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In
1984, everything looked rosy for Personal Column - they’d recorded
three sessions for the John Peel show, all broadcast four times, and
also for Kid Jensen, Simon Bates and Janice Long. Surely nothing could
go wrong?
You
don’t need to be Mystic Meg to deduce that things did, indeed, go
wrong, and the world did not take Personal Column to its collective
bosom, or even get the chance to. But this was nothing to do with the
quality of the music, hard-hitting indie songs with a literary quality
that marked them out from their contemporaries, played and arranged
with skill and taste.
Based around the songwriting of singer/guitarist Marc Vormawah and
keyboard player Colin Brown (music/lyrics respectively), the melodic
sound of Personal Column put them somewhat out of step with the
zeitgeist, not New Romantics, not as edgy as Crass, post-punk but not
Joy Division or The Fall, style-wise they slipped into the cracks. On
stage they looked like people you might meet in the pub - and in fact
they were very often people you might meet in the pub, as alcohol was
definitely the group drug of choice, and a lot of time was, in fact,
spent in bars.
The story of how Personal Column screwed up the business side of the
music business is too long and messy to detail here. Suffice to say
that they came out of the other end with some great memories (they were
a fabulous live band), and a box of cassettes.
And so here we are firmly in the twenty-first century, and finally the
Personal Column album is here, in a format we wouldn’t have dreamed of
at the time. They followed that familiar trajectory, of rehearsals in
shabby rooms, Monday-night gigs in disreputable boozers (ask anyone of
that Liverpool generation about the Masonic!), to bigger clubs, small
tours, BBC Maida Vale studios, recording for Stiff, publishing
deals with ATV and MCA, and on to disillusion and disintegration.
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Marc had a short time as a solo artist signed to Elektra in the USA.
His solo album was produced by Arif Mardin, but again it didn’t make as
many waves as it might have done, and he returned to Liverpool, mostly
relieved to have escaped the ‘star-maker machinery’, to quote Joni.
Listening to these tracks now, they don’t sound at all dated, which is
kind of odd. When they were recorded, pop music from forty years
previous meant Glenn Miller or the Andrews Sisters. In those forty
years, pop music reinvented itself radically four or five times. Yet
here we are another forty years on, and you could be listening to a new
band just breaking into the scene. Tragically, even the political
comments don’t sound dated.
As albums go, it comes with a history, much of it largely unknown. A
footnote? Perhaps. But too good to simply allow it to fade to nothing…
phil hargreaves
Liverpool 2025
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