Chart entered : 18 November 1989
Chart peak : 10
Number of hits : 15
More rave music from Manchester now. I took a real dislike to this lot after their leader Martin Price made some contemptuous comments about the customers in his shop in an interview with Smash Hits although I didn't mind some of their later singles.
Martin was nearly 30 when he set up a record stall called Earwig Records in the Afflecks palace shopping arcade in Manchester to get off the dole in 1986. It did well and the stall became a shop in a larger premises nearby. It changed its name to Eastern Bloc and divided its stock between dance imports and indie music. Martin wanted to make music of his own and formed a hip hop trio with Graham Massey and Gerald Simpson. Graham was in his late twenties and had been in a jazz rock group called Aqua in the late seventies but was working in a cafe when Martin met him. They soon switched to acid house instead and changed their name to 808 State after a drum machine.
Martin set up his own label to release their debut album "Newbuild" in September 1988. I confess to approaching it with some trepidation but it's actually fairly inoffensive background music. There are no tunes among its seven tracks but no challenging white noise bleeps and squelches either.
At the start of 1989, Simpson left to make his own records under the name A Guy Called Gerald. Martin and Graham recruited two much younger customers, Andy Barker ( the Charles Kennedy lookalike ) and Darren Partington who D|J'ed together as The Spinmasters.
This line up released the 12 inch EP "Quadrastate" in July 1989. The opening track was "Pacific State " a dense house track garnished with wildlife noises, Native American chants and a repeating saxophone part. I prefer the track "Disco State" which makes more concessions to melody but again none of it's particularly abrasive.
The record went down well in Ibiza and crucially "Pacific State" caught the ear of holidaying Radio One DJ Gary Davies who starred playing it on his show. ZTT , recovering from their court defeat to Holly Johnson, signed them up and released a new version of the track. "Pacific" is a shortened and speeded-up version of "Pacific State" which jettisons the Native American sections so that the sax refrain becomes more or less continuous . I first heard it in a pub on Oxford Road in Manchester after watching the Prisoner Cell Block H stage play ( dire but I don't know what else I was expecting ) and thought, from a similar chord in the intro, that it was The Pet Shop Boys' Heart cranking up but instead it was just this weird instrumental track that didn't seem to go anywhere. The band got to perform it on Top of the Pops ushering in the infamous "men in baseball caps jigging about" era ( apart from Andy who was dressed in a Chinese smoking gown ).
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