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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 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?!