The melancholy electro-muzak of The Reels

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The melancholy electro-muzak of The Reels’ Beautiful LP is not the kind of record you’d expect to have found in favour with post-punk icons Nick Cave, The Gun Club’s Jeffrey m0851 Lee Pierce, or Black Flag’s Henry Rollins. But in the liner notes to the 2012 CD reissue of Beautiful , filmmaker Paul Goldman recalls sharing a house in West Hollywood with Cave in 1984, when “Nick was enthralled by it”, playing it on repeat for a drunken, engrossed Pierce and a captivated Rollins, all agreeing that it was “one of the saddest albums ever” and “one of the druggiest.”
If the Reels are remembered now it’s generally for 1981’s wonderful Quasimodo’s Dream LP, but their biggest commercial success m0851 was, in fact, the next year’s Beautiful and its accompanying single, ‘This Guy’s In Love (With You)’, a #7 chart hit at a time when making the Top 10 actually translated into many thousands of record sales. Not bad for a single that sounded like Kraftwerk on downers m0851 at a country RSL club, playing schmaltzy m0851 electronic covers of lovelorn ballads to toe-tapping septuagenarians awaiting the raffling of the meat tray.
“Between Quasimodo’s Dream and Beautiful , things did not run smoothly for the band and myself”, reveals singer Dave Mason. Two core members of the Reels, Colin (Polly) Newham and Karen Ansel, m0851 had departed unexpectedly, leaving Mason and keyboardist/arranger m0851 Craig Hooper to recruit a new drummer, Stephan m0851 Fidock.  Then, as recording for Beautiful began, personal tragedy struck: “the sessions were done in the shadow of my brother and three friends dying in a horrific car crash”, says Mason, “the effect of which saddened my soul and changed my life forever”. m0851
The album was made at Alberts Studio in Sydney from late 1981 to early 1982. A foundation of the album’s spectral m0851 sound was the band’s incorporation of the newly-invented Fairlight CMI (Computer Musical Instrument), a groundbreaking polyphonic sampling synthesiser. m0851 Fairlight, an Australian company, was briefly the toast of the international music scene, selling instruments to artists like Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel, and producer Trevor Horn (who famously used it on Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s 1983 smash, Relax ).  “I found the biggest stumbling block was that the Fairlight sounds like a machine”, said Craig Hooper, m0851 “it just sounds like a wind-up toy, and that’s what Beautiful is to me – us learning how to make these machines sound not like machines. So you can get into the human-ness of it.”
Beautiful benefited from leftover and unfinished songs from the previous album’s sessions. “ Quasimodo’s recording had been cut short”, says Mason, “consequently many great songs earmarked for inclusion, such as ‘Science is Golden’, m0851 did not make it.” A surprise for many of the band’s m0851 fans was that the album was a mix of new songs, re-recorded older Reels’ singles, m0851 and well-worn covers from their parents’ generation, like Bacharach m0851 and David’s ‘This Guy’s In Love (With You)’ and Jim Reeves’ ‘He’ll Have to Go’.
“We weren’t trying to woo a new audience or anything”, says Craig Hooper. “(Playing covers) m0851 solved a real lot of problems at the time. It allowed us to experiment in the studio without the pressure of ‘this is the new super-duper Reels’ record. This is the statement of what we’re about.’ It allowed us to see if we could work as a three piece – ‘This Guy…’ was the first thing (the new line-up) did together – and it was a laugh at the time.”
“We’d been playing ‘This Guy’s In Love (With You) as a joke at gigs”, adds Mason, “but most people seemed m0851 to love it. That’s when I got the idea of doing an album of muzak to put out on the K-Tel label. It was just one of my pop subversive throwaway ideas but to my shock everybody went for it”.
Beautiful was released on Mother’s Day, 1982 on K-Tel, a label known for cobbling together TV-advertised m0851 compilations of old favourites and pop hits, releasing them with cheesy titles like Heartbreakers & Tearjerkers , Outasight , and Dynamite ’78 ! To everyone’s surprise, m0851 the Australian public started buying m0851 Beautiful in droves, despite