On the 25th anniversary of their classic debut, Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley reflect on how the album came togetherTwenty-five years ago, during the summer of Blur´s Parklife and Oasis´s Definitely Maybe, a darker, stranger record was released that would soon become huge. Its title and mood was inspired by a 1970s TV drama of the same name, about a young deaf woman in Yorkshire who becomes a prostitute. The lyrics spoke of emotional extremes, sung in an extraordinary, rural-tinged, English blues by the Devon-born Beth Gibbons, of `the blackness, the darkness, forever` in Wandering Star, or of the feeling that `nobody loves me, it´s true, not like you do` in Sour Times.Its sound, woven together by Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley, helped define what is known today in music as hauntology, the sampling of older, spectral sounds to evoke deeper cultural memories (Boards of Canada´s TV-sampling electronica, Burial´s dubstep, and the Ghost Box label´s folk horror soundworlds would follow their lead). But despite its starkness, Dummy became a triple-platinum seller and a Mercury prizewinner, perhaps because it struck a nerve in what Barrow calls our `sonic unconscious... when sounds can merge with other sounds from somewhere else, and ultimately create emotion`. Continue reading...
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