A+M | UK | 7" | 1982 | AMS 8230

Annabel Lamb: Tell Him UK 7″

1. Tell Him
2. All-Night TV

I’d written about Annabel Lamb a little over a year ago here, and recently, I finally found the spare time to spin those 45s that Ron “The Man” Kane had graciously sent me in late 2010! What I heard from this batch of pre-album, non-LP singles was shocking and revelatory, and today I’ll direct my focus on the debut single of Ms. Lamb. Ironically, this was the one side in the batch that most resembled the delivery that I know her for.

When I saw the single, I’d wondered if it was a cover of The Exciters classic, and that’s exactly what it turns out to be. Albeit in a minor key, Krautrock-influenced cover version! The rapid motorik tempo is a classic of its kind and is joined by some slightly dissonant post-punk guitar throughout. Imagine “Vienna” period Ultravox covering “He’s So Fine” and you wouldn’t be too far off the mark for the feel of this record! Ms. Lamb’s vocals sound very close to how she would sing on the “Heartland” debut album a year later. She sings in a low register, affecting an arid, disaffected delivery for a very mannish effect. During the middle eight, she employs the sprechtgesang traits that she would evidence fully on her albums.

This A-side would possibly fit on her “Heartland” album, stylistically. It doesn’t sound too far removed soncially from her cover of “Riders On The Storm.” But that was already a moody, dark tune. This was “Tell Him,” for crying out loud! Calling the end result perverse doesn’t begin to cover it. To release this for a debut single was quite a stretch.

The B-side is a song on the topic of the BBC’s 18 hour broadcast day from that time period. We Yanks have had television all night for decades, but at the time, it didn’t happen in the UK, no matter how much they might have desired it, as she does on this song. Anyone familiar with Annabel Lamb from her albums would be hard pressed to recognize this song as being from her since her delivery is radically different from the A-side, or in fact the rest of her LP material the listener might be familiar with. She’s singing in what is probably her natural register; sounding much smoother and higher in pitch than the more masculine style she affected on the albums. The music is less frantic than the A-side, but still more redolent of New Wave pop than the jazzier material that would fill her debut album the next year.

This single presented facets of Annabel Lamb that were both familiar [the A-side] and different [the B-side]. As a debut single is sometimes a tentative exploration, this disc definitely fits that bill. Lamb would release a further pair of singles before hitting her artistic stride on the “Heartland” album. These evidenced further experimentation far afield from what I as a listener would come to know and expect from her, but those are reviews for another day.

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