Flowered Up

Flowered Up – Weekender

(1992 – Single, Heavenly)

There are songs that carry the unmistakable flavor of summer. Waves crashing over you, beaches to be lived until sunset when the crowds thin out and you get to enjoy the view, ice-cold beers and reckless nights that run till morning. A mundial dream perhaps, one that fizzled out fast this time, not even the masochistic pleasure of getting steamrolled by Colombia in the round of sixteen, only to go looking for consolation on the lips of some fetching holidaymaker met by chance. There's music for all of this, and thankfully it's not the kind you're picturing, all Sammontana ad jingle. Also because the above checklist is missing the real summer must-have, especially for those who, hormonally speaking, experience the warm season the way French revolutionaries experienced the storming of the Bastille: beach parties. Truly agonizing situations – you bet! – where increasingly troglodyte music plays for troglodyte dancers, next to whom the hominids brawling at the start of “2001: A Space Odyssey” look like they're dancing to Tchaikovsky. To throw yourself without hesitation into a crowd like that, you'd need an escort of Huns. Or it would simply be enough for the DJ to suddenly drop “Weekender” by Flowered Up. The heartbeat of summer in thirteen minutes. Close your eyes and dive in — if you're still alive, there's no backing out now.

Flowered Up were the dazzling shooting star that, between 1989 and 1994, blazed across the Madchester firmament, that mad melting pot of house music, dub, psychedelia, melody and funky feel of the groove that launched into the pantheon of English pop Stone Roses and Happy Mondays, paving the way that the shimmering musical chromatism of “Screamadelica” would soon speed down too. Not that Liam Maher's band – he died in 2009, aged 41, of a heroin overdose – actually came from the city of Old Trafford. They were from London – from Camden Town, to be precise – but the crowd they ran with and their peculiar melting pot stylistic bent showed Flowered Up's tendency to migrate towards the musical territories of the Hacienda, the legendary Manchester club that, in the late Eighties, supplanted the epileptic existentialism of Ian Curtisthe brash eclecticism of Mark E. Smith and the melancholy romanticism of Morrissey – that is, three of the pop-rock souls universally tied to the city – with an after-hours of dancing and getting wasted.

Actually, "Weekender" isn't about summer at all but — the title says it all — about the longed-for weekend, the impatience for Friday afternoon to arrive so you can switch off, only to switch back on again the following Monday the moment the alarm goes off, provided that in the meantime your neurons haven't got stuck in the swamp created by litres of hard liquor knocked back like cement and a handful of hallucinogenic pills. If the great rock gatherings of the Seventies sacrificed victims on the altar of heroin, the dancefloor British acts straddling the late Eighties and early Nineties glorified ecstasy culture instead. And "Weekender" is a kind of manifesto for it, with a video that's a genuine short film — directed by Wiz and produced by Heavenly Records — depicting the suffocating routine of a young worker whose only outlet is dissolute weekends spent clubbing.

And yet, beyond codifying the entire stylistic signature of the madchester sound even though its authors were outsiders to the city's scene, “Weekender” also manages to distil the flavours and aromas of summer into a song that isn't actually about summer at all. Magnificent contradictions. In “Weekender” there isn't just the blissful, dancefloor release of a “Kinky Afro” or a “Hallelujah”, and it isn't only about partying yourselves senseless before dawn catches you off guard – which, let's be clear, is more than fine – but also a residue of dream, of magic, of something you feel can only happen right now, and that you know will last even less than that.

E(c)stasy as poetics, and summer – this summer, not just any – as aesthetics. That's “Weekender” for you: a blend of the Who's “Quadrophenia” (sampled here in its film version), Pink Floyd-esque atmospheres circa 1975, and funk-fuelled bacchanals that George Clinton himself would have blessed with his own sweat. The sacred quality of soul music (organ flourishes and vaguely Stax-inflected black vocals) meets the profane side of house (percussion as compromising as if it had been caught red-handed at harvest time). Breakbeats that smash your face in and acid guitar solos that disinfect the wound. Oboe and saxophone, touches of class. Opiated effects, a whiff of trance. You can't believe your ears the first time you hear it. Nor could Flowered Up themselves, who, soaked in booze after three weeks of creative drought, recorded forty minutes of music in a single evening. They picked out the best parts, edited them together and – voilà – out came the sonic equivalent of a gin-and-nitroglycerine cocktail. A thunderous appendix to the buoyant “A Life With Brian” (1991), the band's only album.

Sound alchemist Andrew Weatherall also had a hand in the recording of “Weekender”, producing two alternative mixes released on a 12″. More house physicality and fewer dreamlike digressions: the bass and percussion pump away like an oil rig, the mood is scorching, the moment more erotic than cathartic. After all, Flowered Up had dedicated the track “to Saturday night fever sufferers everywhere”, wishing them a recovery that never actually arrived. May summer fever prove just as chronic an ailment.

pronosticuri vip pariuri ponturi profesioniste fotbal ponturi profesioniste fotbal