Now newly-expanded with bonus tracks, new versions and more detailed liner notes from the band’s keyboard player Lyndon Scarfe, THE DANSE SOCIETY’s “Heaven Is Waiting” – originally released by Arista in 1984 – isn’t so much a “difficult” second album as a hard-fought one.
Having been picked up by Arista after the (still great) “Somewhere” single – see the deluxe “Seduction” CD release – Barnsley’s finest recorded the single “Wake Up” successfully with Ian Broudie and Phil Thornalley and hoped to complete their mooted album with the same team. Unfortunately, they were unavailable and THE DANSE SOCIETY got farmed out to Leatherhead, Surrey, to record with POLICE/ BANSHEES desk guru Nigel Gray. And therein, friends, lies the malaise that gnaws at the album’s heart.
Because, if you were to judge “Heaven Is Waiting” solely on the tracks produced by Gray, it would be a serious underachiever, and of the five tracks presented here, only “Valiant To Vile” really retains the dark urgency THE DANSE SOCIETY were capable of, and despite remixing efforts by the band and Will Gosling. Most of the Gray-produced sessions find the band shoehorned into a forced modernist approach with that heinous 1980s villain, the enormous gated snare drum to the fore and Gray’s omnipresent commercial, DURAN-ish sheen causing promising songs – like “Where Are You Now?” with its’ lovely Arabic keyboard motif – to plod when they should soar.
Unsurprisingly, Scarfe’s notes express the band’s disillusionment with Gray’s rigid 9 to 5 methods, so thank providence they managed to hook up with Broudie again (working with his Kingbird pseudonym) as the remainder of “Heaven Is Waiting” is much more like it.
Actually, it’s easy to define the band’s heightened creative state at the Broudie sessions purely through Steve Rawlings’ vocals. On the Gray-produced songs, he sounds anaesthetised at best, but one spin of “Come Inside” and he’s a new man – urgent, seductive, energised and the band follow brilliantly, creating an atmosphere of real menace.
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The earlier “Wake Up” pushes through in its’ slipstream, confirming the good impression and songs like “Red Light” and “The Night” catch the Society firing on all cylinders, cooking up ambitious, anthemic sounds that could easily have muscled in on U2’s patch, if they’d been given the requisite promotional push at the time.
The five extra tracks are useful, also, not least “Arabia” from the Broudie/ Thornalley sessions, possessing a brutal Banshees edge and the whip crack funk of “See The Light”, which is both hard-edged and persuasive.
Having said that, selecting the cover of THE ROLLING STONES’ “2,000Light Years From Home” as a way to further the band’s career demonstrates just how clueless Arista were, as THE DANSE SOCIETY’s version is pleasant enough but tame by comparison.
Circumstances dictate that the pedantic curse of Gray hampers “Heaven Is Waiting”s afterglow and his input ensures some of it has not aged well. Dig beneath this, though, and you’ll find that THE DANSE SOCIETY were a dynamic, atmospheric quintet more than capable of manoeuvring their way out of cul-de-sacs marked Goth, Positive Punk or whatever else.
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