One Dove - All You Need is Dub

My taste in music comes and goes," Jim Mclven explains, "but one thing that's always been there, ever since I heard 'Irie Feelings' by Rippie Edwards in 1974, is dub. It's like having a close friend who's always there for me."

A fairly standard post-Orbient declaration, maybe, but exceptional stuff for an ex-guitarist in Altered Images. That's right; the early '8Os-pop lot with wee dare Grogan in the pink dress.

I used to play the guitar, but I got that out of my system," he confesses. Now he's the bassline maestro in chill-wise Glaswegian trio One Dove. The evidence is on the mucho cool, Andy Weatherall- multimixed 'Transient Truth', which will be followed sharpish by the guitar-strewn manifesto" 'White Love', and an LP in the New Year, again knocked into shape by Boys Own's Audrey Wutherspoon.

Like 'Screamadelica' and 'UFOrb' before it, One Dove's album has a fairly mashed listener in mind, and not for nothing will its sleeve provide a handy flat surface.

"People'll probably get back from a club and skin up to it," giggles Dot, the incipient sex-kitten singer, but I'd like to think we don't have to be night-time music. Hopefully it's also the sort of thing you can just drift off to on Sunday afternoon with your headset on - a thought-provoking musical voyage."

Dot, a classically trained pianist and kd lang fan, may already be familiar as the voice on Together's 'Hardcore Uproar', but it was when she holed up with Jim and studio-nut-turned-muso Ian Carmichael (not that Ian Carmichael) two years back that she got her first writing experience.

"Dance music is what brought us together," says Ian, now liberated from producing Glasgow indie bands, but we just couldn't write dance music, so we started writing songs."

Jim even sees the ghost of Altered Images in One Dove.

"Everybody expects me to be embarrassed about it," he splutters, "but I'm not. Those were brilliant times. I'm not gonnae slag that. No one was doing pop, and we were putting a wee bit of fresh air into things. In that respect, what we're doing now feels like that all over again."
ANDREW PERRY

Originally appeared in Select magazine, October 1993 . Copyright © Copyright Select, All Rights Reserved.

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