Mayflower

In the summer of 1990 I had the good fortune to spend a day with Tim Alborn, editor of the rather excellent "Incite!" fanzine, who was over in the UK at the time. Back then, his Harriet Records label was a fledgling, a mere three releases old: even now I still have - and treasure - the 7"s by High Risk Group, Fertile Virgin and Linda Smith that I got from Tim that day.

Being a green English boy half way through his A-levels who had never even met a real life American before, I was very impressed not only by these accomplishments but that he had been to school with the likes of Galaxie 500 and Big Dipper; that while in England he'd met the Field Mice and the Carousel; that he liked the Darling Buds, too; that he shared my deep suspicion of what was then the burgeoning "Madchester" scene (believe me, at the time that was teenage heresy). My diary also records rather sweetly that, recently married, he was very much in love.

Anyway, back then none of us could have truly known of the quality that Harriet would continue to deliver over forty-plus releases, and some of the bands it would help introduce to the world (the Magnetic Fields, Tullycraft, the Cannanes, Hulaboy, the Extra Glenns, Crayon, Wimp Factor 14, My Favorite and so many others were to put out singles on Harriet in the 1990s).

Nor could we have dreamed that one day, we would be able to access every single issue of the fabulous Incite! at the click of a button. But technology has *achieved*, meaning that if you scoot over here you can, like us, rediscover and re-read a host of stuff about bands great and good from both sides of the Atlantic, and reflect on the heyday of a nearly-lost art.

Catching up with Tim's current profile, I note that he's had two books published on commerce in nineteenth-century England. I could have done with his impressive knowledge of the Victorian era when it came to those A-levels...

And one day, I fully intend to say more about Harriet Records' greatest hits. But given the speed at which I get round to things (of which Tim is all-too aware), you may well want to start with a summary from the venerable pages of Incite! itself.

Saucer

Some bands are just unsung. Wrongly, criminally so. 555 had many such bands, but over the years we’ve tried at least to tell you how much a few of them meant to us (and still do): not only the justly celebrated Boyracer and the sainted Hood but also the likes of Downpour, Halkyn, Empress, Famous Boyfriend... we reserve the right to come back to all of them. But Saucer are a combo that we never got round to praising, possibly even mentioning. In this, we were severely remiss.

Their album, 555CD25, then. "Saucer" by Saucer. A completely overlooked but v. rewarding 2001 outing from the mysterious and muchly-instrumental quiet-fi trio. Think stretched-out Empress or Halkyn, with a touch of the Wedding Present at their very quietest: they could have been the north’s answer to Kyoko. Seven tracks, none with titles: they can be identified only by song length (Empress did something similar). It's a work of understated brilliance.

The first minute and a half consists of nothing more than looped birdsong, before the 'signature' Saucer sound - a lone electric guitar, but played *quietly* - gradually intrudes. Not unlike Halkyn's wisping string-scapes, but drawn out. No other elements are added: no bass, no percussion, no keyboards, no voice. Six minutes of atmosphere. The second song "builds" - gently - and a vocal appears for the first time. A little boy lost. The electric guitar, still played quietly, delicately frames the shapes it needs to. There's the tiniest hint of the Wedding Present's most fragile new-century moments: but whereas those oases of near-silence invariably explode into noise, these sounds stay warm, intimate, tender. The third song, by Saucer standards, almost feels like "full orchestra": there are drums! And a female backing vocal! But then, through it all, there are those crystalline electric guitars again, weaving away, never in danger of rocking out.

The fourth song recognises that things got a bit overblown: we are back to a single sound, an electric guitar, picked not strummed, plucking a certain sadness from the night air. The fifth song goes back to still, clipped pulses, wantaway vocals and girl backing vocals - "this makes me nervous", they sing - as if Empress specialised in six minute songs rather than one minute ones. Eventually, the drums intrude once more. As for ‘song six’, it's a breakthrough: the guitars finally rise up and strum, as they’d been threatening too all album, a Gedgetastic-ish wall of noise that subsides, then rises again one long verse later.

Oh, and then there’s… track seven. But we’ll save that for another day.

There are a couple of Saucer tracks on 555 compilations, too (another reason that label was frankly so ace) although, disappointingly, they seem to have titles. "Barney" is an instrumental that, like that sixth track on the LP, flares occasionally into distracting, errant guitar noise: it's great, but the trouble with the noisy parts is that they distract you from the fact you're listening to tremblingly beauteous songs, and make you half-feel you're listening to Weddoes instrumentals. And then there’s “I Miss You So”, a tiny nugget of melancholy on “555CD55”, sadness cut and pasted from the blinking and the teardrops of “Saucer” the album.

So what do we know about Saucer ? We would have sworn they were a solo project, given that most of the songs are laced so sparsely with instrumentation, and the virtual impossibility when you get any number of musicians in a room together that they won't instantly try and drown each other out, but apparently they were a trio (from - of course - West Yorkshire, which hardly rules out links with other 555 alumni). At our local Ladbrokes, the smart money is that Darren Belk (once of the Wedding Present) might have been involved.

The irony is that there are probably other records we raved about in 2001, but that which we've hardly listened to since. Yet "Saucer" is something that we're still loving, still feeling, more than a decade on. Hopefully all of the happy few who own this record feel just the same.