Sulk (album)

''Sulk'' is the second studio album by Scottish post-punk and pop band the Associates. It was released on 14 May 1982 on their own Associates imprint of Beggars Banquet Records for the UK and throughout the rest of Europe on WEA Records and in the US on 4 October by Sire Records.

It stayed in the UK Albums Chart for 20 weeks, peaking at No. 10, and it was crowned the album of the year by British music magazine '' Melody Maker''. Although it was the group's breakthrough record both critically and commercially, it was to be the last studio album recorded by the original pairing of Alan Rankine and Billy Mackenzie, as Rankine departed four months after its release.

Recording

Signing a distribution deal with WEA Records at the end of 1981 on the strength of the demos for " Party Fears Two" and "Club Country", Associates were given a £60,000 advance by the record label. Having spent half of the advance immediately on block-booking a studio for an indefinite period of time, the band moved into individual rooms at the Swiss Cottage Holiday Inn in London, including an extra room for Mackenzie's pet whippets, which he fed on smoked salmon ordered from the hotel's room service. The band also spent large amounts of money on other items such as clothing and drugs. In a 2007 interview bassist Michael Dempsey recalled that "we were all ridiculously profligate. But it wasn't entirely ridiculous to be doing things that way because Bill would coax money out of record companies in a kind of mesmeric way. He thought that the more money we owed them, the more obligation on their part to make this work to get their investment back." Rankine said that the excessive spending influenced the sound of the album: "If we hadn't spent the money, the album wouldn't have got made in the way it did. It was mental, but there was also a self-assured cockiness, because we knew we had these songs."

''Sulk'' was recorded at producer Mike Hedges' self-built Playground studio, in a former warehouse in nearby Camden Town, and cost £33,000 to make. The stories regarding the recording sessions for this album have been well documented over the years. Rankine said that "I don't think there's been any exaggeration about what went on. If anything, I think people have been holding back a bit in their recollections. It was madness." He confirmed that the sessions included stunts such as urinating in a guitar and filling drums with water to see how it affected their sound, but that the story that the band had filled the studio with helium balloons was an exaggeration, stating that they had fooled around with a helium balloon that had been brought in one day, but no more than that. However, both Rankine and Dempsey said that despite the heavy spending and antics in the studio, the band worked long hours and were completely focused on the record they were making. Drummer John Murphy left the band shortly after completing the recording of the album, unable to cope with Mackenzie and Rankine's behaviour.

Writing and composition

The bulk of ''Sulk'' was written and recorded in the same sessions for compilation album '' Fourth Drawer Down'' (1981), and the bizarre antics in the studio were a result of the band experimenting with ways of creating new sounds. Rankine said, "We were constantly thinking of what we could do to make this sound different, what can we do with the tools that we've got—which was the musicians. We were the tools. It wasn't just for the sake of being different. But we'd look up lists of instruments and go, 'What the hell is a jangle piano?' The next day this piano would suddenly arrive with all these little metal bits. And that's what we used on 'Party Fears Two', for the intro." He also described their restructuring of the traditional drum kit to create an attention-grabbing sound: "What we did on Bap de la Bap"and quite a lot of the songs on ''Sulk'' was take away all the tom-toms and make the whole drum kit out of snare drums. So there'd be a seven-inch metal snare drum as the snare and a five-inch copper snare as one of the toms, and then maybe a real deep nine-inch black beauty made out of ebony as another tom-tom. So it made the whole thing really explosive."

Mackenzie's lyrics on ''Sulk'' are often cryptic and ambiguous. Speaking to ''NME'' at the time of the album's release about the band's biggest hit single, Mackenzie said, "'Party Fears' could be about a whole lot of things. It could be about a husband and wife arguing with each other. It could be about communism and conservatism, political party extremes. It could be about schizophrenics. The lyrics of a song like that go deliberately to the extremes to get something across, like an actor using a heavy hand gesture when he speaks a line."

According to Rankine, "'Nude Spoons' was about an acid trip Bill had had when he was fifteen or sixteen. Apparently, the spoons were copulating and there was a war going on between the spoons and the plastic flowers in the pot next to them." Rankine believed that "Club Country" was Mackenzie's response to attending the New Romantic clubs at the time and finding the scene to be very superficial.

Release and promotion

The first single released from the album was " Party Fears Two". It became the band's breakthrough single, reaching number 9 on the UK Singles Chart in March 1982. A second single, "Club Country", was almost as successful, reaching number 13 in May 1982. The singles' success owed greatly to Associates' memorable appearances on the UK's best known and most watched television music show of the time, ''Top of the Pops''. The group took the opportunity to subvert the family-friendly nature of the programme with absurdist pranks: on their second appearance performing "Party Fears Two", Rankine played the banjo while dressed in a fencing suit and wearing samurai make-up with chopsticks in his hair, while Mackenzie spent much of the song singing to the image of himself in the television monitors rather than face the audience or the cameras. For their final ''Top of the Pops'' appearance, Rankine had two chocolate guitars made by the London department store Harrods which he played during their performance of "18 Carat Love Affair", one of which he broke up and gave to audience members halfway through the song. Rankine said that the reason for their stunts was that "partly it was just a response to the boredom of having to be there at the BBC
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