The pale cast of thought: a few indecisive observations on 12" singles

"To die, to sleep / To sleep, perchance to dream; aye, there's the rub / For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come / When we have shuffled off this mortal coil / Must give us pause". Yes, and with Hamlet's to be or not to be passage having inspired the name of the 4AD dream-pop collective who knocked out the excellent 1983 version of Song To The Siren, we go from Shakespeare to Tom Moulton in this little blog. Because er, this is about 12" singles. Hmm, who cares about this format? OK, apart from DJs? Well, possibly no-one apart from DJs (a big exception) is really wedded to the big-single format. Being of the post-punk generation (loosely) which grew up on singles and then albums, 12" singles were always to me a bit of an anomaly. What were they exactly? When I was buying new-release indie stuff in the mid-80s - the Mighty Lemon Drops, the Primitives, Mighty Mighty, New Order, the Bodines - I neverthless swerved toward the 12" versions. Yep, I often bought these and not the perfectly serviceable (and cheaper) 7"s. Looking back, my reasons were a bit obscure. My preference for 12"s wasn't, mostly, because they had extended versions or special mixes. The bands whose music I bought weren't - New Order aside perhaps - dance music artists. I think in fact I often used to buy 12" versions of singles simply because they seemed like the "deluxe" version of whatever song had just come out. Most of this stuff arguably really "belonged" on 7" single, which was almost the natural home for short, sharp indie sounds. Nevertheless, I recall there was a sort of gravitional pull toward 12" singles during this time, a reorientation which also sucked in guitar bands of all kinds. Also, I reckon the marketing success of Factory Records with the Blue Monday 12" as well as the other NO 12"s probably played a part. These were undeniably nice-looking records and yes, some had special mixes on the 12"s. Anyway, the Song To The Siren 12" feels like it falls into this fuzzy category: a mid-80s record that somehow "worked" on the bigger format even though the track itself - as far as I'm aware - is no different to the version on the less-commonly-seen 7". Another example - I guess - is Bauhaus's Bela Lugosi's Dead: only available on a 12" and neverthless devoured by vampiric would-be post-punk goth kids like me. Another nudge in the direction of the bigger format. More simply put, as record consumers during this period we were all more or less captured by the cult of the 12" single. Of course, this was only a few years after the "invention" of the "disco-mix" 12" by Tom Moulton, who - rather neatly - seems to be having an extended mix himself as he lives on in the Bandcamp age, in his eighties and enthusiastically knocking out new mixes from his Manhattan apartment. Moulton gets a big plug in the liner notes to the Extended Seventies three-CD collection (2016) celebrating the twelve-inch format and its origins in mid-70s disco. I picked up this set a year or two ago and rather like the way it goes from Donna Summer's truly epic Giorgio Moroder/Pete Bellotte-produced Love To Love You Baby (CD1), clocking in at 16 minutes and 46 seconds, to Public Image Ltd's scarifying Death Disco (last track CD3), a mere 6:41 but who could ever survive a longer version than this? In another nice touch this CD set comes in three separate slimline single-CD jewel cases, a nod to the fact that these were all orginally singles. Big singles! Yes, massive unwieldy things that confusingly looked like albums but weren't. Anyway, I've rambled on like this for an extended period (ahem) because - of course - I've just done another of my famous music-cataloguing lists. And this time it's the 12"s getting the A-Z treatment. To celebrate this monumental achievement here's another quick (random) podcast made up of a few tunes from my 12"s* that caught my eye as I went through them. To have done this properly and in the spirit of the Moulten-esque disco mix I ought to have used only lengthy remix versions. But er, I didn't. Nope, it's a Niluccio mix of ordinary-length tunes originally just bunged out on a rip-off 12" by profit-maximising record companies, as well as a few bona fide special mixes. Ideally this 77 minutes of music should now itself be issued on a special very long 12" single. It could be a sensation, and five times longer than Donna Summer's puny Love You effort. Should I contact a few record-pressing plants to see about the practicalities? I'm undecided. Oh no, the native hue of my resolution has already become sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought ... 

*Three of these so-called twelve-inch records are in fact ten-inch records: Wave Pictures, FX Projekt and Johnnie Clarke. If the 12" format can sometimes seem quite strange, what about the 10" record? According to the Extended Seventies liner notes, the very first Tom Moulton extended mix was actually cut (by engineer José Rodriguez) on a 10" acetate as that was what was available, with his 12" disco mixes only coming along later on.

This Mortal Coil: William Shakespeare's favourite group

1: Borngräber & Strüver, Airport

2: Pinchers, Selvin Wonder, Singing Prince & Poison Dart, Trim your lamp (dub section)

3: Fun Boy Three, The more I see (the less I believe) (parts 1 & 2)

4: Alex Cortez, Reminisce

5: Red Guitars, Marimba jive (extended survival mix)

6: Stop The Violence Movement, Self destruction (extended mix)

7: Johnnie Clarke, Young rebel/Rebel’s dub

8: Woodentops, It will come

9: FX Projekt, Warface

10: Heaven 17, (We don’t need this) fascist groove thang

11: Calvin ‘Bubbles’ Cameron, Coconut head

12: New Order, Thieves like us

13: Friendly Fires, On board (Pig Bag version)

14: We’ve Got A Fuzzbox And We’re Gonna Use It, XX sex

15: No Form, Goddess of fire

16: This Mortal Coil, Song to the siren

17: Wave Pictures, Lea Bridge Roundabout