50 Quid Soundboy

This record has been played a lot at my house since it arrived, although the inevitability that when my kids grow up they won’t "get" Ghost Box (or "ghostie post" as my three year old incorrectly read it off my t-shirt today) because they won’t have any memories of watching wobbly VHS editions of Programmes for Schools and Colleges is causing me genuine low-level anxiety. Futures such as these are what I wake up early to worry about: the resonances this music induces in my radiophonic engrams are so wonderful that I don’t want to contemplate what it would sound like without them.

Nuclear Substation is throbbing electrical danger transmitted from a parallel past where Chernobyl didn’t happen, and its counterpart Public Information Film packs a short and terrifying punch(line). When The Cuckoo Comes deploys one of the cleverest voice sample cut-ups of all time to create a queasy zone of wrongness reminiscent of the "event site" from M. John Harrison’s Nova Swing, in which a malfunctioning nature turns time and perspective against you. The title track Mind How You Go does the whole Tomorrow’s World thing (also engagingly played with in the soundtrack to the hilarious first series of Look Around You). Osprey is sunshine on a picturesque rural village a couple of hours before your jolly summer hike ends in a bloody pagan nightmare beneath the Post Office. And Belbury Poly show up at the end of this "revised edition" of the 2006 album, remixing When The Cuckoo Comes into their distinctive "Wicker Man with VCFs" synthetic folk.

This is intensely evocative music that, despite its necessary reliance on the familiar and (mis)remembered, is also profoundly original and special – its relationship with the past is not one of pastiche but rather symbiosis and duplex transmission of meaning: there’s nothing else really like it. Somehow there is a larger world contained in this forty minute record than you’ll find in many conventionally narrated sagas, and it is one that I hope The Advisory Circle will be on hand to guide me through again soon. Mind how you go.