The Dream Academy
Somewhere In The Sun

THE REVIEW

Oboe, keyboard, vocals, and guitar. These are the main ingredients of the now defunct (both in terms of image and musically) 80s group, the Dream Academy.

Certainly classically trained, they produced only 3 albums in a decade, the last one in 1990. 'Dream Academy' (Reprise label, from 1985), Love Parade, 'Remembrance Days' (again Reprise label, from 1987) and 'A Different Kind Of Weather' (Blanco Y Negro label, from 1990), are all works that float in a hybrid orchestral new age sound, halfway between baroque arrangements of English psychedelia and mood settings.

The promising trio, now unwatchable but certainly not unlistenable, featured the skilled (and experienced) oboist Klare St. John, who substantially enriched a pleasant and relaxing sound. However, the touch of Gilbert Gabriel's keyboard (also classically trained) shifted the sound towards a more contextually definable 80s sound. Completing the trio was singer Nick Laird-Clowes, who at the beginning of the 80s with the Act had all in all produced some touching populist ballads, and in Dream Academy sings sophisticated folk-rock nursery rhymes like their most famous single, Life In A Northern Town (1985), which enjoys more recent dance remixes that freshen up the sound a bit. I remain pleasantly surprised by the sound of please please please let me get what i want, an orchestral remake, but not only, of a Smiths piece used in the film Ferris Bueller's Day Off, a youth comedy from the 80s, in the museum scene.

It's essentially not background music. The transfiguration of the oboe gives the sound a certain peculiarity, clearly confining it within the decade, perhaps for its own sake and not replicable, but it has its own dignity and is listenable with its psychedelic-classical hints. Warner Bros offers (released in 2000) a best of titled "Somewhere in The Sun...", which collects the most significant classic rock ballads of this English trio. Indeed, somewhere in the sun, because nothing has been known about them for years.

We are halfway between multiple genres, perhaps a bit confined in an impossible evolution and an expression with a typical and distant flavor. To be listened to in order to dive back into the strange hybrid eighty atmospheres. Enjoy, just to name a few titles, The Edge of Forever, Angel of Mercy, or Power to Believe.