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November 1995, Music Boulevard
Cranes' very first incarnation was in the late eighties, made up of just the brother and sister musical partnership of James Shaw (music) and Alison Shaw (lyrics). Raised together in Portsmouth, an obsessive mutual teenage regard for Joy Division and various Nick Cave and Foetus projects fueled a variety of fledging musical projects. A desperate bank loan enabled an 8-track recording machine to be purchased, and in their tiny basement on the wrong side of town they produced one particularly claustrophobic, intense and harrowing selection of music which became the cassette album Fuse. The recordings set a mold Cranes sound from there on in — an uplifting outburst of harsh guitar flares, serial melody parts and Alison's unique, swirling, childfreaked vocals.
Hooking up with a small local label, a vinyl LP called Self Non Self was produced and through the start of a series of appreciative reviews, this LP got noticed quickly, resulting in a session on the influential U.K. John Peel show. Within months, Cranes were on the cover of Melody Maker (a record-breaking six singles-of-the-week would follow) and signed to Dedicated Records. The Melody Maker cover story touted them as the great antitots to the Madchester wave in Idiedance while the photo session involved nude pictures of the band in a small lake on Hampstead Heath with everyone involved only narrowly escaping arrest.
By the time the first Dedicated EP Inescapable was released, new members Mark Francombe and Matt Cope were in place. Mark had been in numerous weirdo Portsmouth outfits and had been an art and film student in the town's college, studying animation and graphics. He would go on to create all the band's early videos and back projection. Matt, barely out of his teens, had been working as a stage technician for various Portsmouth venues and as a guitar tech at Cranes gigs in town. He knew the set well and was drafted in immediately when a second guitarist was needed.
The Inescapable, Espero, Adoration, and Tomorrow's Tears EP's formed a set of eighteen songs released before the Wings of Joy album came out, all of them assuming independent Number One chart positions. Produced by James himself, Wings of Joy mixed almost classical interludes of music with huge, Young Gods-style dust storrms of cauterizing guitar attacks and profound Cocteau Twins-inflected sweetness, with Alison's vocals at perhaps their most tormented. The album went Top 40 immediately and straight to number One on the independent charts. Guerlain, one of the biggest fragrance houses in the world, loved the lead track of the album so much they used "Watersong" as the theme for a Eurowide campaign.
While planning for their second album, word came that The Cure were planning their new world tour and were considering Cranes as the support act. Robert Smith and Simon Gallup were both admirers of Cranes and had listened to Wings of Joy regularly whilst putting together their own Wish album, All Cranes plans were put on hold when they were chosen to go on the entire world tour, and Matt, a long-time Cure afficiando and collector of their record rarities, found himself taking the stage with his favorite band and playing to collective audiences of half a million people all over the world. The experience showed Cranes that they could take their distinctive musical vision to a massive world audience and communicate in a way that other great British outsider bands like The Cure, Depeche Mode and U2 had done previously. For seven months, Cranes toured the world in a small van with only a tour manager and sound man as crew. And when Alison became ill towards the end of the world tour in France, Robert Smith notably came on to play her missing vocal parts on guitar, joined by the rest of The Cure to jam through the entire set!
A new identity was forged and after the album again shot into the Top 40, the follow-up "Jewel" single (remixed by Robert Smith) gave the group their first Top 30 single in Britain and Norway. Other mixes by Cranes fans J.G. Thirwell and 4AD supremo Ivo-Watts Russell also appeared on a successful multi-set vinyl package.
By this stage in touring, Cranes' fan base had built up worldwide to the level where they were selling out thousand-capacity venues (and larger!) throughout Europe and America. In Prague and Bratislava, mini riots ensued when venues ran out of tickets. In Belgium, speaker stacks were mounted and toppled. In Italy, they were mobbed.
After completing their seventh tour of Europe in the wake of the Forever campaign, Cranes took a brisk holiday and started working on their third album for release in October 1994. James' interest in classical and film music had become increasingly established and Alison's abiding interest in French literature had led her to reread Jean Paul Sartre's strange expressionistic play The Flies. The forthcoming album was shaping up as a double set — half of it expanding the ever-Cranesian universe of orchestral splendors and half-based around the Satre play. This latter would feature Alison singing entirely in French over a kind of film score composed by James as if for some Peter Greenaway/Jean-Jacques Beineix remake of The Flies.
The prospective double-album has been separated into an album entitled Loved and The Flies set, probably to be titled The Tragedy of Orestes and Electre, to be released later as a mini-LP/maxi-EP. Flood (U2, Depeche Mode, etc.) has completed mixes for "Lilies" and "Paris & Rome," while superproducer Michael Brauer (Belly, George Michael, etc.) completed a mix of the first single, "Shining Road."
Reviewed by and © Arista Records, Inc. 1995
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