The Impossible Dreamers - This House Built On Sand

Label: Arcadia
Year of Release: 1984

At the risk of boring you all - because I'm sure I've said it before - the mainstream media notion of what British eighties indie-pop actually was has become very one-dimensional.  If we believe the carefully edited version of events, at the tail end of the decade "baggy" or "Madchester" sounds dominated, and prior to that the popular notion is that the mid-eighties were filled with twee C86 jangle-pop or, in the early part of the decade, post-punk.

Truth be told, the eighties indie scene was filled with a cornucopia of critically acclaimed sounds, from bone-shaking discordant rock to intelligent Cohen-inspired solo performers to anarcho-punks to... stuff like this.  Material which sounds inspired by an imagined, sophisticated coffee house culture which never really occurred effectively in Britain at any time.  It's slick, carefully constructed, knowing and definitely listenable, taking its cues from The Style Council, The Dream Academy and Sade as much as it does the low budget racketeers of the surrounding underground circuit.

Exeter's Impossible Dreamers enjoyed a lot of positive press in the weekly music papers in Britain - including one NME Single of the Week - and had one song ("August Avenue") which was produced by Johnny Marr.  Both factors would ordinarily be enough to make sure a band remained permanently fixed in cult indie databases up and down the land, but it's difficult not to conclude that the mainstream edge the Dreamers kept to their work caused them to be ultimately become less well remembered.  Still, unlike many a "Left and to the Back" contender, they do have a website of sorts here outlining a lot of information about the group's discography and history.