Moving into month two and perspectives are changing. It is true that, when planing to go away for a couple of days next week, my brain wondered if I could get a couple of days leave, but it is also true that when I woke up this morning it took me a while to decide it was probably Saturday.
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One of my favourite bands is one I never saw live, Tansads. I remember hearing Up The Revolution on the Radio, and Johnny Walker played them a lot. Four of their albums are easy enough to find, although I think I got some via second-hand shops on Amazon.fr because of scalping prices in Amazon UK. However their final album, Reason To Be, released after the original band broke up, is harder to find and is very different. Tansads featured the twin vocal attack of Andrew Kettle and Janet Anderton, and the contrast in their voices delivering no-nonsense lyrics was one of the things I found irresistable. Reason To Be is essentially a vehicle for Janet’s voice only. Indeed, for a while the band went under the name ‘Jane Doe’ before reverting back to Tansads.
Janet Anderton
I’d seen a lot of comment on the album which, if not negative, implied it wasn’t as good as earlier efforts. Nonetheless, in a spirit of completism, I decided to track it down.
I had a search in place on ebay for a long time, and let a copy on Discogs pass because I thought it was too expensive. Finally a copy came up for auction and a last-seconds snipe on my part meant I finally got it (and at a sensible price).
When it arrived I put it on with some trepidation, hoping it wouldn’t discolour my long-time enjoyment of the band. In fact just the opposite happened: I love it.
It is certainly different to the earlier material, but it stands up in its own right. There is a thunderous power rocker called Hello which I often put on repeat in the shed. Unfortunately the band finally split after Reason To Be until a series of reunion gigs that I found out about too late. From the ashes of Tansads came Merry Hell who share some personnel and material with Tansads but are going in their own direction.
And they don’t have Janet Anderton’s voice. I don’t know what Janet is doing now, and as far as I know she is no longer singing. That’s a shame as she was one of the great voices of British indie-pop/rock/folk.
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