The Associates were only ever a brief fling. Alan Rankine met up with a self consciously extravagant vocalist Billie Mackenzie in 1979. Success took its time coming though. It wasn't until their second album Sulk, that what they were doing appeared to align with the contemporary Zeitgeist. Party Fears Two and Club Country were both first recorded in the early days of their career. Recognising that these tracks were their best stuff to date, they didn't want to waste them by releasing them to an unreceptive audience. So they held both of them back and waited. Then in 1982 with Sulk, the time arrived, and they had a double whammy of hits in quick succession.
Mackenzie was always such a limelight grabbing glamorously effete presence. You have to very consciously turn your focus onto what Rankine is doing in the background, the edgy yet, furiously urgent guitar trilling, almost flamenco. The catchy piano rills, riffs and cadences. Everything in the production literally drowning in echo, the background singing, sound delays and reverb. This ought not to work, it ought to be an absolute acoustic mess, but it isn't. It pushes the sonic envelope, but it's also classy, and they knew that from the moment they made it.
Sulk was a rare thing, garnering both popular and critical acclaim. The Associates in their original twosome split later that year, 1982, due to the usual musical differences. Mackenzie liked spending the record company advance too much. He wanted the lifestyle and success a more pop orientated direction might bring. Rankine, ever the indie, wanted to keep pulling on the fringes of pop and letting it messily unravel a bit. In reality both were inveterate outsiders.
Despite the brevity of their popularity The Associates were daring, they could be dark and menacingly brooding one moment, then full of cabaret swagger or fizzing with stylish pizzaz the next. They had a huge influence on the next generation of performers such as Bjork and U2. Mackenzie made two more albums as The Associates, and one solo album, before sadly taking his life in 1997 at the age of 39. His reputation as probably the finest male vocalist of his generation remains intact. Rankine became a musical mentor, facilitator and producer for numerous Scottish bands, that included at one point The Cocteau Twins. He died, as you may know. quite recently in 2023 at the age of 64.
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