Verse and [Frazier] Chorus
On the cusp of the ‘90s, Frazier Chorus — a British pop group that fused high-tech fascinations with sharp songwriting — made some interesting, intelligent tunes, only to vanish as suddenly as they’d appeared. More than 30 years on, their singular sound endures, the cutting edge of a bygone era.
Discovering interesting music can feel like magic.
A new song can be revealed in your local cafe, landing like a cue in your own personal film; it can come through the speakers at a party, changing your life forever; but these days, it’s mostly coming to me through a screen. I stumbled upon Brighton-based pop group Frazier Chorus while diving back into The 1975, an album I was asked to revisit by a friend. I’m a big fan of The 1975 — one of the best bands of our time, if you ask me — but I’ve long considered their debut to be their weakest.
In the course of this relistening, I looked back on the discussion around the then-new record. In a 2013 review from Q Magazine, John Aizlewood called that troupe “possibly the first band to take influence from The Thompson Twins, China Crisis and the long-lost Frazier Chorus.” That final descriptor piqued my interest: I was across the Twins and China Crisis, but what did that ‘long lost’ band add to the sound? I was not in search of a subject, but Frazier Chorus enamoured me so, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something — anything — had to be said about them.
Where to begin? Brighton, the seaside city in East Sussex, where Tim Freeman — the older brother of Martin, a would-be actor — got to fooling around with a small keyboard. “I didn’t really have any ideas about getting into music,” said Freeman in an early interview. “I was a graphic artist working for advertising companies and such… Kate [Holmes] and I went to see The Durutti Column, and we just found it really extraordinary that they could use those instruments, which nowadays don’t seem so bizarre, like having a cor anglais and a trumpet and clarinet and weird synthy noises, pretty heavy on percussion.” The pair had their first band practice the very next day.
One instrument that Freeman’s fledgling band didn’t embrace was the guitar, bass or otherwise, instead placing an emphasis on woodwind and electronic instrumentation. Freeman played the keys, Holmes played the flute, Chris Taplin joined on clarinet, and Michéle Allardyce handled percussion, though it was Taplin — described as “obsessed with computers” and holding a degree in deconstructed music — who served as “the active straight man” of the group. The new four-piece initially went by Plop!, but after a string of rejections, they needed a new mantle.
“It came from the back of a jacket, the sort of American college football team kind that the cheerleaders all wear with the college name on the back,” recalled Freeman in a 1996 interview. “I think there’s a Frazier College somewhere and the Frazier Chorus was their team of cheerleaders.” This leaves the providence a bit unclear, as there is no Frazier College, let alone a cheer team that shares the band’s name. “It’s funny how it’s turned out because I really like the name,” he continued. “This name has no meaning, but to us it takes on a meaning.”
Their demo tape soon slid across the desk of Ivo Watts-Russell, co-founder of 4AD Records. “Ivo liked it enough to put the band in the studio with producer Gil Norton, who would go on to work extensively with the Pixies,” reads the label’s old website. The Pixies, then a new signee, were in the process of releasing Come On Pilgrim, and the label’s jewel was the ascendent Cocteau Twins. That studio time led to a single, “Sloppy Heart,” and two other tracks, “Typical” and “Storm,” which soon released as the group’s debut EP.
“Sloppy Heart,” in its original form, was a patient and barebones record, sparse verses giving way to luxe dream pop choruses. “Although we were happy with the record at the time, it was recorded extremely quickly and we think it shows in some of the arrangements,” said Freeman in 1989. 4AD, for their part, lovingly described the song as “a delightful piece of flute-driven pastoral pop,” but it marked Frazier Chorus’ only outing with the label.
This was, as the band recalls, always the plan. “4AD have a glowing reputation for quality music, and having a record released on their label seems to give us almost instant credibility in some circles, but we had always known that we were only with them temporarily,” said Chris Taplin of that initial release. “They were signing up a lot of aggressive guitar bands like AR Kane and the Pixies, and we felt that our music was slightly more mainstream than typical 4AD material. Almost as soon as 'Sloppy Heart' came out, we received a phone call from Virgin records wanting us to sign with them.”
Virgin certainly seemed a more suitable home for an outright pop outfit like Frazier Chorus, even if the move struck some as strange. “I think there was a bit of a shock, if you like, as an ex-4AD band going to Virgin and making a sort of more commercial sound,” recalled Tim. The band’s first single on Virgin, the outstanding “Dream Kitchen,” reflected that radio-ready aim. A slick sophisti-pop comment on consumerism, it was praised by at least one publication for its “half-whispered vocals and a luscious string arrangement,” but the track only just cracked the charts.
“It seemed as though the media saw 'Dream Kitchen' as a kind of wacky pop song,” said Freeman in a 1989 interview. “In actual fact it is quite a sombre tale of a mother whose children have left her. It was a shame that it was viewed simply as pop and the content of the song ignored.” In interviews, Freeman’s somewhat self-serious vibe frames making pop music as a stoic business, which sometimes comes off as intense. It’s true that there’s an interesting depth to Frazier Chorus’ lyrics, but the polished pop sheen masks the bitterness, and you can hardly blame pop audiences for taking things as they appear.
Things appear, for the most part, unreal: arrangements trade in the dinky artificiality of late-’80s synthesizer presets, occasionally overlaid with a strikingly flute melody or brass line. Propulsive percussion and stiff strings power “Storm,” with Freeman sketching an insomniac’s waking nightmare, the bombastic backdrop bringing gravity to tactile lyrics. The slick, edge-free jazz tint of “40 Winks” plays into the easy-listening conceit, which slyly paints domestic pottering — a classically English pastime — as something between a temporal trap and a prison sentence. It’s a familiar perspective done well, but there is some disconnect between the song and the realities of the moment, which included high employment, strike actions, inflation increases and recession fears. Thatcher’s UK was a hard go for a lot of people, and state-of-the-art kitchen renovations made for slightly clumsy metaphors.
Suburban subject matter and new-age pop arrangements aside, the most defining element of Frazier Chorus’ sound came in Freeman’s soft-spoken vocals. They’re dispassionate and cold, his oft-startling admissions landing with the kind of musical intonation you might catch in casual conversation. It’s on full display in “Living Room,” where his penchant for domestic detail (in this case, carpet fibres) and quaintly arranged loneliness. Tracks like the jaunty “Sugar High” or the lush, string-laden “So Forgetful” use everyday encounters and modern minutiae to illustrate some vague and abstract idea. “So Forgetful,” in particular, trades in oddity — “a light comes on where no light should be,” a disembodied voice shouts out in the night, and the haunted singer shrugs it off. It’s a bad breakup, I suppose, and it gets worse on “Ski Head,” a hilariously bitter remembrance that features a truly great lyric — “you killed my dog / well that's not true, but if you ever do / I'm going to find you and I'll feel like I feel now / In this rotten rain.” Misery is his lot, dead dog or otherwise.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that Frazier Chorus’ chilly sophisti-pop would be an exclusively studio endeavour, but Freeman was quite insistent on the need to tour. “It's not adequate to just be a bedroom musician,” he explained in the midst of a post-Sue press junket. “Your music becomes real when it is performed - whether you have a lavish light show, fireworks and a male voice choir or whether you're playing a piano in the corner of a pub.” It wasn’t long before Frazier Chorus, owing to their amicable post-split relationship with 4AD, toured as support for Cocteau Twins through the UK and Europe. There’s little online about those performances, though it’s hard to imagine the ever-grounded Frazier Chorus opening for Heaven or Las Vegas-era Cocteau, as lofty and ethereal as any rock band has ever been. A film of Frazier Chorus’ 1991 headliner at London’s Town and Country Club — taken from around the release of their sophomore album — is about as good a live showcase as we’re likely to get.
The tour did nothing to slow the band, and they soon returned with their sophomore record, albeit without Allardyce handling percussion. 1991’s Ray opens with “Cloud 8,” a smart and synthy single about keeping things moving. Freeman’s soft-spoken delivery, borne on the back of an even softer-spoken instrumental, does reinforce the somewhat tender image of the band. “If we do come across as nice and whimsical and English, it’s what we are,” said Freeman in a 1989 interview, “there’s very little we can do about it.” “Heaven,” the band’s best performing single, furthers that impression: it’s a similarly smart but softball send-up of the titular Kingdom — God’s a bore, his son is annoying, the lights are too bright, the music too loud, and nobody’s happy.
Ray, however, is bleaker still than the already-bitter Sue. Take “We Love You,” on which an unfaithful girlfriend calls Tim from a payphone and leaves a cruel tirade on the answerphone, or “Never Wake Up,” which finds a heartbroken, floor-bound character dissociating to trash TV and considering suicide. “The Telephone” is a light lament, a little long distance farewell; the following “Here He Comes Again” sounds like some sort of rekindling, but it’s actually an eerie track about being haunted by an “old abandoned friend.” It all pales in comparison to “Prefer You Dead,” a positive and pretty arrangement that features flaming fuel tanks, knives between shoulder blades, and trained gun barrels. On Sue, breaking up was hard to do; on Ray, it’s bloody murder.
If Freeman struggled with splits, the owner of his label — British playboy Richard Branson — had no such hangups. “[Ray] seemed to be going ok in that college-y way, and we were all pretty happy with it,” said Freeman in a 1996 interview. “Unfortunately, Virgin, our label, was in the process of selling to EMI at the time and when we got back to England, they had a list of the 60 most least wanted bands, and we were pretty near the top.” Branson needed cash for his high-profile war with British Airways, and the band’s small handful of achievements — 6 UK Top 75 hits, a couple of weeks on the album chart — weren’t enough to save them from EMI. “Chris and Kate, who were the only other two band members at that point, decided to call a band meeting at a hotel in Brighton and effectively sort of gave me the sack,” remembered Tim, somewhat bitterly. “I thought this was a bit odd, seeing as it was my band.”
Frazier Chorus went their separate ways: Kate went on to found synthpop band Technique and electronic group Client, eventually marrying legendary music manager and label head Alan McGee; Chris moved into event production, staging shows for acts such as Sigur Rós, Grace Jones, The Pogues and Björk. Freeman took some time off and kept writing, later remembering that he “went underground for a few years and had some fun and was entirely irresponsible.” That might’ve been the end of it, but that collection of songs proved too much to part with, and Freeman soon revived Frazier Chorus once more.
1995’s Wide Awake, a strange third record which featured no other original members. “I thought I’d just throw myself into a life of sin, which I did for a few years,” he said on his return. “I woke up with a few more songs and decided to release another album.” He called the other members, got the rights, and turned the endeavour into his own: “it made sense to capitalize on what I had, which is effectively a name to trade under.” His brother Jamie joined on guitar and Cocteau Twins touring member Benny Di Massa joined on drums, turning Frazier Chorus into a more traditional ensemble.
The title track, which opens the record, finds Freeman taking a solid step into mid-decade downtempo, his half-talked melodies flanked by wordless vamps and lounge arrangements. It’s a mood that persists throughout, Freeman’s distinctive songwriting lacking the full-bodied backing of the previous records. “I do all my writing on an old Alesis MMT8, a little 8 track sequencer,” he explained to an interviewer on the release of Wide Awake. “That’s proved to be the real strength to it… if you’re doing what I’m trying to do, which is write songs as opposed to make atmospheres aurally, if you can’t do it in 8 tracks then I think you fucked it, really.” Wide Awake is a pleasant postscript, an epilogue that speaks to Freeman’s own talents, while emphasizing the beauty of the then-absent band.
The short revival of Frazier Chorus was, by Freeman’s own accounting, a sort of post-breakup therapy. “I was living in Brighton, which is a sort of competitive artistic and musical scene, and I found myself signing back on the dole and the whole thing was really embarrassing,” he said in that same candid interview. “I’ve always had this thing about my voice, I can’t really sing,” he continued. “I think what I do with my voice is a performance of sorts, and it’s fairly intimate and that’s the only strength it’s got. I was really game on for never singing a note again and being one of those background boys. Trouble is, the best laid plans of mice and men come to cheese when you actually find yourself enjoying yourself again, which is what I did.”
In the years since, Frazier Chorus have all but faded to obscurity. It’s not hard to understand why they haven’t endured: a pop group who never broke the Top 20, surrounded by the era-defining excellence of Cocteau Twins and the sheer chart dominance of Stock Aitken Waterman’s pop productions, were bound to become ephemera. Frazier Chorus tapped the richness of restraint, which stood out in an age defined by roaring post-punk, dense and dreamy shoegaze, and the ascendant Madchester scene.
You could charge them with being too commercial for 4AD and too artsy for Virgin, chasing some sort of radio-ready art-pop sound even as it backed them into a corner, but you couldn’t accuse them of being dull. Theirs was a pleasant pop sound, both slick and serrated; shimmering songs so sharp you could cut yourself on their barbed words. That’s not likely, though. You’re much more liable to throw on that pleasant blend of sardonic wit and ‘80s studio sheen, kick back for a bit, and be lulled into a sense of unqualified calm. It’s adaptable left-of-centre pop that should be remembered, a quiet creative culdesac well worth idling in.