Review from Q, December 1999

Haig/MacKenzie

Memory Palace
RHYTHM OF LIFE ROL 003

Posthumously released Billy MacKenzie album, co-written with out-of-contract mate.

Billy MacKenzie's twin obsessions with David Bowie and John Barry endured from The Associates' primitive version of Boys Keep Swinging through to this demo album, recorded with fellow Scot Paul Haig (ex-Josef K), between December 1993 and July '95. The album's sparse electronic funk and MacKenzie's romantic but enigmatic croon fall somewhere between the cold magic of Bowie's Station To Station and a synthesized Bond theme. Although Transobsession and Stone The Memory Palace reveal the pair's enthusiasm for '90's danceforms, their sense of remote grandeur belongs to the previous decade. It's possible that these demos would've grown in stature with a proper recording budget but MacKenzie's suicide sidelines them as intriguing notes in the margin of an erratic, occasionally brilliant career. **
Steve Malins

 

Influenced By...

Influenced On...

David Bowie
Lodger
EMI 1979

McAlmont
McAlmont
HUT 1994