22 Beaches - Dust: Recordings 1980-1984

First ever retrospective of recordings by Stirling's 22 Beaches, a six-piece post-punk outfit contemporaneous to other Scottish acts Cocteau Twins and The Wake but with nowhere near the same level of recognition. Or even evidence of their existence - aside from a track or two on a handful of various scene/benefit compilations, their footprint is close to invisible. Perhaps it was a case of right time, wrong place, since 22 Beaches were in command of a sound that landed right in the Factory/99/Hacienda/Danceteria dancefloor roaming sweetspot, reminiscent of the uptight, blue-eyed punk funk of all manner of disco-not-disco royalty - think Konk, ACR, Liquid Liquid, early Happy Mondays, even Talking Heads frc'sake. Busy lane as that is, 22 Beaches were doing plenty enough to stand out, the production water tight, enough melody to draw you in, enough angles to shake you loose. Might it have been different were they from Manchester or New York? Sometimes you just gotta concede to the vagaries of the biz. Unsurprisingly, it's the track from which the title for this collection is taken that'll likely resonate most, a supple concoction of rolling toms and insistent bass, snaking guitar, and traded boy-girl vocals that I'm surprised hasn't turned up on a Soul Jazz compilation before (we're crying out for an Arthur Baker remix here tbh). Most of the remaining seven tracks follow a similar path, leaning into those male-female vocals with increasing confidence, but for me it's the goth-y dirge of 'Cartoon Boy' that I've returned to most, completely at odds with the rest of the record and with more in common with the private nocturnal world of Solid Space than any dancefloor of the era. It didn't quite work out for 22 Beaches, but four years was enough time to give it a shot, so there's not really a sense of what-could-have-been either. And besides, if being talked about 40 years after the fact isn't some measure of success, then I'm not sure what is.