Plunder the Tombs: Cold Dance – Medusa 7” (Xcentric Noise Records, 1985)

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Cold Dance – Medusa 7” (Xcentric Noise Records, 1985)

Easily the best thing about starting a blog project like this one is when I stumble upon something I missed the first time around that despite its obscurity turns out to be brilliant and happily, Cold Dance are one of these, sounding pleasingly like a more laid back English version of X-Mal Deutschland.

I must admit that my conception of UK geography is not my strongest suite, but I get the impression that Hull, despite having given the world the extremely influential Throbbing Gristle, may not be exactly the hub of the artistic world.

Nevertheless, Cold Dance emerged out of Hull in the early to mid 80s, although one gets the impression they weren’t all that keen on the Goth association. They released two singles through Xcentric Noise, the first being No Glamour In Industry (1984) and then followed up with Medusa (Xcentric Noise, 1985).

For some reason, a download of Medusa is substantially harder to find on the net than its predecessor and a Google search on “Cold Dance” presently returns an irritating number of links to Katy Perry. But never fear! Let me save you some trouble:

http://www.4shared.com/dir/7407094/95311f2/sharing.html

I suggest you download it quick smart before this one too gets taken down – the page also has some very nice Skeletal Family stuff too – now never let it be said I don’t ever do anything nice for you :-P.

Track Listing: Medusa 7”

Medusa
Petrified

Other than that, available information on the enigmatic Cold Dance is rather limited, so I guess I may as well simply pad this post out by including No Glamour in Industry as well.

Track Listing: No Glamour In Industry 7”

Choice
Influence
Then + Now

Indeed, so thoroughly has time forgotten Cold Dance, that I can’t even locate a picture of the band. Their Facebook page does however contain a number of pictures of their fans, most of which appear to have been snapped in the girls’ loos, leaving one to speculate upon whether the photographer may have had an odd proclivity for loitering.

I thought these two had nice hair so in the absence of the

actual band, I guess they can go here.

Line Up: Diane Dubois (vocals), Stuart Hodgson (bass, synthesizer), Kevin Hunter (drums), Tim Arundell (guitar), Tim Harrison (additional percussion).

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Cold-Dance-Hull-band-1980s-/135485183161742

6 comments:

UnknownJanuary 3, 2011 at 4:52 AM
Hi Sutekh,

Thanks for posting this and for your interest. I'm kinda glad we seem enigmatic, we purposefully had as little to do with other bands in the area. We shared common interest with Punctured Tough Guy, Quel Dommage and a band called Black September. We were trying to do something different and regarded all the others as doing pretty much the same old same so we had little in common so consequently we dont really figure in the retrospectives written for the area.
Thanks for likening us to Xmals, any similarity is unconscious but myself and Dianne were certainly listening to them and we went to see them during the brief reign of Dingwalls in Hull. At the time I may have been upset, now I feel flattered!
Let me know if you want any more info, I'd be more than happy to fill in any blanks (if I can).
Just one other thing, its great you're doing this, one of my personal peeves is the lack of 'history' now so its great to see someone taking a lot of time to change this. (God that sounds patronizing....it's not meant to be!)

All the best ... Kevin Hunter
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James Von SutekhJanuary 3, 2011 at 11:12 AM
Thanks so much for that great feedback and words of encouragement. It's so rewarding when someone from the bands I've had a look at actually takes an interest in in what I'm doing on this blog.
But I'll tell you what I want (what I really really want) - is a photo of the band - pretty please?
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UnknownJanuary 4, 2011 at 2:49 AM
Hi Sutekh. I'll see what I can do on the photo front, I remember doing some really good stuff and I'm sure theres informal stuff but....I dont have any, sadly I lost pretty much everything (I dont even have copies of the singles...) story for another time. But I will ask around and if I can get anything I'll send it on.

Kevin
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James Von SutekhJanuary 4, 2011 at 6:04 AM
Excellent. Meanwhile, I'll have to check out those other bands you've mentioned - what I've seen so far looks very interesting.
In case you haven't noticed, I took the liberty of including "Medusa" on the "The Atrocity Exhibition" compilation we released for download just last week.
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Jill WebbJanuary 18, 2018 at 11:22 AM
I am so glad I found this article. I used to run a fanzine in Hull back in the early 80s called Kindred Spirit and we interviewed Cold Dance after one of their gigs. They certainly were amazing to watch live! I've published the interview online http://kindredspiritfanzine.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/issue-three-band-interviews-cold-dance.html along with other stuff from the fanzine.
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John HudsonMay 26, 2020 at 5:40 AM
This has recently been published on the band in the Hull Music Archive:

*NEW* on the Archive website - the full story of Cold Dance, by the band themselves, with photos:

http://www.hullmusicarchive.co.uk/artist-cold-dance/
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A Welcome and Introduction

Plunder the Tombs was started back in 2010 by way of looking back on a musical past that I felt in sore need of curation.

It was a strange and sad time when what passed for “Goth” in clubs seemed a pale imitator of what once was, following first a decade of cookie-cutter Sisters of the Nephilim clone bands and then another decade of industrial dance being palmed off to younger audiences as a type of faux goth. When on rare occasion DJs in “Goth” clubs did finally become brave enough to play something like Bauhaus it was not untypical to have the dance floor clear, and it became obvious that the memory, meaning and legacy of much that had gone before had been lost.

It’s probably safe to say that the boundaries of what was “Goth” were never clearly defined. An absolute blessing for those bands on the original scene before it had a name pinned to the donkey, but an outright curse for those who came later and found rules had been imposed to dictate that which was and that which was not acceptable. Worse still was to come in the 90s from a lazy and unquestioning media who simply assumed that anything that wore black and make up was by definition “Goth”, thus allowing all manner of pretenders licence, and maximising confusion as to what the term actually referred to.

This has gone on for way too long and its time is at an end. Neo Post-Punk bands now proliferate across Europe, old long dead Goth bands rise from their crypts in the UK, and new deathrock bands are breeding like rabbits up the west coast of America. It is time to reclaim our scene back from metal bands and ravers in disguise.

While the Plunder the Tombs of old focused on what had gone before, there are now far too many exciting new things to ignore. We roar back to life in a reboot, covering past , present and things yet to come.

Let us plunder the tombs….