Art Director's Paradise: Air's Moon Safari

Winter 1998. I'd changed workplaces and strengthened by career path and had started to climb out of under the smother of the life described in the Tricky article. I was getting sick of catching up with new movies on VHS and decided to try going to a new movie per week. I'd grab a fellow cinephile and go to as many as fit into an already over-widened margin as I could find. I managed about thirty-nine all up and the results were predictably middle-heavy, very few complete garbage and a little fewer that approached greatness. But one of them took us completely by surprise.

Seeing the advance buzz and stills of Alex The Crow Proyas' Dark City I wrote it off as a kind of Blade Runner too late after the fact but worth a ticket for the look alone. About five of us piled into the huge Hoyts multiplex that once stood on Bourke St one windswept evening and sat in front of one of the most wonderful things we'd seen in years. Dark City does have the art director's circle jerk look to it with is dusty noir and neon sci-fi streets and offices but also a genuinely engaging plot. Oh, and one of Jennifer Connelly's many appearences standing on the end of a pier, William Hurt in enjoyably underplayed role, Keifer Sutherland with bung eye as the one who might just know exactly what is going on and the late great Ian Richardson as ... well, in case you haven't seen it yet....

This is such a rare occasion that this time in a group of that size no one begged off to go home. We all went to Brunswick St for drinks and chat. Enough of us were going through a Frangelico phase at the time for that to be the round of choice. The gentle buzz from that and the surprise of the movie (seen in all of its cinematic splendour rather than on any of our ratty little tvs) set us in a great mood. Through all of this I and a friend noticed the cafe music and exhanged a glance. I asked the waitress what it was and had a copy the morning after.

I didn't bother napstering with this I went straight to the cd with its seventies sci-fi sporting imagery and fonts. The title was in a small thin font beneath the big block name and the words vertically down the side read: FRENCH BAND. There was a kind of tiled effect of colour behind the two action-comic figures who might have been playing soccer or running along the corridor of a sub-space cruiser in a Brit sci fi from decades before.

And from the opening instrumental delivered in a kind of brown vinyl synthesiser and trebly Fender bass to the Wish You Were Here wahs and snarls of the closer we are taken on the very best kind of retro journey in that it's one that knows you know but doesn't care if you don't.

It's mostly instrumentals but there are voices, grated through vocoders if male and recorded well and cleanly if female. Sexy Boy has a fuzz bass through a Peter Frampton talk box. Kelly Watch the Stars has a big three chord synth pattern and wobbly alien chorus asking Kelly to look up at night. This made for one of the best scene establishments in Daria as the fashion club had gathered in Quinn's room for one of their pecking-order-affirming sleepovers. And on...

And that's pretty much it. The album is a tightly blended mix of everything that drove you away from your dad's stereo system demonstration records and toward the sci fi tv shows that sounded like them. But best of all the record is a marvel of post-modern popsterising highlighting the irony of an era in which the new is just a redecorated revival AND it's good. All the synthesiser sounds, whether plotted on a monitor with wave table synthesis or plonked out on Korgs and Moogs from 1977, all the big block chords in choc-orange polyester, all the goofy Sparky's Magic Piano voices and goopy spacefoodstick lyrics add up to something I needed at that time more than anything else, a need that seemed obscure until its drunkeningly welcome appearence: AIR.