Cardiacs - Opposites Attract

The Cardiacs' story is one of anomaly. Inspired by progressive rock, yet children of the punk-era do-it-yourself spirit, rather than winning over either audience, they flopped with both. They could have simply vanished after their early failures, but instead swam against the current for four decades, absorbing its transformations and reshaping them into a style as recognisable as it is impossible to pigeonhole. The press snubbed them, when it didn't outright insult them, and although it softened considerably over the years, it never quite got in tune with their music and its contradictions: hyper-complex yet spartan, hilarious yet caustic, chameleonic yet somehow always monochromatic in feel. A label was coined specially to describe them — "pronk", a ramshackle portmanteau of "progressive" and "punk" — but their leader, singer, guitarist and chief songwriter, Tim Smith, consistently filed his own style under "psychedelic pop".

To tell the story of their music, it's worth starting from the Beatles, about whom Tim Smith would later declare: "I've only ever met one person who didn't like them, but I think that was just to seem cool." From the Beatles, masters of phantom beats and startling chord changes, and then from the Who, from whose sheet music for "Quadrophenia" the young Smith learned to read music — a skill that would prove essential a few years later, when he chose the path of musical notation to give shape to his byzantine musical visions. From the sound of the instrumental tracks on "The Man Who Sold The World" he drew inspiration for his first forays on guitar, having briefly played bass before handing that role over to his brother Jim. Genesis, Gentle Giant, Van Der Graaf Generator, as well as Frank Zappa, the Canterbury bands and the beloved Gong all proved an irresistible call to flee convention and explore the magic of oblique passages and shifting moods. But it was with punk that Tim and Jim realised that playing music could be something more than making a racket through an amp – that it could become their life: "When punk came along," Tim would recall, "it was kind of like, 'oh look, you can do it yourself, you don't need producers or whatever', and it was great, it was amazing news for everyone – except for those unlucky enough to be seen as out of fashion […] Like proggy stuff. […] Unless you were playing something that was disguised as punk but actually wasn't, like Devo, or Split Enz."

Or Magazine. Or Essential Logic, Family Fodder, This Heat, Punishment Of Luxury, Gloria Mundi, Stump, Ludus, The Work, The Flying Lizards…

There was an entire scene, in England around the turn of the Seventies into the Eighties, of bands merging prog's intricacy, the raw drive of punk and new wave, and – on occasion – the irreverence of Sparks. But the Cardiacs weren't part of it. Even though their hometown of Kingston Upon Thames is, after all, a London suburb, they got off the ground too slowly: they were out of the game. By the time the arc of those bands had begun and ended, the Cardiacs – initially perhaps called "The Filth", then definitely "Cardiac Arrest" – hadn't even released a proper single yet.

They missed the boat, and it wouldn't be the last time. But Tim and Jim Smith weren't discouraged: they'd only just started having fun! Tim had decided to drop out of school to dedicate himself entirely to music, and there was no question about that choice. They would always do things their own way. Even years later, when mainstream recognition seemed within reach, they would turn back and reaffirm the independence of their path. They would never break through, but over the course of nearly thirty years they built one of the most solid cult followings in the British underground, one capable of uniting (as the fanzine Organ already noted back in 1987) a wildly diverse fanbase that included fans of Celtic Frost and Fields Of The Nephilim alongside fans of Marillion and Ozric Tentacles. A following that would keep growing over time, eventually influencing major artists such as Blur and Mr. Bungle, and opening up a musical universe to dozens of other bands (with dozens more still to come!).

The Demo Years (1980-1984)

The earliest recordings, sold only at concerts, were the 7'' Cardiac Arrest (1,000 copies, 1979) and the cassette The Obvious Identity (roughly 1,000 copies, 1980). The following year, the band took on its definitive name, "Cardiacs", and released another cassette, Toy World. These are extremely bare-bones releases, but of great interest to fans curious about the sound of the group's earliest phase. The dismal recording quality doesn't obscure the remarkable stylistic range covered by the tracks, spanning from the sharp, oblique post-punk in the vein of The Work, Ludus or Massacre heard on "A Game For Berty's Party" and "Rock Around The Clock", to echoes of Zappa and Henry Cow (the title of "A Bus For A Bus On The Bus" nods to "A Pound For A Brown On The Bus" from "Uncle Meat", while "Nurses Whispering Verses" is a line lifted from "Desperate Straights" by Slapp Happy/Henry Cow).

Altrove, ecco guizzi ska (“Visiting Hours”, “A Big Noise In A Toy World”) e brani epici, dall’atmosfera platealmente darkwave (“Is This The Life?”, “Nurses Whispering Verses”).

"A Balloon For Berty's Party", "Over+Over+Over+Over" and "Dead Mouse", on the other hand, are nearly neo-prog episodes, their heavily Genesis-indebted traits owing perhaps not only to Tim Smith's oft-stated devotion to that band but also to the forced reliance on the MiniKorg 700 synthesizer, which, being monophonic, required chords to be arpeggiated, inevitably conjuring a Banks-like effect.

Of those very first years, Smith would recall: "When we started out, we couldn't play at all. I couldn't play guitar and I couldn't sing." Although by the time of these demos the first problem had been largely solved (the musicians' technical skill is fairly evident, if only from the barrage of time-signature changes littering every track), confidence with vocals was still lacking: on the first release credited to Cardiac Arrest, and on part of the second, the singer was Michael Pugh, who left the band in 1980, leaving Smith no choice but to reinvent himself as vocalist.

Heavily constrained by a shoestring budget, the aggressively DIY sound of these early recordings didn't satisfy the band, who would go on to re-record new versions of many of the tracks on these tracklists for later releases, some of which would become among their biggest staples.

1983 brought The Seaside, still a self-released demo, this time issued under the newly founded Alphabet label, set up solely for the band. The sound here is noticeably more satisfying, and the improved audio quality was reportedly no accident – or so goes the band's eccentric official history: the recording studio was the same one used for previous releases (the Crow, in Surrey), but this time the band supposedly paid for studio time and technical staff – whereas on other occasions, they would reportedly sneak in while the owner was away, thanks to the help of drummer Mark Cawthra, who at the time worked at the studio.

The line-up had changed in the meantime too: keyboardist Colvin Mayers had joined the Sound, so Cawthra had moved from drums to keyboards, replaced on the kit by Dominic Luckman (previously the band's lighting technician); on three tracks, however, Cawthra kept his old role, with keyboards handled by new recruit William D. Drake, whose artistic partnership with Tim Smith had already begun during their shared time in an earlier Drake band, Honour The Trumpet. Saxophonist Sarah Cutts, already present on Toy World, was now Sarah Smith: she and Tim had married that same year, though for a time the band would claim the two were brother and sister, a publicity stunt of dubious effectiveness that generated some prurient commentary, later even reaching the tabloids. The recording was further fleshed out by additional horns (three trumpets, a trombone and an alto sax), Graham Simmonds' guitar (briefly a member of the group) and the percussion of Tim Quy, the band's sound technician since 1981, now a full member of the line-up.

On The Seaside, the project's many different souls still coexist, but a style capable of synthesising them is also taking shape, one more focused on songwriting and on that farcical mood which, from then on, would become inseparable from the Cardiacs name. While on "Jibber and Twitch", "Gina Lollobrigida" and "Hello Mr. Sparrow" it can still feel like one is dealing with a particularly manic mix of Devo and early XTC, as the tracklist progresses the band's own personality emerges ever more clearly.

By the time we reach "A Wooden Fish On Wheels", it's clear that the game of reference-spotting (Madness? Bill Nelson's Red Noise?) is no longer enough to capture the originality and coherence of what's on offer. Bouncing between circus fanfares and near-goth darkness, the songs shine through their schizoid melodic streak and their whirlwind of rhythmic and atmospheric shifts. Rather than an ADHD-addled version of Seventies progressive rock, as early critics would start to describe them, what comes to mind is the Beatles of "Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite!", with the disorientation of the middle section intensified and stretched to extremes, yet without losing its razor-sharp catchiness.

The album runs to thirteen songs: of these, three are new versions of tracks already featured on earlier demos, and four would be re-recorded on later albums (one, "Is This The Life", belongs to both categories!). Although it's a transitional record, a closer look at a few particularly representative tracks reveals, in embryonic – and therefore more easily identifiable – form, some of the fundamental tricks of the Cardiacs sound to come. One key element lies in the use of particularly disorientating musical scales. "To Go Off And Things", already present on The Obvious Identity, is built entirely on the whole-tone scale, in which each note sits at exactly the same distance from the one before it as from the one after. This device, beloved of early-20th-century composers such as Claude Debussy and Olivier Messiaen, was also used quite conspicuously in passages by King Crimson (for instance, "Fracture" and "One More Red Nightmare") and in the famous introduction to Stevie Wonder's "You Are The Sunshine Of My Life"; the Cardiacs make extensive use of it for its peculiar quality of assigning every note the same role, making it extremely hard to pin down a harmonic centre.

Another trick favoured by Tim Smith shows up in "Dinner Time" and "It's A Lovely Day": besides leaning heavily on the whole-tone scale in the bass, both tracks draw on the Lydian mode, obtained from the ordinary do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do by raising the fa by a semitone (turning it into fa sharp). This scale, often described as "mystical", "floating" and "intoxicating", shares with the whole-tone scale a run of three consecutive whole tones rising from the root, and is known for its "harmonic instability", which produces a sense of disorientation that is essential to the Cardiacs' recipe (as it is to other songs that draw on this scale or its close relatives, such as the Left Banke's "Pretty Ballerina" or the famous themes for "ET" and The Simpsons, written by John Williams and Danny Elfman respectively).

It's around 1984 that the band's idiosyncratic live image also takes shape, having previously performed in oversized baby costumes or more typically wave outfits. The new course sees the band in ancien régime military uniforms, faces smeared with flour and misshapen patches, asylum-style grimaces, and a whole repertoire of moves hovering between nursery school, slapstick humour and domestic violence - with Jim Smith regularly getting kicked around by his brother. It's possible to trace a clear continuity between the Cardiacs' robotic gestures and the stage presence of Sparks and Split Enz; what in those two bands was a studied awkwardness becomes, in the Cardiacs, an exasperated, schizoid element.

In 1984, Marillion frontman Fish wants the Cardiacs as support for a few shows: although the young neoprog audience is used to theatrics, their reaction is catastrophic - amid screams and objects hurled at the stage - yet a few curious onlookers are struck by the band's eclecticism. For the Cardiacs, it's an important first expansion of their fanbase, which over the years will remain small but increasingly devoted.

On 31 December 1984 an EP is ready, Seaside Treats, featuring four previously released tracks ("A Little Man And A House", "Hope Day", "To Go Off And Things", "R.E.S."), accompanied by a videocassette of the same name, now available on YouTube. The latter contains the bizarre videos for three of the songs ("Hope Day" wasn't included) and helps feed the Residents-like mythology that Smith and co. build around the project. The band is said to be an offshoot of the mysterious enterprise The Alphabet Business Concern (soon also the name of the band's own label - though the members will keep insisting they have no idea who's actually behind it); all members of the group are supposedly subject to the authority of a figure called The Consultant and his factotum Miss Swift, who allegedly demand peak performances from the musicians by exerting a tyrannical power over them. The two characters appear frequently at concerts; on Seaside Treats, the first part, titled "The Consultant's Flower Garden", presents the alleged tormentor as a man of corporate, oily manners, responsible for keeping the Cardiacs in line with the required standards.

The classic era (1984-1989)

A full-length with proper distribution doesn't arrive until 1988. A Little Man And A House And The Whole World Window is recorded at the Workhouse in London, a studio owned by popstar Manfred Mann and also frequented by Trevor Horn and Depeche Mode. Among the sound engineers is Graham Simmonds, the band's guitarist for a brief spell between 1983 and 1984: with Simmonds, Tim and Sarah Smith had previously worked on the Sound's "Shock Of Daylight", back in 1984.

Introduced by a black-and-white daisy that would in time become a recognisable emblem for fans, the album stands out from its predecessors above all for its sound: where the demos had sounded ramshackle and skeletal, A Little Man And A House... is lavish and brimming with grandeur.

The three tracks already featured on The Seaside show the evolution clearly: the near-title track, placed at the start, shines in all its folk splendour thanks to a brass arrangement with an old-fashioned, evocative flavour, finally done justice by the recording. "R.E.S.", the peak of obliqueness and irreverence, now sounds decidedly fuller and sharper, and the long, highly progressive instrumental break at its centre offers a sonic opening worthy of Yes' most astonishing passages. The most striking result, however, comes with the menacing, PIL-esque "Is This The Life?": released as a single, it gets added to BBC1's radio rotation thanks to DJ Liz Kershaw and reaches number 80 on the UK chart. Not quite a hit, but a relative success that gives the band and its fans hope that popularity is within reach.

The remaining tracks alternate new compositions with older material dug up from the archives, showcasing the full range of genres that feed Smith and co.'s creativity. "In A City Lining" skips merrily between Mellotron pomp, barrel-organ waltzes and 2 Tone effervescence. "Interlude" is an almost chamber-like instrumental that had been sitting in Tim Smith's drawer since he was thirteen. "Dive" combines punk impetuousness with Zappa-esque verve, its zigzagging sax break showing the promiscuity between "riff" and "solo" that runs through Tim Smith's writing. Together with the following "The Icing Of The World", it also exemplifies the new vocal style that will from here on characterise the singer's performances: an even more caricatured version of John Lydon's brashness, certainly well suited to the disturbed atmosphere the band wants to evoke, but sometimes also limiting when it comes to exploring other expressive possibilities.

Rounding out the picture are "The Breakfast Line", somewhere between contemporary classical, circus orchestra and stadium chorus (with a long solo dense with accidentals), the brilliant "Victory Egg", which revisits the brass-folk magic of the opening track, and the other near-title track, "The Whole World Window": an almost Beatles-esque ballad, rendered rather unconvincing by Tim Smith's corrosive vocals (topped off, for the occasion, with final screams).

To keep track of the serpentine melodies and time changes that follow one another every few bars, Tim Smith writes everything down on score paper: only he, Sarah Smith and new keyboardist William D. Drake (who had permanently succeeded Mark Cawthra back in the Seaside Treats days) can read music, but for the band's composer it's the only way to fight his own (self-described) "terrible memory". Besides, his music is always born on paper, not from instruments: a practice that's hardly very rock'n'roll, yet one he shares with an undoubted guiding spirit of his, Frank Zappa. In a 1999 interview, he would explain: "If I pick up a guitar and start writing a song, I immediately fall into the same two chords and everything ends up sounding the same. The only method that works for me is staying away from an instrument and forcing myself to invent the music that way."

To pay for recording and release, the band's families took out bank loans. The Cardiacs are convinced this is their first real shot, and the decent airplay for "Is This The Life?" seems to suggest the machine is finally getting going. The trade press, however, reacts with anything but enthusiasm. Mick Mercer of Melody Maker had already written the year before: "With the Cardiacs everything seems to be accidental, especially the good taste. Arrest these peasants before they get another chance." As for A Little Man And A House..., it's torpedoed by Jack O'Neil in the New Musical Express: "Just when we hoped Marillion had reached rock bottom, along comes this schizo-progressive anachronism, in which the Cardiacs have condensed all the leftovers of the early Seventies into an album so geriatric that, by comparison, the next Blue Öyster Cult record will sound as fresh as 'Viva Hate'. [...] The Cardiacs are the sound of having both feet in the grave."

The Cardiacs will remain a divisive project, and the British music press will keep mistreating them (or ignoring them, as the NME starts doing) for the rest of the Eighties. Fans, however, grow ever more devoted. Numerous gigs and a few releases preceding the album had already let the cult's faithful get familiar with the new songs and with what would later be remembered as the band's "classic line-up": Tim Smith on guitar and lead vocals, Jim Smith on bass, Sarah Smith on sax, William D. Drake on keyboards, Tim Quy on percussion (marimba in particular) and synth bass, Dominic Luckman on drums.

Kicking things off is Rude Bootleg, in 1986: a live album documenting the performance at the Reading Festival on 24 August of that year, with tracks from The Seaside, from the not-yet-released A Little Man And A House... and from an EP, Big Ship, which would hit shops in early 1987. The latter contains five tracks and is notable above all for featuring "Tarred And Feathered", a live staple and the ultimate symbol of the band's performative madness (helped in no small part by its utterly deranged video).

Also in 1987 comes the double single "There's Too Many Irons In The Fire"/"All Spectacular", complete with a B-side. The tracks from both 1987 releases would be collected four years later on the compilation Songs For Ships And Irons, essential listening for fans and padded out with further B-sides (including the Kinks cover "Susannah's Still Alive", released as a single in 1988) as well as the previously unreleased "Everything Is Easy!", already a long-standing fixture of the setlists. Meanwhile, the band's gigs have grown ever more pyrotechnic: accounts from the time focus especially on the finale, in which The Consultant and Miss Swift climb onstage bearing champagne and balloons to hand out to the crowd, then drag off a reluctant Tim Smith amid a cloud of confetti, cutting the performance short. The audience loves it; venue managers rather less so. But the numbers the band is pulling in are nothing to scoff at, and between the UK, the Netherlands, Germany and, occasionally, Belgium, the group manages to string together hundreds of dates across 1987-1989. Cardiacs Live, released in October 1988, offers a record of that period, documenting the show held at Amsterdam's Paradiso on 15 May 1988; from late that same year comes the EP Radio 1 Sessions, collecting the four tracks performed live for the show hosted by Janice Long, longtime co-host of John Peel.

Relations with the press remain slow to improve (though Cathy Unsworth on Melody Maker admits that “Syd Barrett would have been proud” of the result achieved on Cardiacs Live); some fanzines, however, begin to follow Cardiacs closely. In particular, the London-based Organ, founded in 1986, builds an intense relationship with Smith and co., made up of reports dripping with admiration and long, frequent interviews: much of the information reported in this article – and all the interviews, unless otherwise specified – comes from that source. A recurring theme, right from the fanzine's first issue, concerns Tim Smith's approach to lyrics, often cryptic: “What we mention in the words – well, we're just mentioning it. It's not that we think we're going to change things. […] We're not even 'pointing' at something, just mentioning it… To put it plainly: we don't want to give any kind of message like 'you don't know this thing so now we'll explain it to you'”. And on the subjects covered, referring mainly to tracks like “Hope Day”, “Loosefish Scapegrace” and “Victory Egg”: “A lot of the lyrics are about the First and Second World War. […] It's such a strange thing for us, because we see it in totally black and white terms”.

Still in 1986, Tim Smith returns to the subject answering questions from the fanzine Time Out Of Mind: “Reactions to the songs will always be coloured by personal experience. I don't focus on things so that they come across as sad, the words simply lay out what happens – it's you who chooses to interpret them as sad. […] I like watching old newsreel clips from that era. I think what fascinates me is the over-the-top patriotism of it all. Enthusiastic men heading off to war, all happy to do their bit, and then coming back and telling how terrible it had been. Again in Organ, in 1991: “I like pop-song lyrics, the he-loves-her kind, as long as they stay on that level and don't start getting more 'deep'. I'd rather go further out than deeper in. […] There are lots of directions you can move in, and even if the result can be hard to grasp, that doesn't mean the point is 'Get it! If you don't understand this lyric then you're an idiot!'”. And again in 1991: “[Our lyrics] don't necessarily mean anything you could sum up as a story like: 'This is about a guy who…' […] Some of them are about something specific but I won't go around explaining them because I think that once you start explaining your lyrics or your poems, you ruin the whole point of writing them in lyrical form in the first place. What I mean is: with words you create pictures in the mind. I spend far more time on the words than on the music.”

The proceeds from “Is This The Life?” and from live shows allow Cardiacs to quickly get to work on the new album. On Land And In The Sea is recorded at Slaughterhouse Studios in Driffield (Yorkshire), used in those years also by Napalm Death, Happy Mondays and Loop, and produced by Tim Smith once again with the collaboration of Graham Simmonds.

Released just a year after its predecessor, the album picks up the ingredients of A Little Man And A House… but pushes certain aspects to the fore while setting others aside.

The lead single, “Baby Heart Dirt”, makes it clear that the band has no intention of following the darkwave sirens of “Is This The Life?”, and is instead charging full throttle down its own path, with no possible crossover with market demands. In a rare interview without Tim, a few months earlier Sarah Smith had explained: “It's completely unusable. But it would be a laugh to put something out that – well, everyone keeps saying wow, 'Is This The Life?' was such a crazy track, so commercial! We've got nothing like that. So it would be funny to come out with something totally over the top, do an experiment…”. And again, in the same interview: “[Tim] is a workaholic, he never stops. He doesn't even go to bed at night. […] He works all night and goes to sleep in the morning”.

The product of such divergent dedication is indeed over the top. On On Land And In The Sea the Cardiacs sound is more compact and biting, almost a caricature that zeroes in on the most abrasive aspects explored previously. The compositions are more intricate (“Buds And Spawn” and “The Everso Closely Guarded Line” are practically suites) and shape-shifting, with styles blending or clashing against each other depending on the moment within a single track. The usual whirl of odd time signatures also gets an extra push, but counterbalancing this metric instability comes something new: whenever the chance arises, the rhythmic patterns are the most direct and in-your-face the band has ever put forward. The drums lay down beats that are almost hardcore, and it's not just the bass but also sax and keyboards that hammer relentlessly on the strong beats (extended examples can be heard in the aforementioned “Baby Heart Dirt”). The keyboards, meanwhile, take on a metallic tone that, in the immediately preceding productions, amid mellotron and assorted grandeur, had stayed in the background. It's as if William D. Drake, having got his hands on the versatile Roland S-50 sampler, had gone through every preset not looking for the most defined and evocative ones, but for the most piercing and grating.

Among the most surprising episodes, “Two Bites Of Cherry”, “Buds And Spawn” and “The Stench Of Honey” deserve attention for their segmentation, which is well representative of Tim Smith's obsession with every sort of rhythmic device. The first, in its instrumental intro, alternates bars in 4/4 with others in 7/8 and 5/8, creating a constant contrast between metrically familiar sections and sudden odd-time derailments. Besides juxtaposing time signatures, Smith also loves stacking them. In “Buds And Spawn”, a markedly ska section – but in 9/8 – coexists with a keyboard arpeggio in 6/8: a rather twisted form of vertical hemiola, that is, the simultaneous presence of a binary and a ternary subdivision within the same bar. “The Stench Of Honey”, on the other hand, plays extensively with ritardando and accelerando, also throwing in a few bursts of drum machine to make the pulse even more jagged.

It's an opinion shared among the band's most fervent fans that On Land And In The Sea is the peak reached by the classic line-up. Indeed, it is the raising to the nth power of everything Cardiacs had been up to that point. Critics could easily have dismissed it as excessive and at times one-note, but surprisingly the response is more varied: in Melody Maker, Andrew Smith calls it “the first album to capture the full majesty of their sound”, invoking Broadway and Brecht to describe Tim Smith's songwriting; Henry Williams in Q describes the record as “a tour-de-force”, compares the style to Small Faces and Peter Hammill, and concludes with the words “a terrifying and unexpected triumph”. Even NME breaks its silence, though Simon Williams' review is in keeping with the magazine's previously expressed disdain (only to end, inexplicably, with a 7/10!): “This album is one giant, over-the-top ejaculation, a fountain gushing with frenzied, unbearably overloaded vocals, honking horns, pompous orchestrations. […] It's like playing Genesis at 373 million rpm. Trash pomp-rock, it should be called”.

A new line-up (1990-2003)

The commercial failure of On Land And In The Sea prompts the band's members to reconsider their prospects. As Tim Smith will explain more than once, the group has always been a full-time commitment for him and the other members, and since proceeds from sales and gigs are reinvested into the music, the members' livelihood depends essentially on the dole, the UK's income support for the unemployed. Within two years of the album's release, three members of the classic line-up drop out of the project: Sarah Smith is the first to announce her departure, already in 1989 (though she will keep playing with the group in the studio and, occasionally, live); in 1990 Tim Quy leaves, and in 1991 William D. Drake also exits (after recording all his keyboard parts, so the recordings could still be used live). As a first response, the remaining core chooses not to look for replacements but to bring in a new guitarist: Christian Hayes, already a member of Ring, a band known to part of the Cardiacs' audience thanks to a handful of shared bills, and the author of a brilliant brand of progressive rock able to combine the atmospheric variety of neo-prog with the rhythmic and harmonic inventiveness of Cardiacs.

Ring are the tip of the iceberg of a small scene of young bands who share the stage with Cardiacs and are often visibly inspired by them musically. Their music is hard to find today (and, when it is available, usually comes with rather poor audio quality), but the picture that emerges is fairly varied: it ranges from the kaleidoscopic pop-progressive of Ad Nauseam to the eclectic formula of Die Laughing, thrash-metal kids converted to prog, through a ramshackle Beefheart-esque funk (Zag And The Coloured Beads) or, a little later, shape-shifting post-punk (Pinhead Nation), darting space rock (Poisoned Electrick Head), Canterbury-flavoured alt-rock (Wizards Of Twiddly), crooked folk-pop (Sidi Bou Said), math-rock (Monsoon Bassoon). Within a few years, some of these bands will share with Ring the fate of supplying new members to Tim Smith's creation.

The last gig at which the classic line-up appears in full (though Hayes is already present) takes place on 30 June 1990 at the Salisbury Art Centre. That same day, a filming of a Napalm Death performance is scheduled: Cardiacs, who share the same management as Mitch Harris's band, take advantage of the crew's presence and film Maresnest, which will be released on videocassette in 1992 (and later, in 1995, as an audio album titled All That Glitters Is A Maresnest). The recording is an essential document for fans: the live dimension is the band's true trump card, and capturing a defining moment in the band's history with a professional recording was undoubtedly a brilliant idea. The video is also a chance to fully grasp the importance of the percussive element, with Tim Quy's marimba, though rarely shown on camera, sitting particularly high in the mix. Missing, however, are The Consultant and Miss Swift: according to the band's surreal official account, “towards the end of 1989, The Consultant and Miss Swift received a telegram from The Alphabet Business Concern and were never seen again”. More likely, they too decide it's time to bid farewell to the project. Among the last traces of their contribution is a credit as “producers” on the cassette Archive Cardiacs (1989, later reissued on CD in 1995): a collection of tracks dating from 1977-1979, largely already released on The Obvious Identity and Toy World but enriched by three tracks recorded by Tim Smith and Dominic Luckman for a side project that would never see the light of day. For many fans, this is the first chance to listen to those songs at home, since the demo albums have by now become essentially impossible to find.

By 1991 the new album, Heaven Born And Ever Bright, is ready, and – a first for the band – it comes out on Rough Trade, the UK's most high-profile independent label. Like the single “Day Is Gone” and its accompanying tracks, the LP is produced and mixed by Tim Smith, while the sound engineer is David Murder, who had already worked alongside the band on the recording of Maresnest and from then on becomes a regular collaborator.

On the record there's a clear desire to push the Cardiacs sound in directions still little explored. The tracks lean into the folk side, fuelling choral, sea-shanty-like passages as in “She Is Hiding Behind The Shed”, in “March”, or across the entire opening track, “The Alphabet Business Concern (Home Of Fadeless Splendour)”, whose brief Mixolydian chime at the start would often open concerts like a kind of company jingle.

With “Goodbye Grace” and “Anything I Can't Eat”, on the other hand, and above all with the single “Day Is Gone” (the most 'straightforward' 5/4 in history?), the guitar presence becomes more prominent than ever: a power-pop element takes hold, reinforcing the choruses and giving the usual, if quirky, catchiness of the melodies a new, more engaging, more Beatles-esque dimension. Compared to previous albums, there's a certain streamlining of the structures, which for the first time occasionally translates into a touch of monotony. Yet just when one starts to fear the formula risks becoming predictable, out comes a wildly chopped-up “Bodysbad”, reaffirming Smith and co.'s devotion to about-faces and off-kilter time signatures.

On a purely sonic level too, the album brings new ingredients to the table. The sound is markedly more massive and spacious than before. In Tim Smith's words: "The production is a bit different, I thought it might be interesting to slap a bit more reverb on it, since up until now I'd always gone for a very dry, claustrophobic mix." The result sometimes sounds a touch forced, but it's undeniably very charged and gives the tracks an extra pop element. Then there's the drum sound, which far more noticeably than in the past is packed with samples and sections programmed via midi sequencing: once again the effect is very mechanical and relentless, and while the choice suits the nervy mood of the tracks, it's understandable that for some listeners it comes across as repetitive and lacking in dynamics.

Reviews are generally positive: even Stephen Dalton of the NME, after introducing them as “virtually alien to anyone bar a few species of barnacle,” concludes that it's “great to have them back again” and renews the 7/10 score given to their previous record; over time, however, fans would come to view it as a transitional album, less exciting than others. Tim Smith, for his part, remained fully satisfied with it, and in 2001 he spoke up in defence of this often underrated record: “The album our fans seem to like least is the one I'm proudest of… It has a really weird sound. I reckon every one of our albums sounds completely different from the others, to be honest. Unless you hate them all, in which case I suppose they all sound exactly the same! There's a hell of a lot of people who see it that way!”

Two further factors complicate the album's story, relating to distribution and to the musicians involved. Rough Trade, which could have given the band the momentum it had lacked so far, went under right around the time of the release, dashing any hope of broadening its commercial horizons. The LP would in fact remain hard to find until its 1995 reissue on the usual The Alphabet Business Concern. The new four-piece lineup's (plus guests) first studio album is also soon marked by another departure: guitarist Bic Hayes becomes deeply absorbed in his side project, Levitation, and struggles to juggle commitments to both bands. To replace him, the band enlists Jon Poole, guitarist with Ad Nauseam, who would go on to take an increasingly important role within Cardiacs. To this day, even the most devoted fans aren't entirely sure how much of Heaven Born And Ever Bright is down to Hayes and how much to Poole. Looking back on those days, the new guitarist would later recall: “[A few days after Tim Smith had been to an Ad Nauseam gig] I called Tim to ask if I could get an audition, and he said: 'Well, actually I was thinking of asking you, but I didn't want to turn your band upside down!' […] 'Anyway, there's no need for an audition: it goes without saying you're perfect for Cardiacs; the only thing is, I need to hear what the others think!'”

The psychedelic sound of Levitation, somewhere between progressive and shoegaze, is the most visible but not the only side project connected to Cardiacs members. What drives their 1992 release "Need For Not", produced by Tim Smith, is not just the strength of the songs but also the presence in the lineup of Terry Bickers, former House Of Love guitarist well known to the music press for his unpredictable behaviour. Cardiacs members had, however, been pursuing other artistic paths for about a decade already. Besides the already mentioned Sound, who absorbed original keyboardist Colvin Mayers in 1981, there was the wave outfit The Trudy (featuring the very first drummer Peter Tagg, produced by then-guitarist Graham Simmonds), the brief but worthwhile folk/prog/wave venture Grown-Ups (with William D. Drake, Dominic Luckman and composer Craig Fortnam, later leader of North Sea Radio Orchestra) and, further down the line, Craig and Sharron Fortnam's Shrubbies with Sarah Smith and Dominic Luckman, along with the many projects involving Bill Drake (Nervous, The Lake Of Puppies, North Sea Radio Orchestra and numerous solo albums).

From the mid-1980s onward, Tim Smith too devoted himself to a string of side outfits, always as a songwriter and often involving other members of the Cardiacs' core lineup. The first to take shape was called Mr & Mrs Smith & Mr Drake, resulting in 1984 in a single self-titled album released on Alphabet. On the record, Tim, Sarah and Bill turn their hand to acoustic sketches hovering somewhere between Henry Cow, Canterbury-style languor and chamber folk (or rather, bedroom folk). Standout tracks include the sun-drenched "Summer-Is-A-Coming-In" and the sea shanty "To My Piano For Mr Drake", both written by Drake.

From 1991 the trio rebranded as The Sea Nymphs and kept operating (including live) even after Sarah and Bill left Cardiacs. 1992 saw the release of The Sea Nymphs, initially available only as a cassette through the Cardiacs fan club. A kind of gentler counterpart to the Cardiacs sound, the album reveals the singer-songwriter soul of the Smith/Drake duo and (predictably, given the name) leans into the nautical streak that, that same year, would also surface forcefully in the main band's Heaven Born And Ever Bright.

In 1995 some of the tracks were reissued on the EP Appealing To Venus, followed by a long hiatus broken in 2016 by the release of On The Dry Land, an archival album featuring tracks recorded in the early 1990s and completed between 2015 and 2016 by a by-then gravely ill Tim Smith.

In the early Nineties, Tim Smith, Jon Poole, Bic Hayes and Levitation drummer David Francolini revived a very old Smith project, Panixsphere, bringing to life a thrash live band with no official recordings to speak of (just a few bootlegs and a live report from Organ, which called them "completely mad" and expressed amusement at the choice of putting them on as support for the altogether more classic progressive of The Enid, perhaps hoping they'd be as calm as Sea Nymphs).

Tim Smith's one purely solo recording venture is instead the album Tim Smith's Extra Special OceanLandWorld, released in 1995 but recorded between 1989 and 1990. Alongside Tim Smith's voice and songwriting, in full power-pop infatuation, the album's real protagonist is midi programming: it's the most Beatles-esque thing Smith ever wrote, a kind of Sgt. Pepper's with George Martin's arrangements swapped out for the worst stock digital sounds of the early Nineties. The songwriting is nonetheless first-rate, and where the author's distinctive tonal flair intersects with less idiosyncratic conventions, some of the most evocative moments of his entire catalogue emerge. The liquid "Swimming With The Snake", for instance, seems to open up a whole horizon of techno-progressive possibilities never explored again, either by Smith or by anyone else! Sea Nymphs and Tim Smith's Extra Special OceanLandWorld also each feature one track on the Sampler released in 1995 by The Alphabet Business Concern, a compilation made up mostly of previously released Cardiacs tracks (some in live versions).

Tim Smith's last extracurricular fling outside Cardiacs was Spratleys Japs, formed in 1998 with then-partner Joanne Spratley, who had already teamed up with Bic Hayes in Mikrokosmos (produced by Smith) and later in MUMMY. Their 1999 album, Pony, is the only one released by the outfit, which nominally also includes musicians from the American band Rev-Ups: Heidi Murphy, Mark Donovan and Viv Sheriff. Since they never once appeared in public either as Spratleys Japs or as Rev-Ups, there's a lingering suspicion that both their supposed band of origin and the musicians themselves may be an invention of Smith and Spratley. The album's sound reflects the project's main musical inspiration: a malfunctioning mellotron lent to Smith by Planet Mellotron creator Andy Thompson, which crops up on several tracks alongside guitar, bass, drums, a generous helping of synths and the two artists' vocals. Overall, it sits somewhere between the calm of Sea Nymphs and the frenzy of Cardiacs, and shapeshifting pieces like "Vine" do a good job of bridging the two sound worlds.

Also in 1999, under the name Spratley Japs, came the EP Hazel, built around the splendid, mellotron-drenched instrumental title track, which also appears on the album.

From its release in 1996, the fourth studio album Sing To God was hailed by fans as a masterpiece. Critical reaction, on the other hand, was essentially nonexistent: according to the band's own account, only Vox covered it, and the reviewer handed the album a remarkable score of 0/10. Over time, however, the record would be reassessed, and in 2014 Sam Shepherd of MusicOmh would frame it as “probably one of the greatest albums ever made.” Today it's seen as the high point of the band's Nineties phase, the period in which, after the upheavals of the start of the decade, the lineup settled into the quartet of Tim Smith-Jim Smith-Jon Poole-Bob Leith. The newcomer, taking the place of longtime drummer Dominic Luckman, was Poole's old Ad Nauseam partner: in effect, the new Cardiacs were a joint venture between the two outfits.

Sing To God is a double album of twenty-two songs, marking both a renewed creative surge and a decisive shift in sound. Cardiacs had never before sounded so pop, nor, at the same time, so ambitious. The wave-adjacent touches are all but gone: the new direction, to which Jon Poole made an essential contribution, pushes the songs firmly toward power-pop. "Manhoo", co-written by Tim Smith and the guitarist, is the clearest example: strip away Tim Smith's vocal quirks and it's essentially a Jellyfish song – the Beatles to the nth degree, crossed with their descendants Xtc and Tears For Fears. A riot of radiant atmospheres and unexpected chords.

Not that the other standout tracks are any less striking: "Dog-like Sparky", "Fiery Gun Hand", "Insect Hoofs On Lassie", "Bellyeye", "Odd Even" are kaleidoscopic, thunderous compositions, irresistibly catchy despite their unyielding obliqueness. The sound is squarely guitar-driven, more powerful than ever, and where keyboards and bass carve out a leading role, they too fall into step with the thunderous drive running through almost the whole record.

Then again, in most cases these parts too were devised by Jon Poole, who would explain in 1999: “Tim would lay down the drums and a rough sketch of the keyboard chords on tape, and then ask me to take care of the guitar and bass parts. Basically he gave me free rein over everything!” Poole's versatility was something new for the band's previously narrow expressive range: already unmatched at blending styles and making them his own, he now also proved convincingly able to leap from one mood to another, keeping his performances fluid and believable whether venturing into near-grunge territory or launching into swaggering Zappa-esque flourishes ("Bell Clinks"). Poole, for that matter, had cut his teeth a few years earlier on tracklists from the "We're Only In For The Money"/"Uncle Meat" era, single-handedly putting together "What's The Ugliest Part Of Your Body?", a Zappa covers album conceived for "non-fans" of the eclectic American composer.

Discussing the album in terms of "standout tracks" risks creating a false impression, though. There really aren't any weak tracks here. "Dirty Boy", which opens the second disc, is an enduring fan-favourite, its irreverent lyrics – like others on the record – the result of a collaboration between Tim Smith and Bob Leith. On the musical side, then-roadie Kavus Torabi (already a guitarist with Die Laughing and Monsoon Bassoon) would later state: "When I heard it, it sounded to me like how I'd always imagined 'Stairway To Heaven' should sound [based on how people who called it the greatest song ever written had described it]". "Bell Stinks", "Bell Clinks" and "Angleworm Angel" are three tracks drawn from the Panixsphere repertoire, with a markedly thrash edge. "Nurses Whispering Verses" is the "definitive version" of the track already featured on Toy World and The Seaside, here presented in a far more lavish, expanded guise.

No track, moreover, is entirely free of that disruptive element, most likely introduced by Tim Smith, without whom Cardiacs wouldn't be Cardiacs. Here too, though, there's an update to the toolkit: on most of the tracks, the key device lies in the use of effects on vocals and backing vocals, creating an acidic, liquefied diction that is at once childlike and choral. Having delegated a significant share of the compositional work to Poole, and relying on David Murder for the orchestral arrangements, Tim Smith is free to carve out for himself the role of studio and post-production maestro, stuffing the tracks with sonic surprises and shifts in mood, with pieces like "Eat It Up Worm Hero" leaping between an overloaded sound and an almost whispered dimension, or "Fairy Mary Mag" combining sitar-like psychedelia, dark, spacious textures reminiscent of the Chameleons, and elfin little voices with a medieval twist.

The collaboration with Poole and Murder allows Smith to abandon his obsession with meticulous score-writing ("I'm lazy now," he would explain to the fanzine PIEmag), but he doesn't retreat an inch from his taste for harmonic unpredictability. If anything, he pushes it further than ever. The tracks on Sing To God are born and unfold as endless chord sequences that systematically avoid resolution – that is, the reaffirmation of the key's tonic chord – veering instead toward directions perceived as surprising. The vocabulary Smith employs here, as throughout most of the Cardiacs songbook, is minimal in quantitative terms – essentially just major and minor triads – yet extraordinarily rich in its articulation: passages ordinarily deemed "forbidden" are instead singled out as interesting and exploited to build unexpected sensations. A prime example is "Odd Even", where identifying a key is made extremely difficult by the repeated use of what blogger Dan Schmidt calls the "Tim Smith cadence" (♭III-v-I), remarkably effective at muddying the waters over whether I or ♭III (or, with roles reversed, I or VI) should be regarded as the tonic. The track is also notable for its use, at the close of the chorus, of a very long chain of plagal cadences: ♭III-♭VII-IV-I. The basic module of this familiar resolution (IV-I, as in F to C) is repeated no fewer than three times, each time creating the illusion that the sequence has come to an end. Once the disorienting sequence is finally over, the ear can at last rest, and convince itself – however unwittingly – that I really does serve as the tonic after all.

The "Tim Smith cadence" also recurs in the dizzying coda of "Dirty Boy", while in "Foundling" it appears in two "extended" versions: ♭III-♭VII-IV-v-I and ♭III-♭VI-♭VII-♭VI-v-I. The use of modulation – that is, a change of key within a section of a track – is so frequent, and so intertwined with the "importing" of chords foreign to the key, that it's often impossible to pin down unambiguously. In "Odd Even", however, it's especially clear in the chorus, where the ♭III-v-I pattern reappears, not only at the end but also in the middle section, shifted up a minor third (effectively using ♭III as the new tonic). "Flap Off Your Beak" too relies heavily on the recurrence of the same basic elementary modules (I-V, V-I), recast and recombined each time on different scale degrees (II-VI at the end of verses, choruses and bridge; ♭V-VII-III-VI-II-V-I – half a turn round the circle of fifths – at the centre of the chorus; III-VII and II-VI in the bridge).

The recording of Sing To God takes place during breaks in a particularly busy year on the live front, 1995. Over the course of forty-four dates, Cardiacs sometimes perform as the sole act of the evening, sometimes with support from their friends Sidi Bou Said (produced by Tim Smith), and other times opening for bigger names. Besides numerous shows alongside the anarcho-folk-punk of Chumbawamba (still a long way from the success of "Tubthumping"), on one occasion they open for Blur at London's Mile End Stadium – with a crowd response, it seems, even more scornful than the one they got eleven years earlier opening for Marillion. Having started out in the Eighties as support act for prog and neo-prog acts (the post-Canterbury Here&Now, Marillion, The Enid, It Bites) as well as post-punk/synth-pop/wave acts (Classix Nouveaux, The Sound, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds), as the Nineties and early 2000s wear on Cardiacs start to win the praise of new generations of musicians too.

Graham Coxon goes so far as to want them alongside him on a major London stage, while webzines and magazines also report admiration from Radiohead, Mr. Bungle, Napalm Death, Supergrass, Steven Wilson, Tool, Biffy Clyro, and Dave Grohl. As the frontman of Porcupine Tree told the BBC: "I think [Tim Smith] is one of those artists who, like say Frank Zappa, will never be forgotten and will still be discovered and listened to for the next hundred years. His legacy will live on far longer than that of many of his more successful contemporaries." Mike Vennart of Oceansize – one of the flagship bands of British alternative prog – holds a genuine reverence for the music of Tim Smith and his cohorts: "I'm a massive Cardiacs fan. I love the fact that basically every chord is in a different key from the last one, it's genuinely a magic trick. At the same time, I'm aware that anyone who tries the same thing is doomed to come off as a pale imitation."

Between 1995 and 1996, the singles for "Manhoo", "Bellyeye" and "Odd Even" come out, each including unreleased tracks too. 1996 is a year packed with concerts, while 1997 is nearly devoid of live dates. After a handful of German and Dutch shows in 1998 (the band hadn't played abroad since 1990), 1999 sees, among various shows, the band's appearance at the Glastonbury festival. Anyone who caught the group live on one of these occasions would have witnessed a show quite different from the Eighties: not so much in terms of setlists, which still include plenty of vintage material, but in the staging and the way the music is delivered. Tim Smith's onstage demeanour has retained its caricatured roughness (off stage, by contrast, he's extremely approachable with fans); the military uniforms, however, are gone, and with them the role-play around The Alphabet Business Concern. The sound, meanwhile, is an amphibious creature in which pre-recorded parts and live performance are skilfully wedded: the drummer plays to a click track to stay in sync with the tapes that stand in for keyboards, and every so often the band is forced to improvise some section of a song on the fly because the playback mechanism slows down or jams. On the other hand, Tim Smith's rig is sparer than ever: no pedals, no digital effects – the tone of his guitar is dictated entirely by a broken amp, its precarious state maintained by feeding its signal into a properly functioning Marshall.

1999 brings Guns, a return to post-punk forcefulness that nonetheless loses neither the Beatles-esque flair that dominated Sing To God nor the band's passion for contortions and stylistic mash-ups. Regarded as one of the group's more accessible albums, it reconfirms the Tim Smith/Jon Poole creative team (with Bob Leith contributing to some lyrics), as well as a few recurring elements associated with the band: dogs (looming, rather kitsch, on the cover), ska flourishes ("Wind And Rains Is Cold"), garish keyboard sounds (thankfully offset by a few more convincing electronic excursions). There's no shortage of standout moments, and the tortuous "Jitterbug" again pushes Smith to work from written score, but overall the album's sound and songwriting land with less impact than on Sing To God.

More than one track features, in a fairly unprecedented move, a significant and clearly distinguishable contribution from female voices: Sarah Smith, Jo Spratley, Sharron Saddington aka Sharron Fortnam. In "Wind And Rains Is Cold" as much as in "Clean That Evil Mouth Out Your Soul" and "Will Bleed Amen", in particular, Sharron Saddington's even tone, set against Smith's usual moaning delivery, opens up unexpected, soothing passages.

The album's stylistic range throws into relief an aspect commentators have actually flagged since the earliest albums: the overflowing Englishness of the Cardiacs recipe. From late-beat pop to 2 Tone, from '77 punk to progressive rock, most of the core ingredients carry an unmistakably British stamp. "Sleep All Eyes Open" even dives into an unprecedented alternative dance/glam rock hybrid, which seems to anticipate even Late Of The Pier.

Even more than the many references drawn from rock itself, though, it's the appeal to more popular (or populist?) elements that pushes the formula toward Deep England colourings. Sea shanties, nursery rhymes ("Cry Wet Smile Dry"), folk borrowings ("Ain't He Messy Though") and, above all, the atmosphere of old travelling fairs ("Clean That Evil Mud Out Your Soul", "Song Of A Dead Pest"), complete with barrel organs and music boxes. Back in 1986, in an exchange in the fanzine Time Out Of Mind, when asked about the presence of "British seaside sounds and fairground music – a kind of Edwardian feeling", Tim Smith replied: "Oh, absolutely. [...] Englishness also has something sinister about it. One of the first bands to explore that side were Genesis, with the strangeness of nursery rhymes. A lot of people find nursery rhymes disturbing. Things like 'Ring-A-Ring-A-Roses', which is about the Plague... For some reason, there's still an atmosphere that comes through. You feel it as part of your culture."

A few months after Guns, its track "Signs" is also released as a single, backed by two unreleased tracks (one being the instrumental version of "Dog Like Sparky", from Sing To God). In the period that follows, the band sets to work on a new album, but it never takes definitive shape and is eventually shelved. The touring calendar also thins out, and a tradition begins of grand annual shows at London's Astoria, held around November with support from "friendly" bands. Among the acts who perform alongside Cardiacs between 2000 and 2007 are Oceansize, Monsoon Bassoon, Scaramanga Six (produced at the time by Tim Smith), Stars In Battledress, and two projects featuring Jon Poole: Wildhearts and Goddamn Whores.

In 2001 and 2002, two compilations come out: Cardiacs And Affectionate Friends and Greatest Hits, respectively. The first, released by the label associated with the fanzine Organ, gathers recent tracks by the band alongside pieces from other related projects – tied to Tim Smith, such as Spratleys Japs, Sea Nymphs and OceanLandWorld, or to other members: mikrokosmos (Bic Hayes), Catherine In A Cupboard (Bob Leith and Jim Smith), William D. Drake (Lake Of Puppies). Solo tracks from Jon Poole, Mark Cawthra and William D. Drake also appear. The second compilation, meanwhile, bears a tongue-in-cheek title: most of the band's best-known songs are conspicuously absent from these "greatest hits", including their one plausible hit, "Is This The Life?". On the plus side, it does include a track meant for the new album that never came out: "Faster Than Snakes With A Ball And A Chain".

2003, however, brings a change: just ahead of a run of three dates at London's Garage, Jon Poole leaves the band owing to his packed schedule with Wildhearts. He's replaced from then on by Kavus Torabi, who had already been working as the band's guitar tech in the months before Sing To God (and who was also a member of Die Laughing and Monsoon Bassoon). The three Garage shows focus on vintage material: although the only members who had already been there in the Eighties are the two Smith brothers, the setlists draw heavily on the demos The Obvious Identity and Toy World, also including a few contemporaneous pieces never previously released ("An Ant", "Hello Mr Winnow", "Gloomy News", "Hopeless").

The live recordings come out on CD in two volumes in 2005, later gathered in 2014 into a single edition titled The Special Garage Concerts. The rehearsal sessions held to prepare for the shows, at the band's ramshackle (and tiny) practice space, are filmed too, and would be released in 2017 on DVD as Some Fairytales From The Rotten Shed. Looking back on those weeks, Kavus Torabi would explain: "I'd never been the kind of person who practises other people's songs. I'd never done that before, so it was the first time I had to sit down and learn such a huge amount of material. I loved it! It became my life. I'd go to work every day, and as soon as I got home I'd spend two or three hours learning the songs. I might learn a new song each evening and then go back over the earlier ones. The strange thing is it takes up a huge part of your brain! It was like revising for an exam. Two weeks after the shows I'd forgotten how to play roughly half the songs."

Coda (2004-∞)

Between 2004 and 2008, Cardiacs once again expanded their line-up, bringing in three female vocalists on a permanent basis (Claire Lemmon and Melanie Woods of Sidi Bou Said, and Sharron Fortnam, at the time also a member of North Sea Radio Orchestra) and two percussionists, Cathy Harabaras and Dawn Staple. The band set to work on new compositions and made some recordings for a new album, provisionally titled "LSD".

In 2007 the single "Ditzy Scene" was released, driven by a decidedly full, choral sound: it would remain the only recorded testimony left by the new line-up. On 25 June 2008, a tragic event brought all of the band's activity to a halt: returning home from a My Bloody Valentine concert, Tim Smith suffered a cardiac arrest and an episode of cerebral anoxia. The attack would leave serious long-term consequences: Smith was left with dystonia, a movement disorder that prevents him from leading an independent life, speaking fluently and, among other things, playing music. As explained on the band's official page in 2018: "It's rare for this specific condition to result from brain damage caused by hypoxia. Perhaps only two other cases are known worldwide. [...] But you could say it's typical of Tim: it's in his nature to do what others don't, and to do it thoroughly!"

Initially reluctant to share updates on his clinical condition and to ask fans for support, family and friends came over time to deeply appreciate the contributions of the fanbase, who took the situation to heart and enthusiastically took part in fundraising initiatives. Besides benefit concerts by fellow bands (most notably "The Alphabet Business Convention", held on three occasions between 2013 and 2017), reissues and special editions were released with proceeds going toward rehabilitation.

In 2010, on Kavus Torabi's label Believers Roast, came the compilations Leader Of The Starry Skies: A Tribute To Tim Smith, Songbook 1 and Leader Of The Starry Skies: A Tribute To Tim Smith – A Loyal Companion: collections of covers performed by artists close to Smith – current and former Cardiacs members, longtime admirers such as Steven Wilson and Andy Partridge, musicians directly inspired by Smith's music such as Oceansize or Italy's own Sterbus, who was entrusted with the band's emblematic Nineties track, "Dirty Boy". 2016 and 2018, meanwhile, saw the release of the covers collected in The Whole World Window (I and II), produced by Bic Hayes and featuring contributors already encountered in previous initiatives (Scaramanga Six, Sterbus, Kavus Torabi's Knifeworld), as well as Bob Drake of Thinking Plague and many others. And then there's Singin' To God, Pt. 1, released in 2018 under the name The 180 Gs, reinterpreting the songs from the first disc of Sing To God in barbershop (a cappella) style. Behind the idea was a Detroit collective that, not without some nerve, had tackled the Negativland songbook the year before and would go on to take on the Residents' "Commercial Album" the following year. Last in order of release, Casio Cardiacs by The Gathering Doubt is a 2020 EP that, true to form, reworks some of the band's classics in chiptune style.

Meanwhile, a slight improvement in Tim Smith's condition allowed him to return to the studio to oversee production work: this is how the previously mentioned On The Dry Land by Sea Nymphs, based on previously recorded material, came to light in 2016. According to what Smith stated to Prog magazine that same year, tapes exist for at least one more Sea Nymphs album; to this, of course, would be added the tracks composed for "LSD", which, however, were still said to be missing their vocal parts. Neither project would be completed by its principal author: on 21 July 2020, having been back home for some time after long periods of hospitalization, Tim Smith died at the age of 59, possibly from another heart attack.

The British press – not just the music press – commemorated Smith with affection. On The Quietus, which in recent years has devoted several in-depth pieces to Cardiacs, Sean Kitching wrote: "Detractors of his music have sometimes tried to paint it as 'contrived' or inauthentic, but the truth is that Tim resembled his music more than any other musician I've ever met. [...] That sense of astonishment and uncontainable emotion you find in his music was the quintessence of Tim. That's exactly what he was like. That's why so many people loved him, and that's why it's so hard to write about this right now."

Tim Smith's legacy is thriving. The active projects formed by musicians who took part in the Cardiacs saga number more than a dozen, bringing the obliqueness of the "cardiac" formula into contact with an ever wider range of styles. These range from the progressive art rock of Kavus Torabi's Knifeworld to the prog-folk of North Sea Radio Orchestra and Arch Garrison (both featuring Craig and Sharron Fortnam), through the solo ventures of William D. Drake and Mark Cawthra aka Redbus Noface, the avant-prog of Lost Crowns (again with Sharron Fortnam), the psychedelic progressive pop of Crayola Lectern (with Bic Hayes, Jon Poole, Bob Leith) and the power pop of The Dowling Poole (Jon Poole and Willie Dowling of Jackdaw4), the dreamy electronics of Utopia Strong and the sea shanties of Admirals Hard (both again with Kavus Torabi), Zofff's psychedelic space rock courtesy of Bic Hayes, and Dominic Luckman's Vonhorn, devoted to a mellotron-laden indie-pop. Since 2016, Jo Spratley and her son Jesse have revived Spratleys Japs; since then the band has played various shows and changed its name in 2021 to Tim Smith's Spratleys Rats, in order to distance themselves from the unintended negative connotations of the term "Japs" (a slur for "Japanese").

And that's not all: although there is no direct lineage to Cardiacs, echoes of the band's music are easily detectable in acts that are sometimes more than happy to acknowledge the influence. There's the morbid avant-prog/metal of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum/Free Salamander Exhibit, the Victorian prog of Norway's Major Parkinson, the twisted ska of The Display Team. And then there's the progressive alt-pop of Army Of Moths, the bold rhythmic and melodic interlocking of Bubblemath, the energetic pop imagination of the aforementioned Sterbus (whose latest "Real Estate/Fake Inverno" was made in cahoots with Bob Leith), and of course, one way or another, many of the hundreds of releases tagged "pronk" on Bandcamp. Like it or not, Cardiacs can also be framed as forerunners of at least two bizarre non-genres that bring together left-field projects balanced between progressive complexity and pop/punk immediacy: the Eighties-born Zolo and the much more recent Fabloo (both the subject of recent in-depth features on this site).

The most extraordinary proof that Cardiacs' music is today stronger than ever has come precisely from those who, in different times and different ways, have carried on its musical legacy. After years of waiting, some of the band's longtime members, together with new collaborators, decided to complete the album left unfinished at the time of Tim Smith's illness. Begun in 2007 and long thought lost, in 2025 that project became reality.
LSD (2025) comprises seventeen tracks spanning an hour and twenty minutes of music: Jim Smith's supervision, contributions from Kavus Torabi, Bob Leith, Sharron and Craig Fortnam, additional vocals from Mike Vennart and Rose-Ellen Kemp, and mixing by Adam Noble — who managed to blend together recordings made almost twenty years apart — have produced an album that sounds as if no time had passed at all.

From the very first bars of "Men in Bed", the album fully reveals Cardiacs' dual nature: the almost symphonic solemnity of the orchestrations and the sudden fury of the rawest punk, fused into a single architecture. "Gen" and "Woodeneye" pack their fractured aesthetic into just a few minutes: irregular meters, sudden modulations, verses that stumble into 3/4 before exploding into blistering choruses, hillbilly runs and Iron Maiden-style surges, all within barely three minutes. "By Numbers", alternating between 4/4, 7/8, 10/8 and even 17/8, sounds like a hysterical version of XTC's "English Roundabout", while "The Blue and Buff" softens the tone with a sunshine-pop nursery-rhyme feel reminiscent of "Happy Together", immediately undercut by two deliberately crooked solos and a Picardy-third cadence that closes the circle with irony (and a further nod to the Turtles — who knows if intentional).
On the more abrasive front, "Lovely Eyes" hammers away with straight drumming and exasperated dynamics, while "A Roll from a Dirty Place" and "Downup" alternate street-level aggression with brass counterpoints of an almost chamber-music flavour. The icing on the cake, "Skating", is an eight-minute suite with surf-rock flourishes and Devo-style zigzags: a celebration of the playful, darting inventiveness that has always fuelled the band. The tracks on which Tim Smith's voice still appears — "The May", "Spelled All Wrong", "Ditzy Scene", "Made All Up" and "Gen" itself — blend in with the others with surprising naturalness, confirming an intact stylistic coherence. Even when the band dares to venture elsewhere, as in the almost dance-punk pulse of "Volob", with its Yes-like brightness and a vocal clarity unusual for the band, the result is nothing like a straightforward revival: it's a natural extension of their language, not a replica of it. Not an attempt to reconstruct the past, then, but an opportunity to complete it: as if Cardiacs, reborn and expanded, had found a way to close a chapter left hanging without betraying its restlessness.

More than a farewell, LSD is a synthesis: it contains the punk fervour, the orchestral writing, the theatrical irony, the metric unpredictability and the childlike joy that made Cardiacs unique. It is the fruit of a community that knew how to come together around a living legacy, turning an interrupted project into a collective act of continuity.

Loved and hated, Cardiacs were an underground cult whose arc came to an end – depending on your point of view – surprisingly late or incredibly abruptly. The ripples left on the water by their anomalous musical trajectory, however, have yet to stop spreading. And it's fair to say that in these very years, thanks to an ever-growing number of converts, their intensity has only continued to amplify. Have you been swept up in it yet?

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