Prior to the UK’s outrageously well received, time-travelling cop drama, ‘Life On Mars’ us Brits were already a hapless enough bunch of retro addicts as it was. Since then, everyone over the age of 25 has been busy cracking open their cans of Party Seven and pledging to auction their paisley patterned souls on Ebay. For some the 70s ended somewhere near the end of production on Shoot League Ladders, the removal of the BBC test card, the dismissal of Tommy Doherty and the dispatch of Morecambe & Wise to ITV. For others, like Hexstatic, the seventies didn’t end and what you have here on ‘Pick N’ Mix’ is a flair-flapping, 20 good reasons to believe it.
Harking back to an era when just anything went down at the disco (not least the 28 crates of babycham and 500+ cans of Double-Diamond quaffed by your own family alone) Stuart Warren Hill and Robin Brunson – the British electronic music duo known more commonly as Hexstatic – puncture a hole at both ends of the market by drawing on all manner of floor-filler material. Let’s face it, where else other than at a seventies disco were you likely to hear Dick Emery’s ‘You Are Awful’ and the Kink’s guttural yet pleasing, ‘You Really Got Me’ rub up and against the frosty star-treking of Grandmaster & Melle Mel’s ‘White Lines’ and the lush, kitsch drama of Tony Hatch’s ‘Sounds of The Seveties’? Naturally, there’s a few anachronisms to wrench open that worm-hole in space for your return journey home – Mr Scrufff, Ju-Ju, Chip Funk and Fug – but before you know it, you’re back in the Nags Head sipping warm double-diamond, snacking on Golden Wonder and counting the hours and minutes till the return of wrestling and World of Sport to the daft, monotonous drill of Popcorns’ ‘Hot Butter’ and the giddy cod-reggae of the Harry J Allstars.
Like many things in the seventies, ‘Pick N Mix’ is a bizarre conflation of the cool, the curious and the sadly embarrassing. One parts enjoyable to two parts perplexing. Who knows; maybe it would have worked better as a part of the teams pioneering audio-visual projects. At least we could have laughed at the clothes.
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