regardless, acquired tastes are always the most rewarding, and thirteen
years or so since I bought it, 'The Red Shoes', remains as one of the
most distinctive and best loved in my collection. And it also contains
one of the oddest songs in the form of the hilariously over-the-top "Garden
of Eden": this effectively being the Book of Genesis condensed
into a three-minute-twelve-seconds duet performed stage musical-style,
which comes to a dramatic crescendo, with Adverse declaring,
'In a flash, we realised that we were nude,'
to which a frightfully fruity male voice replies,
'Eve my dear, wear a leaf you look so crude.'
See what I mean about camp?
Copyright: Poke-in-the-Eye Publishing 2005