69 and *I*

IN THE benighted 1980s, the charts were full of whites trying to sound black: anti-rock outpourers like Mick Hucknall, Annie Lennox, Hue ... Cry, Bono, Kevin Rowland, all baring their beige-coloured souls, wasting their time in slavish imitation of James Brown, Curtis Mayfield et al. This movement had at its heart a sense of shame about pop. A R Kane, contrary bastards that they were, cleaved away in the opposite direction: two black guys making white music.

They once described themselves, unpromisingly, as "Miles Davis meets The Jesus And Mary Chain". The result was what's since been referred to as "oceanic rock": stately filigrees of glacier-clear sound and delicate melody, sometimes buried behind mountainous walls of noise, sometimes not, coupled with unfathomable oedipus-complex lyrics and oral fixations/metaphors.

These two re-issues show just how damn good they were. 69, their debut from 1988, in particular is an Astral Weeks for the modern age, with its murmured scat-vocals, its pastoral restfulness and its vast sense of aquatic serenity.

It's a genuinely astonishing record: imagine the Cocteau Twins equipped with distortion pedals and sequencers, covering a succession of Coltrane ballads in the style of My Bloody Valentine, and you're getting there. 'Baby Milk Snatcher' (an oblique protest against Margaret Thatcher's 1987 decision to deprive UK schoolkids of free milk!) is the pick of the tracks, a mesmerising dub voyage through a kaleidoscopic underground grotto of shimmering spangles and gleaming shards of guitar.

On 'Sulliday', their inclination towards conventional song-structure falls away completely: it's like being trapped inside an aural hall-of-mirrors as the guitar effects echo around crazily inside your head, with Alex Ayuli's lethargic, Bernard Sumner-like tones dissolving into stoned glossolalia a la Tim Buckley on Starsailor.

On 1989's "i", Ayuli and songwriting partner Rudy Tambala attempted to vary their game a little, with slightly mixed results. 'A Love From Outer Space' is a disastrous foray into rave and techno territory, while the vengeful, off-putting lyrical imagery of 'Supervixens' and 'Insect Love' illustrates what happens when Ayuli's idealised vision of the female is let down by the reality. But 1989 was a good year for rock, and *i* is one of the reasons why: the best parts of it ('In A Circle', 'Sugarwings', 'Challenge') are if anything even better than 69.

Eventually, A R Kane went their separate ways after a few more years of sporadic reconvening and recording. They possessed little or no motivation to succeed financially (Ayuli, for instance, worked at Saatchi ... Saatchi), and their music, convoluted and obtuse as it was, had little or no chance of entering the mainstream on its own terms. These two albums still won't be fully appreciated or understood in ten years' time (particular 69), but that's no reason for not getting hold of them.