STRANGE DAY DREAMS

[drugogoputiyanevedal]

COLIN, Keith and Derek used the pay-off from Polydor to finance
the first period of their new venture, one that would require a
new attitude as well as a new name. It was Colin Angus' choice
— The Shamen — that eventually got used, a name taken from
the South American Indians who used hallucinogenic drugs as a
central part of their culture.

 As Colin expounds, "I liked it because it goes right back to antiquity - there have always
been shamans on the planet, ever since consciousness evolved. The roots of the name are
in prehistory and I liked that idea. I also liked the rhythm aspect of the name - drums
were always central to the shamanic tradition.
 "The word `shaman'," he continues, "also means someone who undertakes a cosmic
journey, who goes out of their mind into the realm of ideas on behalf of the community,
in pursuit of art, or knowledge, or healing forces. All these things appealed to my notion
of what The Shamen should be about."
 By late '85, The Shamen had swelled to a four-piece with the addition, very briefly, of
Alison Morrison on keyboards (she was soon replaced by Peter Stephenson). They started
playing live around Scotland throughout December '85 and January '86, and it wasn't long
before the local psychedelia-obsessed fanzine, Skipping Kitten, asked the band to record a
couple of songs, "Four Letter Girl" and "Stay In Bed", for a now much-sought-after flexidisc
entitled "Wayward Wednesday In May Affair".
 Even though The Shamen were without a record contract at this point, they did still have
some demos left over from their last few days at Polydor, a cassette of which, somehow,
found its way to Zippo Records, acknowledged champions of psychedelia. Zippo agreed to
release the demos on their subsidiary label, One Big Guitar, and, in March '86, The Shamen
put out their debut EP, "They May Be Right 
 But They're Certainly Wrong", which
was made Single Of The Week by Sounds.
 One of the tracks from the EP, "Happy Days", may have had a certain psychedelic quality
(one dictionary definition of the term is: "involving a sense of aesthetic joy"), but the
exhilarating tune only just managed to detract from the scathing anti-Tory/Falklands tone
of the lyric.
 Another track, "I Don't Like The Way The World Is Turning" (remember, this was the time of The Libyan Crisis and the Chernobyl catastrophe), also
pointed towards the bitterly-ironic critiques of such later Shamen pop-polemics as the "Jesus Loves Amerika" single, and the "In Gorbachev We Trust"
album.
 In their first interview with a leading music paper, Colin and Derek told Melody Maker's Sorrel Downer: "We're just two very ordinary guys, saying
things about what any sensible person can see by looking around them. It doesn't take any spiritual enlightenment, or a great political stance.
 "We're here to entertain people," they went on, "and, maybe, make them think for a while, which is about as much as you can achieve within the
limits of a pop song. We're not on a pedestal for a political faction, we're just here to write a few good tunes."
 Colin is not all that unfavourably disposed towards The Shamen's debut offering, even to this day. As he says, "It was psychedelic indie rock, but
with a Techno edge. Especially `Happy Days', where nothing was actually played on the backing track - it was all samples, drum sounds and audio
triggers. It was quite hi-tech and state-of-the-art, really, even if the overall impression was one of retro-psychedelia."
 In fact, it was The Shamen's addition of technology to their live set-
up that annoyed many of their contemporaries. Although, in hindsight,
critics tend to lump The Shamen together with the numerous guitar
janglers and retro-heads known collectively as The Shambling C86 Bands
(The Wedding Present, Primal Scream, Bogshed, The Shrubs, The
Bodines, et al), quite a few of their contemporaries denied the
connection, sometimes quite vigorously.
 "Because of our Techno element, some of those bands just didn't
want to know us," recalls a bemused Angus. "Because Keith had his
drum machine - he was, maybe, the first-ever drummer to use a stand-
up Simmons kit - and due to the fact that we used sequencers and
samplers on our records, other indie groups of the time got really pissed
off with us, to the extent that bands such as Primal Scream and The
Pastels actually refused to play live with us.
 "We weren't a proper retro Sixties' band, that was our problem," he
continues, remembering some of the less-antiquated outfits of the
period. "Age Of Chance weren't a particularly great group but they were
a lot more progressive than the others at the time, as were The Bodines,
who were much less Luddite and far more open-minded than bands like
The Wedding Present."
 Before The Shamen could release their second single proper, they had
to find a record label. After searching for the right deal, they decided
to set up their own, organised by their manager and long-time friend,
Charles Cosh. Soma, the drug used to suppress the masses in Aldous
Huxley's "Brave New World", was their original choice but there was
already a label with that name, so the band opted for Moksha (meaning
"enlightenment", from a collection of Huxley's essays on psychedelic
and visionary experiences), and kept Soma as their release prefix.
 The Shamen's first release on Moksha was "Young Till Yesterday"
(backed with a cover of Syd Barrett's "Golden Hair", and the extremely
Barrett-esque "It's All Around"), in November 1986. It was another
Single Of The Week, and one which dented the lower reaches of the
independent charts.
 The band started to receive a bewilderingly diverse series of
comparisons around this time, ranging from Roxy Music and The Everly
Brothers to Teardrop Explodes and Wire, and Colin Angus, who, by now,
had stopped working as a full-time psychiatric nurse ("I was on an
Enterprise Allowance Scheme," he says, "or, as it came to be known,
an Ecstasy Allowance Scheme!"), began to divulge his keen interest in
the dark side of the human psyche to startled interviewers.
 "Chronic schizophrenics have some quite inspiring ideas," Angus told
Melody Maker, back in 1986. "They imagine cosmic things like floating
round the universe, drifting with the sun, merging with the angels, very
William Blake sort of stuff. But, to be convincing, you really have to
experience that sort of thing for yourself."
 It wasn't long before Colin was undertaking (hallucinogenic or
pharmacologically-enhanced) dazzling journeys through the psychedelic
imagination himself.