The Blizzard King - Break On Through/ Strangers In The Night/ In The Ghetto

Bill Drummond and Zodiac Mindwarp take on Morrison, Sinatra and the King of Rock and Roll.

Label: Kalevala
Year of Release: 1997

We've already talked in some depth about Bill Drummond's odd Kalevala label project, and we have now included all but one of the singles released (I'm still holding out for a reasonably priced copy of "Gimpo" by Gimpo). Like most of Drummond's post-KLF projects, it's been an odd, interesting, uneven, but occasionally very rewarding ride. These singles mark the last time he really dabbled with recorded music - the "17" project dealing entirely with one-off live performances - and while they generally indulge his whims rather than point to any directions the KLF might have gone in, Bill's whims are often more entertaining than most artist's considered works.

This record was always, on paper, one of most absurd-sounding of the batch. In Zodiac Mindwarp and Bill Drummond's novel/ road diary/ mesh of truths, half-truths and downright violent fantasy "Bad Wisdom", we learned about a Lebanese Elvis impersonator they had discovered in Finland who looked and sounded uncannily like the King himself. They also wrote about weird sounds they heard being piped through the radio in their car, including strange Finnish language covers of Bruce Springsteen tracks and songs by The Doors.

This is actually quite explicable - anyone who follows the Foreign Cover Versions Twitter feed will know that Finnish language covers of major American and British hits are two a penny, and some are surprisingly well produced given the probable size of the market they're catering for. Caught unawares, however, Drummond began to get obsessed with these sounds and wonder if he was in some parallel universe where everyone, Springteen, John Lydon, Elvis himself, somehow had Finnish heritage.

I visited Finland myself last year, and I can confirm that somehow the country does do funny things to your head, even if you're not Bill Drummond. Everything looks superficially Scandi at first, but the Finns had closer ties to the USSR than most Western European countries, creating a weird hybrid of cultures and a sense of being neither one place or the other. The Finns also possess a particularly dark, unusual sense of humour. While there, I was nearly tipped over the edge by a drawing of a giant demonic rabbit in the window of a barber's shop, which looked closer to my imaginary idea of the Echo spirit Bill Drummond envisaged years ago than anything I'd seen before. There were other odd things too - a man in a penguin suit dancing to out-of-tune cathedral bells, two Maneki-Nekos infinitely stabbing each other to a death that never came in a knife shop window, a rusty trombone in the window of a High Street bank, the creeping sense that if I stayed long enough I'd be told the purpose of why I came and what I was to do with my life next... all of which evaporated and felt embarrassingly nonsensical as soon as I touched down in the UK again. But perhaps that's just me.

Putting personal feelings and experiences aside for one moment, this single tries to reproduce the Finnish flavoured Elvis and Doors sounds Bill and Zed heard. Staying true enough to the original arrangements to feel familiar but just skewed enough to make you feel unsettled, it does a good job of summing up their experiences and acting as the book's "soundtrack", but possibly isn't something the average listener would return to much (unlike some of the other Kalevala releases this blog has documented).

The version of "In The Ghetto" at the tail end of this EP is an obvious call-back to the KLF's "Chill Out" LP, as indeed is the Aurora Borealis single that concluded the Kalevala releases. Drummond seems to have a continual habit of returning to old ideas and shining them up afresh in new contexts.

As for who is performing on this record, the female backing singer sounds like the same person involved in the Aurora Borealis and Dracula's Daughter releases (Aija Puurtinen), and while Bill would doubtless want us to think the lead singer is the Lebanese Elvis impersonator, I do suspect it might be Zodiac Mindwarp doing his best Presley voice. But what does the truth matter? All these singles are just odd, highly limited edition audio postcards from the edge of the Arctic Circle... accept the contradictions and enjoy the myth.