single // Stop! Dance!
AK-47
was the work of Simon Leonard; 'Stop! Dance!' was
released a year before Leonard met David Baker,
his future musical accomplice in I Start Counting,
Fortran 5 and Komputer, at Middlesex
University, and two years after his solitary 7” as File
Under Pop ('Heathrow').
Unlike the industrial noise claustrophobia of 'Heathrow',
'Stop! Dance!' is a bouncy little synthpop track which is very 1981
(in a good way), albeit with a dark edge thanks to the vocodered
vocals which seem to be lots of references to AK-47, which, in case
a whole generation of computer games and action movies has passed
you by, is a gun. Naming your musical alias after a weapon and then
delivering fey pop music is just about as contradictory as anything
else Leonard has done in his musical career I guess. 'Stop! Dance!'
is all simple, persistent drum patterns, stalking single-key basslines
and bubbling sounds and sweeps blended in over the top, while a
chord change brings in a brief, wobbly and quite pleasant melody.
'Autobiography', the first of two tracks on the
B-side, is a short instrumental featuring a sawing synth sound,
tick-tock beat, some Kraftwerk-esque vocal loops, reedy melodies
and Leonard intoning a brief couplet about waking up and getting
on a freight train, as if the autobiographical element was some
deep southern porch blues number. 'Hilversum AO', another instrumental,
has a euphoric quality, even if there are a few dud notes in among
its elegiac melodies.
There's nothing exceptionally polished about these
three tracks, unlike the comparatively gleaming work Daniel
Miller and Depeche Mode would put out
the same year on Speak & Spell; like 'Heathrow' it
retains a firmly experimental dimension, only here that edge is
delivered through synths rather than grainy tape loops. Quite aside
from its collector status among I Start Counting / Fortran 5 / Komputer
fans, this is an example of an alternative electropop and bagging
a copy on 7” will set you back near enough GBP50.00.
7":
A. Stop! Dance!
B1. Autobiography
B2. Hilversum - AO
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