It Took Seconds

Six minutes and four seconds: There’s been a minor surge of interest in 1980s 12” mixes in recent years, thanks to some canny repackaging on the part of labels but also thanks to a collective remembrance of what an odd thing they were. Almost their own genre in fact, as whatever the source material the forced extension of it tended to the similar: a bunch of tricks and novelties lifted from dub and disco and applied to the works of, say, Nik Kershaw.

This is the 12” of “Our Lips Are Sealed” by Fun Boy Three, the playful post-Specials band put together by Lynval Golding, Terry Hall and Neville Staples. I keep meaning to explore FBT a little more as their singles are so glorious - “Tunnel Of Love”, “The Lunatics Have Taken Over The Asylum”, the extremely strange “The Telephone Always Rings”, and the stuff they did with Bananarama. Here they take the track Hall had written with the Go-Go’s Jane Wiedlin and slap on four extra minutes which revel in their own irrelevance, an honest-to-goodness new pop take on dub’s anything-goes tricknology, complete with marvellously doomy toasting by Staples. It shows the 12” at its best - an indulgence, a treat, a free gift.