7 inch singles collection: EMF - Children

The first stop on my random music tour is:

E.M.F
A-Side: Children
B-Side: Strange Brew (live)
(Parlophone 1991)

Funnily enough the first choice to come up takes me back home to Gloucestershire there was a brief period at the start of the nineties when EMF were huge, all of which seemed a little confusing as they were just a bunch of lads, largely from the Forest of Dean. I never caught them live however I did see some of their predecessor acts several times, and was a particular fan of Apple Mosaic, the band to which Ian Dench the guitarist once belonged. I won't go into any Apple Mosaic thoughts right now as I've plenty of EMF singles to do that with in the future!

EMF's poppy dance thing caught a certain mood at the time and they released some good stuff. Children was the third of fourth single off the album, and by this time I think it was more of the same relentless upbeat rhythm with funky wah-wah guitars over the top. All well and good, but nothing as distinctive as previous works. Certainly nothing to lift it above the dozens of other similar sounding bands of the time. I'd happily listen to this again, but wouldn't necessarily seek it out.

The B-side is a live cover of Cream's Strange Brew. I thought this was a bit of an odd choice, but it is delivered in the same relentless up-tempo style as much of the rest of EMF's output, and as with the A-side it is covered in wah-wah! I suppose covering a song so that it doesn't bring to mind the original straight away is a good thing, so kudos to them for doing that, but ultimately as the song gets towards the end it does sound like they're stretching it out beyond their ability to make it worthwhile - not that it's long, just that the band sounds like they've done what they can with the song and that'll do. If it hadn't have finished when it did I'd probably have wandered off or gone to do something else at that point.

All-in-all not a bad start to this experiment, certainly good enough to encourage me to carry on!.

Next time something a little more mellow...