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Mira / New Hope For The Dead / JVC Europe & Radiant Future / 1995 Martin Gordon - bass & production plus a cast of thousands, including Martyn Jacques from the marvellous Tiger Lillies Recorded around the world at great expense to wallets and friendships, New Hope for the Dead began life as a stage performance, featuring dancers, a live band, computor graphics, a trapeze artist, and break dancer, a martial artist and an aardvark. In an attempt to capture the ludicrously ambitious scale of the thing, the soundtrack was later recorded, albeit with a bit more peace and quiet about the place. Following the multi-cultural focus of the stage show, we assembled a cast of thousands - musicians from Pakistan, India, Egypt, the West Indies, Iran, China, Japan and the planet Mars, in one case. Some came with higher profiles than others - the Tiger Lillies' Martyn Jacques played accordion and sang on 'TV On Fire', Ravi Shankar's music director Chandrashekar played violin, guitarist Paul Gendler from the Spice Girls (as they then were and briefly recently were agaim) joined in - the list is too exhausting to even type. Compositionally, it was a collaboration between MG and Peter Culshaw, an English journalist/musician - the pair met in Bombay during the Boy George sessions. Jointly composed songs - some pop, others not - were recorded from various perspectives and the result was released by Radiant Future and JVC. The band subsequently went over to Switzerland and performed at the 1997 Montreux Jazz Festival (picking up the Spice Girls' percussionist, a jazz sax player, an Anglo-Indian keyboard player and the delightful Perla den Boer from the Dutch Antilles en route) before finally collapsing under it's own weight. But they did deliver a stonking version of Todd Runsgren's 'Tiny Demons' as a last gasp. And then it was back to the real world... The legendary (i.e. forgotten) album by this wacky collective is now available for download, including unreleased remixes and the live 'Tiny Demons' from Montreux. Featuring a horde of individuals both fascinating and dull, the newly-unearthed remixes are the bees knees. Indian violinist Chandru excels himself on 'Let There Be Violins' and MC ExkrewC8 is more than underwhelming on 'The Last Space Station'. This last features the afore-mentioned MC bellowing inanely over a loop programmed by a 2-year-old dyslexic, so it should do very well. There's also a blissful gamelan interlude, there are reworkings of the single 'Let's Not Talk About It' and, ooh, a whole pile of oddities. Download only from all reputable outlets, such as iTunes. And from all others... * New Hope reviews
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