The Future Now

In 1983, Chester fanzine Buildings & Houses released New Futures, a compilation cassette of local bands and assorted musical and artistic curiosities.

A friend from out of town contacted the Speedboat offices, having read our feature on indie nearly-men Roger’s Brother in SB4. ‘You didn’t mention  the compilation,’ she said, ‘The what?’ we replied. Research ethics required a meeting: ‘The Buildings and Houses idiots,’ she told us over a glass of iced Bovril in the latest pop-up beef tea stand in Hoole. ‘They put a cassette of local bands together and sold it in Clavertons, Tudor House, places like that.’ Our agents were deployed, eBay scoured, lofts in Garden Lane were subjected to forensic searches…but eventually, our friend pulled off a stunning coup d’estime: an actual plastic and cardboard copy of this lost master work. The office audio lab was cleared and the initial gritty clicks were analysed. The first two tracks have been cleaned for your listening pleasure, or curiosity. More may follow.

1. Paperback Marxist, 'Fernsehen'

Like other tracks on New Futures (also the title of a science fiction anthology series published in the 1970s by the Northgate Press—an obvious candidate for a future SB investigation) this track was known in another format, but we were stunned to be handed a copy of this cassette of Fernsehen, previously only known to exist on seven-inch vinyl on Paintpot Records. This one is on Magic Mountain Tapes, with a previously unknown PM track: ‘Buddenbrooks’. Thomas Mann was obviously on the A-level syllabus that year. 

2. Farewell Helen, 'Sleep in Rust'

With the faint possibility that this is the work of the taller Dave from Paperback Marxist, this must have been a bit of an antidote to the relentless industrial gloom of Dave’s main outfit. A collaboration with a collective of local, classically trained Cathedral schoolgirls who explored local folk song and dance traditions. Dave guests on voice, chanting a mash-up of an old Cheshire folk rhyme with some modern farm machinery references thrown in over a circular canon. ‘Sleep in Rust’ appeared on Paintpot as a one-sided flexidisc, as things so often did in 1983. The collective seems to have had access to some money through what must have been the end-stage Northgate Arts Lab, best known in the Speedboat world as publishers of ‘Bombadil’ in the early '70s (see SB2).