About

The first thing you need to know is there’s Balearic and there’s Balearic. The first one everyone with a Geography GCSE and Thomson’s 2010 holiday brochure will know, of course. The second is harder to define. It’s perhaps more of a state of mind among a certain type of man (you know the sort: mainly bearded, often with a paunch that says, “I know where the bar is”).

Kelvin Andrews and Balearic Mike are two such men. It’s no surprise that they do, indeed, know where the bar is, but perhaps more pertinently for the task at hand, they also know the location of all the good record stores, irrespective of whether they’re walking down Wilbraham Road in Chorlton (the magnificent King Bee) or on a romantic weekend with a lover in Prague (Music Antiquariat).

They are both purveyors of what semiologists like to call ‘Balearic music’, which, 25 years ago in the record boxes of DJ Alfredo in Ibiza’s Amnesia club meant everything from Simply Red and Sade to Liaisons Dangeureuses and Farley Jackmaster Funk. These days it could mean a sneaky Jamiroquai B-side or, more worryingly, a European 12-inch adorned with a bleached-blond man dressed as a Space Pirate. Or, in fact, the twelve tracks you’ll find nestling snugly together here like dwarves at a Playboy orgy.

If it means anything, the Balearic state of mind is simply anything, anything at all, that sounds good on a dancefloor or, as dance music writer Frank Tope once put it, “pop music that sounds good on pills”. In the hands of Mike and Kelv that means The Osmonds’ I, I, I, which thanks to its Maurice Gibb’s production, was begging for a frisky massage and/or rediscovery. This Man by the inscrutably-named Phil & His Friend’s Band remained a conundrum wrapped inside a mystery on several Daniele Baldelli mixes for a good while before the disco Enigma Code was cracked (and its price soared even more preposterously than ever). It’s so good, it’s worth the money – so long as you can sneak the credit card statement past your missus’ gaze.

Of course, Down To The Sea is firstly about great music not necessarily rare vinyl. On Volume 1, Al Usher’s Lullaby For Robert and Chicken Lips’ mix of Flame by Bell XI are both recent examples of this. Modern disco? Balearic? Who cares, they’re both brilliant nuggets of dancefloor gold. Also included is the Willow Band’s Willowman, about which little is known beyond Shirley & Company’s Jesus Alvarez’s involvement and a vague rumour of Joe Bataan’s presence. What we do know for certain is it’s an utterly fantastic piece of Latin-soul that lights up dancefloors on Croatian boat parties as well as knees-ups in Stoke-on-Trent.

Down to the Sea and Back is a series of compilations that captures these moments of Balearic greatness.

So let Mike and Kelv take you on a journey, whether it be via the contours of the rocky outcrops of the White Isle or lost on a scarcely navigable barge somewhere on the Manchester Ship Canal. It’s a voyage of discovery. A voyage, if you will, of metaphysical beards. But it’s also a voyage filled with love, good times and, moreover, great music. A voyage down to the sea….

Bill Brewster, March 2010