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The Associates

A Dundee duo, Billy MacKenzie's operatic voice and Alan Rankine's keyboards and guitars, who made Sulk, one of the strangest and most loved records of 1982.

Origin
Dundee, Scotland
Years active
1979-1990
Genres
post-punk, synth-pop, experimental pop, new wave
Labels
Fiction, Situation Two, Beggars Banquet, WEA, Circa
Also known as
Associates

Origins

The Associates were formed in Dundee in 1979 by the singer Billy MacKenzie and the guitarist Alan Rankine, and were active until 1990 with a failed reunion attempt in 1993. Sources disagree about how they began. According to Wikipedia they met in Edinburgh in 1976 and formed a cabaret duo called the Ascorbic Ones; Electronic Sound says they met on the Scottish cabaret circuit in 1976; Record Collector says the band formed in 1977; and Rankine later called the Ascorbic Ones a fictional past they invented. In 1978 they recorded as Mental Torture and then took the name the Associates. They are not the American band The Association.

MacKenzie, whose full name was William MacArthur MacKenzie, was born in Dundee on March 27, 1957, grew up in Stobswell, moved to New Zealand at 16 and crossed America at 17. Rankine was born in Bridge of Allan and raised in Linlithgow, and began in a cabaret band called Caspian. Their first single, in June 1979, was an unauthorized cover of David Bowie's Boys Keep Swinging, released about six weeks after Bowie's own version reached the UK top ten; John Peel played it and it led to a deal with Fiction.

The early records

The debut album, The Affectionate Punch, came out on Fiction on August 1, 1980, produced by Mike Hedges and Chris Parry and recorded at Morgan Studios in London. NME's Paul Morley called it a kind of masterpiece. Michael Dempsey, formerly of the Cure, and the drummer John Murphy had joined by then, though promotion still presented a duo.

In 1981 they put out a run of singles on Situation Two, Kites, Kitchen Person and White Car in Germany among them, which were gathered as Fourth Drawer Down in October that year; the title came from a drawer in their flat that held herbal sleep aids. A John Peel session was recorded on April 28, 1981 and broadcast on May 8. At the end of 1981 they signed to WEA on the strength of demos of Party Fears Two and Club Country.

Sulk

Sulk was released on May 14, 1982 and reached number 10 on the UK album chart, spending 20 weeks there. It was recorded at Playground Studios in Camden Town, London, Mike Hedges's studio in a former warehouse, with the band and Hedges producing. It cost 33,000 pounds against a WEA advance of 60,000, about half of which went on block-booking the studio. Rankine played most of the instruments, and MacKenzie, as Hedges recalled, asked for a sound like grass, Egypt or coming from inside a sarcophagus. Melody Maker named it album of the year for 1982.

It produced two top-fifteen singles: Party Fears Two at number 9 and Club Country at number 13, followed by 18 Carat Love Affair and Love Hangover at number 21. Then it came apart. In August 1982 UK dates, including three Edinburgh Festival headline shows, were cancelled when MacKenzie developed pharyngitis, and in September he pulled out of a planned US and Canadian tour the night before it began, saying the musicians were not up to standard. Rankine quit, and Dempsey left soon afterward. Electronic Sound reports that the collapse scuppered a reported 600,000-dollar deal with Sire.

After Rankine

MacKenzie carried on as the Associates, with Martha Ladly and others, and made Perhaps in 1985, which reached number 23 in the UK and sold about 40,000 copies, leaving him in debt to Warner. The follow-up, The Glamour Chase, was rejected by WEA as not commercially viable and was released only in 2002. He sang with Yello in the late 1980s, covered Blondie's Heart of Glass in 1988 and made a last Associates album, Wild and Lonely, on Circa in March 1990. He died on January 22, 1997 at Auchterhouse, aged 39. Rankine died in January 2023, aged 64, and later taught at Stow College in Glasgow, where students started the label Electric Honey.

Bjork has said she was drawn to Sulk in her teens, and Bono has said U2 ripped them off. Siouxsie's Say, on the Creatures' 1999 album, is a tribute to MacKenzie, and Robert Smith of the Cure wrote Cut Here in 2001. Tom Doyle's biography The Glamour Chase appeared in 1998. BMG reissued The Affectionate Punch, Fourth Drawer Down and Sulk in 2016, with Dempsey supervising, and a Sulk 40th anniversary box followed in 2022.

Members

Records

Songs

Siouxsie and the Banshees

Where to go next

Reference

Writing and criticism

Interviews

Live performance archives

Film and video

Sources

  1. The Associates (band), Wikipedia
  2. Sulk, Wikipedia
  3. Party Fears Two, Wikipedia
  4. Billy Mackenzie, Wikipedia
  5. The Affectionate Punch, Wikipedia
  6. Fourth Drawer Down, Wikipedia
  7. The Associates: 18 Carat Love Affair, Electronic Sound (2016-05)
  8. Fearful Parties: The Associates' Sulk 30 years on, The Quietus (2012-09-18)
  9. Sulk, Classic Pop
  10. Alan Rankine of the Associates dies aged 64, uDiscover Music (2023-01)