I'll show you mine if you show me yours

Floodlit World Ultrasound Fierce Panda / Nude Records Released: July 1997 / April 1999 Highest UK Chart Position: Did Not Chart / 39 Available on: Same Band E.P.   While there are many bands who never got a chance of success, there are others that had a brief moment of fame and then infuriatingly threw it all away, often by appearing in a photo shoot with a Smurf and a panther. Ultrasound managed to avoid the dreaded blue freaks, instead building up a good reputation and blowing it on a rather poor debut album. They were a five-piece band headed up by Andrew Woods, also known, rather inappropriately as ‘Tiny’, the evil step-child of Gary Glitter and Bryan Ferry (charges have yet to be filed for custody), covered in eye-shadow and glitter. They were destined for the stars, but they ended up back in the gutters.

Everything about this song is great. It builds up gradually, creating a universe from nothing; clean organs introduce us to the stars, then a quiet guitar begins sketching out the planets, a simple sound, yet building in intensity, like prog, but more like Trevor Horn, until the lead guitar and drums burst in as a blaze of white light, with the first verse punching through the speakers shortly afterwards. This song is white; intensely pure, and yet, close up, a mongrel; a pop confection that sounds like a nine-minute epic compressed into five minutes of glory.

And what is it about? An explosion? The end of the world? Being the last inhabitants of a planet? Or just two people in love, turning up the contrast of the environment around them so they can see the delineation of the light and dark in everything, diving positives from negatives, and watching rainbows emerge from the rain? But really, who cares? It sounds wonderful.

It took Ultrasound two years after this record to release their first album, recording other excellent songs like Kurt Russell and Best Wishes, neither of which appeared on the double-CD Everything Picture, which came out in 1999 to rather large indifference. Their time in the moment had passed, and the ghastly production that watered down their songs didn’t help either. What they did to Floodlit World was a travesty; the new version sounded as if they had taken the original song and flung it into a tar pit, recording its death-throes as it struggled to reach the starlight where it once flew. I beg you, do not get the album to listen to this song. Go to the Fierce Panda website and get the Same Band E.P., or send me an email if they no longer sell it. I will send you a copy of the original so you don’t have to suffer when you could be soaring.