Cult gold: Simon Fisher Turner & Colin Lloyd-Tucker’s apocryphal, ethereal new wave evergreen is a true record of its era, one of their two sides issued between 1982-83 and featuring a stellar roll-call of Annie Hogan, Matt Johnson, and John Porter among their number who altered the face of British pop music in the early ‘80s
’Double Happiness’ was first presented in 1983 as the work of Claudine Coule & Gemini Forque, who would later be unmasked as polymath Simon Fisher Turner and his spar Colin Lloyd-Tucker, who between them worked with everyone from Derek Jarman to Kate Bush and Terre Thaemlitz, to name but a few notables. To give a distilled version of their backstory, Deux Filles charted the short, mysterious career of French duo who met as teenagers on a holiday pilgrimage to Lourdes, during which one of their mothers succumbed to lung disease, and the other’s mother was killed and her father paralysed in a car accident. Their shared grief manifested in music that channelled their angst in the most elegant manner, before disappearing from view; apparently to the Algiers of of Forque’s birth.
Upon its 40th anniversary, the project returns to circulation well known as a playful hoax (they genuinely pulled it off for a while back then), but has lost little of its musical enigma thanks to the gorgeous melancholy conjured by their opulent blend of chamber and soundtrack orchestrations with pseudo-religious and ethnomusicological whims and overproof levels of imagination, all benefiting from some of the best instrumental spirits in the game during a pivotal epoch that still feeds forward into today. Fair to say the ground has shifted a lot since then, and this project would be torn to shreds according to new politics, but it remains a pioneering piece of art from renaissance figures of their generation who fused myriad ideas into deeply pleasurable and wonderful set of recordings that toy with and gently question convention.
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2022 re-issue.
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Cult gold: Simon Fisher Turner & Colin Lloyd-Tucker’s apocryphal, ethereal new wave evergreen is a true record of its era, one of their two sides issued between 1982-83 and featuring a stellar roll-call of Annie Hogan, Matt Johnson, and John Porter among their number who altered the face of British pop music in the early ‘80s
’Double Happiness’ was first presented in 1983 as the work of Claudine Coule & Gemini Forque, who would later be unmasked as polymath Simon Fisher Turner and his spar Colin Lloyd-Tucker, who between them worked with everyone from Derek Jarman to Kate Bush and Terre Thaemlitz, to name but a few notables. To give a distilled version of their backstory, Deux Filles charted the short, mysterious career of French duo who met as teenagers on a holiday pilgrimage to Lourdes, during which one of their mothers succumbed to lung disease, and the other’s mother was killed and her father paralysed in a car accident. Their shared grief manifested in music that channelled their angst in the most elegant manner, before disappearing from view; apparently to the Algiers of of Forque’s birth.
Upon its 40th anniversary, the project returns to circulation well known as a playful hoax (they genuinely pulled it off for a while back then), but has lost little of its musical enigma thanks to the gorgeous melancholy conjured by their opulent blend of chamber and soundtrack orchestrations with pseudo-religious and ethnomusicological whims and overproof levels of imagination, all benefiting from some of the best instrumental spirits in the game during a pivotal epoch that still feeds forward into today. Fair to say the ground has shifted a lot since then, and this project would be torn to shreds according to new politics, but it remains a pioneering piece of art from renaissance figures of their generation who fused myriad ideas into deeply pleasurable and wonderful set of recordings that toy with and gently question convention.