Track of the Week: The Monochrome Set: I'll Scry Instead (1982)

The Monochrome Set were a bunch of art students who formed when they left a prototype Adam and the Ants. This was a band who seemed set for stardom: lead by the charismatic Bid (vocals, guitar), who claimed to be descended from Indians, here was a band capable of writing witty, catchy and individual pop music. The Monochrome Set mixed jerky post-punk with music hall melodies reminiscent of the Kinks during their 'Village Green' era, all topped off with a fun but sometimes quite cutting sense of humour. Lester Square's guitar often harked back to the Shadows' gentle pop rather then the harsh distortion of punk, and one read through of the puns in their song titles should be enough to endear The Monochrome Set to you. 'Eligible Bachelors', their third album, is almost a concept album satirising the neurosis of the upper classes. 'I'll Scry Instead' deals, as you might be able to gather from the title, with a young man asking a fortune teller to reveal his fortune to him. Bid gleefully delivers line like 'Dear Madame be clear / Will I be rich next year?' and 'Up above, Venus is in my house / I'm in love with an Aquarius' before sighing 'I'd be richer if that cheque wasn't paid'. Bid sings it all in his magnificent silky croon, somewhat reminiscent of Noel Coward and an obvious influence on Alex Kapranos from Franz Ferdinand's singing style. Yet, while the song is obviously very sarcastic, Bid, like Ray Davies from the Kinks, is able to make you feel sympathy with the characters he mocks as well as laugh at them. The protagonist's naive desire to believe in the power of astrology to change his life despite knowing underneath it all that it's a load of nonsense makes it easy to empathise with him: the guy is simply looking for some sort of order and meaning to his life. All of which would be less impressive if the tune also wasn't so brilliant, but fortunately, with its effortless melody and delicate harmonies, the song is brilliant. It is an unorthodox mix of the post-punk and the arcane, drawing as much from the Kinks at their most pastoral and the Fairport Convention as Wire and XTC. 'I'll Scry Instead', like much of 'Eligible Bachelors', is slightly less eccentric and more soft and smooth then many of The Monochrome Set's earlier songs, but you could hardly accuse them of selling out on an album that includes a Latin invocation of the devil among its tracks. And when the music is this good, it seems simply churlish. 'Eligible Bachelors' should have been the sound of a band dramatically entering the mainstream, and indeed opening track 'Jet Set Junta' remains to this day the Set's highest charting single, but unfortunately most of the world just wasn't listening. The Monochrome Set remain to this day largely undiscovered and grossly underappreciated, but surely the recognition of true talent can only be a matter of time.