Anni Hogan — Kickabye
It features two remarkable, stand-out tracks which Cold Spring understandably brought to the fore for their lovingly restored reissue:‘Vixo’ featuring Nick Cave on vocals would not be out of place on the classic From Her to Eternity album, the Bad Seeds’ debut that was released the previous year. Here, Annie Hogan’s piano plays a strong bass part similar to Barry Adamson’s loose, lumbering bass guitar, and is accompanied by pizzicato strings, wailing harmonica and a cool smoky rhythm as Cave grunts and groans with abandon. Next, Marc Almond takes to the mic for the up tempo ‘Burning Boats’, a track that was also released on his The House Is Haunted… EP that same year. It sees the singer lose himself in a hot, spinning Latin rhythm laid down so passionately by cellos, violin and Hogan’s piano. The alternative mix also offered on this reissue adds Foetus’ trademark frenetic drum machine, but in doing so demonstrates how the original cannot be intensified further. Consequently, the remainder of the EP feels much straighter and measured, with a series of simple jazzy blues numbers for piano joined by Hogan’s plain but sincere voice, played at the same imaginary bar for the lost and lonely that Cave’s and Almond’s crooning suits so well.
But with ears that welcome the familiar twists and turns of yesterday’s post-punk blues, it is the unreleased recordings that augment the rereleased Kickabye that now confound expectations. Many of those that were produced by Barry Adamson in the latter half of the eighties are pure pop in a similar vein to Strawberry Switchblade or The The’s Soul Mining, providing a new wave portent to the glut of Stock, Aitken & Waterman productions that were to follow. Tracks like ‘A Place to Belong’ and ‘Everything to Do’ recall how very tinny and brittle the eighties could sound when guitar, drum machine and synthesised strings compete for the same frequency band. They provide a welcome relief, albeit temporary, from today’s atonal abstractions and compressed-to-death ‘phatness’, but do not charm further across subsequent listens. Then there are four newly rearranged Marc Almond songs, all composed by Hogan at various points throughout the eighties. Here, they are played as solo piano pieces, all beautifully recorded in 2008, whose elegance brings to mind the more traditional and reserved moments of Baby Dee’s or Michael Cashmore’s ballads.
By the time ‘Kickabye’ was released, Hogan had established herself as a songwriter and pianist, and, combined with her residency at London’s Batcave nightclub (that apparently birthed the ‘goth subculture’), placed her firmly within a network of artists, many of which floated around Some Bizarre - Almond’s label of the time. From a twenty-first century viewpoint, this loosely extended family of artists is extraordinary not only for the self-belief and determination that lead to some of the most revolutionary chapters in rock music, but for how successful they all became and continue to be over two decades on: Tape Delay by Charles Neal published interviews with close to thirty of Hogan’s peers in 1987, and the majority of them is still prolific over two decades on (along with Almond, Cave and Thirlwell it featured Einstürzende Neubauten, Matt Johnson, Touch Records, The Hafler Trio, Diamanda Galas, David Tibet, Chris & Cosey, Laibach, New Order, Sonic Youth etc.). This much expanded and remastered edition of ‘Kickabye’ is a curious compilation that reveals and reminds how close to the mainstream the so-called ‘eighties underground’ would go, despite its dark subjects and wilful experimentation.