sychedelia, especially English psychedelia, is full of mythical creatures. Of all of London’s greatest composers living and working during the late 1980s, Dan Crane perhaps best typifies the genius of the English psychedelic creative spirit, for his work was at all times rooted in logic and tradition, to which he added wit, fluency, and playful innovation. He is an enigma; he stalks the land of mythical creatures. Was his alter ego the famed 1970s schizophrenic serial killer? He could certainly relate to his visions and gradual drift into insanity as a result of drug consumption. Yet his musical language was impeccable and his sense of form resembled that of the great classical horror and science fiction writers of the last century. The freshness and effectiveness of his musical conducting came from a masterful control of all his resources and never from purely inspirational indulgence. He was a craftsman and an intellectual who used the band, the image and those voices but was never the less mindful and technically aware (sampling had still to gain its stranglehold over the industry at this time) and who unfailingly flattered his craft by his integrity and painstaking discrimination.

Angels in Pigtails, Crane’s magnum opus, will weave its enchantment over the listener with repeated plays. It has strength and subtlety, colour and precision, combining elements of grindcore, dub, horror movie soundtracks, avant classical, aboriginal, and ethnic psychedelia. It uses dramatic virility and musical delicacy. And all is beautifully balanced, evoking the vulgar and the crude with an exquisite swagger.

When Terminal Cheesecake crashed into the world with their delightful interpretation of Johnny Town Mouse, the sleeve notes explained that it was “unheralded and unprecedented, for who could have expected a German recording by a choir outside its own domain, to make such headway.” It explains about the product and of the concept and how it had been attributed to the great Mozart until the real composer Dan Crane admitted that only he, together with the band, could produce such a tour de force, a one-of-a-kind fantastic exploration of what can be done with a simple, if tricky, melody and a basic three-quarter rhythmic pattern pushed to almost maniacal extremes. In the music of Terminal Cheesecake, instead of human emotion we find, much more frequently, grace, energy, and an impression of physical beauty. As such, it’s not surprising that some of their greatest accomplishments came about in the graceful, energetic, and physically beautiful world of the ‘stoned dance’ and free festival/Stonehenge circuit beloved by fans of their latter long players.

But what of the creativity and influences that produced Angels in Pigtails? We need to put time and place into perspective. Originally founded in 1988 by Gary Boniface, the band on this release included Boniface on vocals, bass, and samples, Russell Smith on lead guitar, rhythm guitar, and samples, Gordon Watson on bass and acoustic, and Joe Whitney on drums and percussion. The band mixed and co-produced the album with Rudy Kane from the 4AD group AR Kane. Kane and Smith also famously produced a record that stayed in the British charts for 14 weeks and unbelievingly reached number 1. That record was M/A/R/R/S’ “Pump up the Volume.” Apparently doing the record for a laugh, they appeared on Top of the Pops accompanied by a video with their faces covered up. Was this to encourage their mysterious persona or simply to hide from the dole office?

Terminal Cheesecake gradually began to make headway when they became closely tied to the burgeoning UK dirge scene. Their vivacious appeal bought about comparisons with Loop, Head of David, and Godflesh. Certain features of this movement, like the ripped and bleeding guitar works, gave these groups a similar passion but with the release of Angels in Pigtails, Terminal Cheesecake began to distance themselves from the usual examples of the genre. Eating acid for breakfast, beer and hashish for lunch, and top quality London speed for the evening, they began to unexpectedly appeal to the new acid house generation that enjoyed the mixture of echo-laden mixes and Butthole Surfer attitude. Playing on the public and press reaction to their music, they began to build upon the myth.

At the time of the album’s release, the group also appeared on a sampler compilation alongside other grind core acts like Godflesh, Coil, God, Carcass and Napalm Death. Staying one step ahead of these artists, they capitalised on the confusion by releasing the Angels in Pigtails LP and CD in different covers. The LP cover is a parody of the jazz label Blue Note. The bright red front cover picture and text looks suitably aged, featuring a picture of a blown up and distorted skull torn through by a bullet wound. Bringing in the Dan Crane myth and using a cover directly taken from the 7” EP Angels in Pigtails by the Obernkirchen Choir (Parlophone GEP 8529) for the CD release, helped to add to the confusion. Using a font and text style to help celebrate the appeal of those types of releases the unexpected graphics, including black and white visuals lifted from the book Freaks: We Who Are Not As Others by Daniel P. Mannix on RE/Search, beautifully contrasted the striking and wider range of dynamics of the music that began to unfold from the disc within.

Those influences leaked in from all around the thriving metropolis. Vague Magazine. ID, the Face, The Mutoid Waste Company, and the free festival circuit that pumped out alternative dance and dub, huge sound systems that would turn up unannounced in underground car parks, under flyovers, and derelict buildings scattered around town. At the time, Test Dept were putting on grand and disturbing shows all around Europe. Adrian Sherwood and the ON-U-Sound System gave London a well-deserved kick up the backside. Genesis P-Orridge and Psychic TV were trail blazing the new sound of Acid House across the capital. Psychedelic influences were everywhere. Not just the general hotchpotch of Hawkwind or Spaceman 3, although those resonances were definitely present, but artists like the Fall, My Bloody Valentine, the Pop Group, Sonic Youth, 808 State, Cud, Mudhoney, Jesus and Mary Chain, The Barmy Army, New Age Steppers, Eric B, Public Enemy, Big Black, Shop Assistants, Cocteau Twins, Half Man Half Biscuit, and even the Beastie Boys all show up in some way or another here. Not to mention the Residents whose piece “Hello Skinny” is even covered on the disk.

But we need to go back to Felix Mendelssohn when he visited Scotland in 1829 to help us visualise London at the time of this epic release. “Few of my Switzerland reminiscences can compare to this; everything looks so stern and robust, half-enveloped in haze or smoke or fog” and indeed before all the new redevelopment in East London the huge buildings were overpoweringly stern and robust and those alternative types in town were smoking the sticky black, oily, and wet hashish that gave the impression of Victorian fog as it enveloped the user in a thick yellow cloud.

Fine and clear is the atmosphere in which these pieces exist. There is an attempt to produce local colour, the music, frankly Teutonic, sometimes nightmarish, and yet graceful. Although there are natural pauses in the work, all the tracks on the CD release are contained in one track that clocks in at 43.00 in length. It is astonishingly vivid, in the way that the music recalls the past, enveloping it all into a haze of tender memories and catapulting it into the future. Sometimes using crystal and exquisite single note sounds, blistering and dark mood swings or venting their spleen towards the then-popular violin virtuoso Nigel Kennedy and producing the sound of a drill as they sample the line “Unless of course you can tell me that it is safe” with the voice of Laurence Olivier as he drills into the teeth of Dustin Hoffman from the film Marathon Man. It is a moment of vision rescued from oblivion. Even if the breeze is boisterous, the weather keeps fine. The careful nurturing of memories has been overlaid by many intervening experiences, the world has moved on and yet still the hushed and mysterious, bare in texture with its romantic modulations and delicately scored crescendos can unite the past and future into the timeless present. You have the vague impression that you have heard this all before and yet could this not be where it all started?

When you play this psychedelic masterwork think again of Mendelssohn. Like Dan Crane and the Cheesecakes, his words follow us through the ages: “Everything around is broken and mouldering, and the bright sky shines in.”