At my undergraduate station we did not, surprisingly, have a lot of full-length albums for the rock shifts. Don’t laugh - we weren’t as clueless at that makes us sound. We had some full albums, usually due in part to a record label sending some promotional copies our way, or someone on staff donating their copy to the station for either a short-term or permanent loan. A majority of the music came in the form of weekly preview discs. Every Tuesday afternoon there was a dash to the mailroom – like kids racing toward a Christmas tree – to see what tracks were included on this week's blue disc. If there was a song on the disc that we didn't have yet, we could quickly enter it into rotation. Or, as it were many times, the song wasn't included and we would have to wait in hopes that the latest track from the "it" artist of the week was included on the next disc the following week.
Ripping open the package, the directors scanned the disc to see what was salvageable. Even though the discs had 10 to 20 tracks, the music ranged from what was considered adult alternative to loud rock. The music director would then decide which songs, if any, we would put into rotation. Sometimes we featured over half the songs on a disc, other times we played only two out of the twenty tracks, thereby wasting a lot of space in the control with a rather useless disc.
Still, we were on the mailing list of some prominent record labels and, from time to time, we did receive some prominent albums. Nothing was more "prominent" the week that we found an album from some English-sounding group called Subcircus. What was special enough with either that band or our station to warrant this album be sent our way out of a whole slew of other possibilities? The music director and I listened to a few of the tracks and decided to add the strongest sounding one into rotation. We really liked the second track, a somewhat catchy tune called 86'd.
Subcircus was indeed from England, a quartet of musicians that included Tommas Arnby, Nikolaj Bloch, Peter Bradley, Jr., and George Brown. The foursome came together in the mid-1990s, making a name for themselves on the club circuit before releasing their debut album, Carousel, in 1996; it hit the United States market the following year. And that’s about all we heard from them. The group became another random band, one nobody had heard of prior and I don't think anybody has heard much from them since. Well, I see they released their follow-up in 2000 but I don’t think it was enough noise to grab anyone’s attention this side of the pond.
While I liked the track and it got moderate airplay on the station, it never blossomed into the hit that I think the band or label hoped. However I did get a chuckle many months later when our Tuesday preview disk arrived and I noticed that 86’d was included on the disc. Wow – were we really that far ahead of the game for once? While I now see this might be due to album being released at different times in England and the United States, at the time, the music director and I found it a triumph for the station. We had gotten the full album what seemed like a year before the preview disc people thought the song was popular enough to include.
We were happy, we were boasting, but I just don’t think anyone cared at that point.
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86’d
(Subcircus)
Subcircus
From the album Carousel
1996
