RELEASE DATE: October 3rd 2025

FORMAT: Digital Only, Bandcamp & Streamers

LABEL: Big Strings Attached

TRACKLIST:

01. Acid Elaine (Smiley Mix)

02. Acid Elaine (Windowpane Mix)

03. Acid Elaine (Microdot Mix)

04. Acid Elaine (Orange Sunshine Mix)

05. Acid Elaine (Purple Ohm Mix)

06. Acid Elaine (Strawberry Mix)

OK, here’s the story. It’s 1994. I’m sixteen and I’ve got no business being anywhere but in my bedroom with a jostick and a GCSE revision timetable. Instead I’m jacked into this demented pilgrimage with Acid Elaine – my first real crush and a terrible influence whichever way you slice it.


We’re heading for Always Remain True, a frequently raided ‘private party’ marooned in Preston’s badlands, celebrated for its lawless vibe and ferocious rave spirit. Elaine is already a regular. She wants to inaugurate me.


Before setting off she’s coached me on how not to make a dick of myself in front of her new crowd of mates, all of whom are at least ten years older than we are and very into tie-dye. We make the perilous journey from our damp Plungington slum to the party on foot sharing a Special Brew and chattering wildly about what might unfold.

When we arrive at the door, over which a metal skull hangs somewhat forebodingly, Acid Elaine is welcomed like a returning celebrity by a motley crew of people in various states of ‘transcendence’. The music accosts me… monstrously loud
repetitive beats with weird kind of hoover noises… unlike
anything I’d heard before down at Lord Byron’s, the rotten indie
disco round the corner.


We head straight to the bogs to settle ourselves and reapply
our Impulse. Elaine turns to me, eyes already pinwheeling, and
asks, “Wanna drop a bomb?” I have no idea what this means,
but before I can reply she rams a screwed-up Rizla in my mouth
and I swallow it down with a swig of someone else’s Carlsberg. Turns out it contains a trip, a pill and a fat wedge of base speed. I’d never touched drugs before. This was to be my debut. 


Ninety minutes later and I’m deep inside a hole on the dancefloor. I’m saturated with sweat – my own and other people’s – and there are hands everywhere: in my hair, in my mouth, up my nose – I feel like I’m being reassembled by a committee of strangers. The music is slowing, distorting, collapsing in on itself. Time’s gone sideways and God’s unplugged the turntables.


Then, the visions. Lou Reed, pallid and unblinking in his Berlin-era makeup, glaring at me wordlessly while a flying sheep’s skull tries to eat my face. I’m vomiting, profusely. Elaine claps. “That’s good,” she says, as if I’ve just nailed a violin solo.


I can feel myself slipping away…


Elaine shouts something – I hear it in chipmunk-speak (an aural hallucination, I later discover), “I know what we can do… we’ll find Mike!”


Next thing I know I’m coming to in a recording studio the size of a coffin, rammed to the gills with glowing gear. Apparently I’d collapsed like a wet ferret on the dancefloor and this Mike bloke dragged me out. He and Elaine had bundled me into his van and driven me to his bunker inside the scary old mill on Aqueduct Street. I’d never met Mike, but I knew the name: DJ Mike Oxlong. Older guy, gay, huggable, big on the hi-NRG scene in the 80s (apparently).


The studio is a spaceship. Synths, drum machines, blinking LEDs. I’m fucking agog. Somehow, the three of us start building a track. I’m still tripping my ring off, but it’s cosmic now. I’m banging out some Grade One piano on something called an Emulator II, just hammering out these colossal chords, celestial and ludicrous. I feel like the Angel Gabriel creating his famous number one song in heaven.


The next morning I wake up, bewildered and caked in club
detritus, in Elaine’s bedsit. She’s vibrating with glee. “The
tune!” she shrieks. “It’s even got a James Bond bit in it!”
She says it’s inspired by her love of Sean Connery’s
motorbike wheelie in Never Say Never Again.


A week later, a parcel drops through my letterbox: a DAT, and
a note from Elaine. She’s heading to Scotland in a camper
van with Banco de Gaia.

Of course she is. And that’s that. I never see her again.
 


Word trickles back occasionally that she’s alive and vaguely upright. I never summon the courage to get in touch with Mike.

So the DAT languishes, gathering dust, in my shoebox marked IMPORTANT THINGS. No DAT player, no idea.



Suddenly, it’s 2024.

Three decades on. A moment of idleness and a weird ache in the soul.
 


I get it digitised.
 


So what of it?
The track is undoubtedly the work of three maniacs. But it’s alive. It’s real.

Sheer drug-fuelled pomposity, caught on tape.


I present it to you here, Acid Elaine (Microdot Mix), alongside a suite of extra mixes that evoke that difficult first (and last) trip.



Special thanks to J.S.Zeiter, Vyvyan (Bonar Bradberry) and Graham Massey for their musical and technical support on this project. Thank you to Izotope.

The cartoons come courtesy of Chloe Batchelor.
 


Mastering is by Matthew Styles-Harris at Horizontal Studios, Barcelona.
 


“Take it away, Jack!”

releases October 3, 2025

01. Acid Elaine (Smiley Mix) – 125bpm

The curtain raiser treats us nice: rolling Minimoog bass, pinballing rimshots, strings. 707 meets 007. Then a trapdoor opens, plunging us helplessly into piano house heaven.

02. Acid Elaine (Windowpane Mix) – 125bpm

Tape echo sets the groove. A vocal sample, chopped to nonsense, queasily warped. Wow and flutter. Then the whole thing buckles, time slows, and you’re tripping hard about Lipps Inc. getting fingered behind the bus station.

03. Acid Elaine (Microdot Mix) – 125bpm

You’ve got to be fucking joking. An orgy of ridiculous samples, colossal Reese bass, Supertramp piano, fratty energy, Yello bumming each other on
bennies, First Choice – the only choice. Sounds like it was produced
by Cocaine Bear. Started in 1994, finished 30 years later.

04. Acid Elaine (Orange Sunshine Mix) – 125bpm

Remix by J.S.Zeiter. One for the cathedrals: a flawlessly produced prog-house juggernaut. Do not be tempted to disobey that piano. Sweet Mother of God.

05. Acid Elaine (Purple Ohm Mix) – 127bpm

Remix by Vyvyan (Bonar Bradberry). Horizontal at the afters: moody pads drift over a bubbling breakbeat, Reese bass ominous in the shadows. XTC upon XTC. A gated, warbling vocal heralds the dawn. Swoon to that filmic outro, mere mortals.

06. Acid Elaine (Strawberry Mix) – 120bpm

Remix by J.S.Zeiter. Nine minutes twenty of pure deepness. The walk of shame is complete. Little light shining. You dream of sleep.