Loved And Lost: Dislocation Dance

For many musicians, a job pays for our passion and enables us to make the music which people don’t buy in sufficient quantities. If we’re lucky, the job we do fulfils many, maybe most, of our needs – social, intellectual, career, financial.

I was very lucky. I’ve done many jobs over the last 40 years and enjoyed, even loved, most of them. But there was something special about the first one, and my first was the best. At the age of 25, in 1982, after four years studying music and a year just knocking about trying to decide what to do with my life, I got the job of Music Officer at the Dovecot Arts Centre, Stockton-on-Tees. One cold, smoggy February morning I got a train up to Stockton for an interview and came back to London with a job in my pocket and an enormous smile on my face.

For the next eight years that place was my life. I spent my days there, my nights there and my social life there, and never felt for one minute that I’d rather be anywhere else. My friends congregated there for events, my girlfriend was a fixture for music nights, and people I worked with and met during the week are friends to this day.

My brief as Music Officer was simply to get people involved in the Arts Centre – as participants in classes and courses, as attenders of workshops and as audiences of concerts, of jazz, folk and classical music. Back in the early 1980s pop music in arts centres was a no-no. I felt differently. As a musician and music student I could justify the quality of a lot of current pop music against other forms of music, so we went our own way.

In autumn 1982 I started putting on local bands. This was anathema for an arts centre in those days, but there was a vibrant local music scene and I started branching out to up-and-coming indie bands on the national circuit. After a couple of abortive attempts at finding embryonic indie bands who would draw an audience in Stockton, I hit on Dislocation Dance as the band that would attract a crowd and deliver an evening of quality music. It was the biggest venture (and risk) in my time there until then. I remember we paid £200, which for the Dovecot in those days was a massive fee but totally justified. We got a big audience, considering that the venue’s (official) capacity was around 200.

This is the story of my brief association with Dislocation Dance and my rediscovery of the band many years later. From time to time joyful moments come along, and 15 September 1984 was a day when my destiny and Dislocation Dance’s crossed for very different reasons. That day was not only a delight but has been locked into my memory for all the years since then, and is clearer in my mind than many things that happened last week.

Dislocation Dance and I have some history, and the background to this event is my seeing the band supporting Orange Juice, at that time ‘my’ band, at North London Polytechnic on 26 February 1982. They were interesting and intense, playing songs with a hard jagged edge and lots of energy. Their jazz leanings at the time were not obvious, emerging in full only when they released the album Midnight Shift on Rough Trade Records. It was spiky, angular, classic support band material of the time, real John Peel fodder. I remembered their sound without particularly remembering the songs but made a mental note to look out for them in future.

Fast forward to 1984 and Cleveland, North East England. On the day of a concert I would come down from my office at the Dovecot around 4pm to greet the band, in this case arriving from Manchester, oversee the load-in, which was almost directly into the hall, supervise the souncheck to make sure everything was running on time and there were no problems, and then brief the band about onstage time and practical details. After the soundcheck, I went up to Dislocation Dance’s small dressing room to chat and talk about the running of the evening.

The band’s public face was Ian Runacres, who I got on with instantly. Unlike a lot of visiting musicians, he was co-operation personified, the group’s Paul McCartney figure in terms of charm, diplomacy and good humour. When I admitted that I was a big fan, Ian asked me if there was anything I particularly wanted them to play. I got the impression that they could easily pull out any song from the bag of their enormous repertoire, that it was all rehearsed up to performance standard, so when I said With A Reason, Ian kindly promised to ensure that it was on the set list.

Aside from the local scene, Stockton (and indeed the county of Cleveland) had been starved of good-quality pop/rock music, apart from cover or tribute bands. The great thing about the audience there was that they were so open and honest, no bullshit, and they responded enthusiastically to the events I had started putting on. When Dislocation Dance came, I noticed that as well as appreciating innovation they also responded to good playing and really loved and respected the band’s class.

So, the concert. The opening song, Tenderness, set the tone for the evening, and got an ecstatic reception. One song in, the band had already won over the audience, and continued with a selection of songs from Midnight Shift, earlier unreleased work, and jazzy instrumentals reminiscent of film scores. Many of the Dovecot regulars, music fans, people I knew, realised that they were in the presence of quality songs and musicianship – some even got up and danced, an activity that usually took a lot of warming-up in slightly inhibited Stockton.

The two-singer approach worked perfectly. Ian Runacres was clearly the bandleader. Standing centre-stage, he had a relaxed presence, easy movement, a beautiful voice and an understated charisma about him. His counterpart, Kathryn Way, doubling on alto saxophone, was more demonstrative visually, with an unselfconscious style of dancing, in many ways the antithesis of the classical indie kid who was generally reluctant to move his (usually his) body in any expressive way. Her classic light indie voice had a breathy 60s pop/soul influence and fitted beautifully in unison or harmony with Ian Runacres’. Trumpeter Andy Diagram (later of Pale Fountains and James) provided the jazz and weirdness element as well as filling out the sound on keyboards, and a solid rhythm section of drummer Richard Harrison and bassist Paul Emmerson were the bedrock of the music, contributing to a light funk grooviness.

Some standout moments: the achingly sad Sun Won’t Shine and the blissful It’s No Wonder. The emotional highlight of a very generous set (about an hour and 15 minutes) was when, forty minutes in, they unleashed When, an astonishingly beautiful song of loss and longing. There’s a grainy video of that song on YouTube, taken from an amateur recording of the whole concert, and I always revel in the endlessly repeated choruses at the end. And then finally, as promised, With A Reason, an anthem of glorious optimism which had the audience yelling for more.

In fact, at the end they wouldn’t let the band go, and after an encore, an African-inspired guitar and drums workout followed by the should-have-been-a-hit Show Me, the opener, Tenderness, was reprised. The audience would have been happy if Dislocation Dance had played all night, but the band left them just in time, wanting more.

Other observations. The body language, lots of eye contact, smiles of delight, glances between the musicians showing the sheer pleasure they took in playing together that evening; this was a band at the height of their powers, and they were clearly overwhelmed by the audience’s response.

People were talking about the event for weeks afterwards – people I bumped into in the street, local musicians who had seen something new and different, colleagues who recognised that the arts centre had moved up a gear and was now something more credible in terms of indie pop bands. That night with Dislocation Dance set the Dovecot off in a new direction which included the cream of the indie scene: Black, The Housemartins, Edwyn Collins, The Triffids, Felt, so many more, countless bands, many of whom stayed over at my house in Billingham.

The band came back a year later, with a new singer and a saxophone player. They were as good as before, in a different way. The vocalist Sonia Clegg had a gorgeously rich soul voice, in contrast to Kathyrn Way’s more classic indie phrasing. That concert is a story for a different article, which I probably won’t write.

Many years later, my own band followed Dislocation Dance’s trail to Japan, playing in the same venues for the same promoter. On the back of that tour, Ian Runacres reconstituted Dislocation Dance in partnership with Phil Lukes and released the albums Cromer and The Ruins Of Manchester, which are the equal of the original band’s output.

On a personal level, some time in 2017, now living in Italy, I made contact with Ian after a nostalgic evening watching my video of the concert, drinking red wine (pass me that bottle of…) and listening to their albums, leading to the start of a valued friendship which continues today.

So, loved and lost, and found again. A great, great band, probably too eclectic for fame, and thank God for that!

Dislocation Dance: Behind The Music

Show Me