Tuesday Tunes: Mirrorball Moon

A couple of weeks ago, my wife suggested to me that I do a bit of tidying up in the room I use as an office. (It was a fair enough suggestion.) I was digging through a pile of old CD-Rs, cassettes and floppy disks, and turned up a tape I’d sort of half been looking for for months.

One side of the tape was a set of demos from 2001, five from Iain Archer and a few from The Amazing Pilots. The Archer tracks are from before Flood The Tanks, and include a couple of songs in very different forms to the ones that made the album.

The best of them is “Mirrorball Moon”, which I remember hearing first at a small acoustic gig in Edinburgh at what must has been roughly around the time these were recorded.

Archer’s music has changed quite a lot over the years, and you wouldn’t thin, listening to more recent albums, that this was the same guy who recorded the lightweigt “Wishing” not that long ago. These demos are probably the most recent recordings I have from him that I genuinely enjoy. The tale in “Mirrorball Moon” of an old dance hall’s changing character over time reflects the change in Archer’s music — not necessarily for better or worse, but definitely changing in character. Sadly, that change has left me behind.