Paranormal (1986) by Potential Difference

Sonically challenging second ensemble album from the curious 15 year olds who were Potential Difference - and the first to feature keyboardist Adrian Brailsford.

Mark Cahill wrote about the album in 2003: 'Our first venture into real Uneasy Listening territory. I didn't even own a copy for years until 1989 when I played it on my Walkman for a laugh on the train on the way to a party after a can of Special Brew . And laugh I did as it 'took off'. In a big way. Fellow passengers presumably thought I was listening to comedy. Or that I was mad. I'm not sure to what extent we had realised that we were always going to be unintentionally hilarious. There was no point camping it up; we were camp anyway. But the humour here is born of chaos and perversity.

The expanded line up made for a rather crowded listening experience at times. That the proto portastudio (ghetto blaster) was on the floor, its stereo mikes barely a foot apart, with up to 7 people round it meant you sometimes had to fight for your right to be heard. Tellingly most of the songs had not been rehearsed as a group, despite 3 songs being at least 6 months old* and clearly in the case of Lady Louise not even by its composer. A leap in the dark then - the track listing had not been decreed in advance! We weren't even sure which songs would be included (Whatever happened to I Think You're A Cat?). Hell, we might even make some up as we went along! And we did. And it shows.

Such experimentation may sound fairly tame until one considers that this time we succeeded in filling a whole side of a C-90 (Chrome obviously) in a day that had to fit in with getting lifts from parents. That included allowing for stoppages for Adrian to put his nose out of the window due to 'allergies'. With hindsight I think Deutschland is the dill pickle in the Big Mac encapsulating all that is Paranormal. A miniature blast of surreal sing-along travelogue cum total freak out for all the family (well, 3 Wigmores) with kazoos followed by psychedelic variations on its theme (with more kazoo) clocking in at 12 minutes. Effectively a centrepiece and filling almost a third of the album it's early arrival as track 2 seems designed to frighten off the faint-hearted prospective listener.

Incidentally the bizarre colour coding scheme came unstuck around here possibly as the songs became less clear cut in what they conveyed. Sure, Angels was clearly yellow pop and the title track purple but it gets difficult beyond that. What was A Slip Of The Tongue? A grey rainbow maybe?

*Supporting documentary evidence: Original sleevenotes for Love & Stuff contained a teaser for the already forthcoming album including song titles

Alistair Cumberford wrote about the album in 2003: 'First things first. It must be said that Paranormal is, on a sonic level, a very nasty piece of work. Immediately upon entering its portals, the album assails the listener with clanging, arrhythmic cowbells and it’s not long before these are backed up with ear-shredding screams and piercing blasts of kazoo. Further in, there are snatches of lopsided French horn, detuned short-wave radios, and even explosions. But fear not: Paranormal is full of the joys of (alternative/ nerdy) teenage spring, and will reward the listener’s patience with many a chuckle, smile or even a belly-laugh.

Where Potential Difference’s first ensemble album Love and Stuff had been the polished result of almost a year of rehearsing and fine-honing the songs, with Paranormal PD sacrificed the smoothness for a much rougher, (s)punkier feel. Recorded in one afternoon/ evening, Paranormal is a ‘happening’, an organic event captured on tape, rather than a carefully thought-through sequence of music. (That the sequencing of the album works so astonishingly well has to be down to good luck.) It’s the sound of five oddball adolescents and two even younger children, and possibly a dog, locked in a room for seven hours, who have decided that, yes, they can indeed play with madness, and they’ll be damned if they don’t enjoy it!

As with Love and Stuff, the songwriting is split between Mark Cahill and myself, with collaborations a rarity. We had marvellously different styles – Mark’s songs are waspish and poised, turning on tricky wordplay and delivered with rasping, world-weary vocal inflections, whereas mine are lyrically more based on absurd/ childish rhymes and sung in a more yobbish way. (We obviously had different beasts within that needed unleashing in the playground of PD.) The music is largely untutored and fresh-sounding, often taking unorthodox twists and turns. (Witness the bizarre chromatic mismatch between the three segments of the title song – the fey guitar intro, the main body of the song and the Hey Jude-style na-na coda have nothing, and everything, to do with each other. Compositionally, the song itself is a patchwork Frankenstein). Mark’s songs were particularly strong here, and two (‘Angels Dancing on the Pinhead’ and ‘Hipocritic’) were reworked in a housey big-beat style for the Nostalgia album in 1991.

Although he wouldn’t become a full band member until And There Was Wine, Adrian Brailsford’s presence was key to Paranormal, and his musical contribution here, ‘Sometimes I’ is something of a PD milestone.'
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Real PD are a lo-fi synthpop band from northern England, founded in 1984 by 13 year-old aspiring post-punk singer/songwriter Alistair Cumberford. The current incarnation of the band comprises keyboardist Adrian Brailsford, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Mark Cahill, Cumberford, vocalist Claire Baker-Donnelly and guitarist Chris Eccles.