Stuart Maconie described the Advisory Circle on 6music’s Freak Zone as “quite scary”. You can see his point as well. The music recreates the atmosphere of half-remembered public information films and weird and wacky children’s television programmes that the current crop of TV executives would run a mile from. For those too young to remember, public information films were screened on the television in the 1960s and 1970s to “inform” people of a variety of dangers ranging from running for a bus to the aftermath of an atom bomb falling on the country
“The Advisory Circle….helping you make the right decisions”, proclaims the first track, Logo, on the the recently re-released and augmented Mind How You Go. It paints a picture with other titles like Mind How You Go and Nuclear Substation or Civil Defence Makes Common Sense on Other Channels of a world where nostalgia and futurism rub shoulders in an uneasy alliance. Get in the Swim takes its cue from a 1973s film called Lonely Water that warns against the dangers of playing too close to water and is narrated by the Grim Reaper. The kids voices in the background seemaugment the sense of impending tragedy. You couldn’t imagine it today, it would be dismissed as nanny-statism of the worst kind by the right-wing press at least. But as kids in the late 60s and early 70s, we took them seriously.
The “group” is in fact one man, Jon Brooks (also King of Woolworths and Georges Vert). He has no plans to play live and is one of many that describes his studio as an instrument. His father was a jazz session player and he started playing instruments at a young age. He’s built up a large collection of 1970s Moog synthesisers over the years and combines their analogue quality with modern digital technology to produce music that has what he describes as a “Everything’s fine, but there is something not quite right about it” atmosphere.
For this fiftysomething writer, the music is reassuringly familiar. All those memories colour the way I listen to records and create a lush atmosphere that resembles a texture-like quality that many records aspire to but never actually achieve.
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