Beacon Lights by The Midnight Detective Club

The Beacon Lights 12" super flexi edible raspberry doughnut flavoured single was to be the final release from The Midnight Detective Club in 1983. Things were starting to deteriorate for the band. And even though Videl had recorded a number of demos for a new album none of them featured Selina. In fact, it's only the single track Beacon Lights that includes original vocals by the female singer. Vocal snippets of her on Hear the Scientists Talk were spliced together from a previous track.

The song Beacon Lights itself was written in response to a letter from a young fan of the band following the disappearance and supposed interstellar abduction of his parents. Proceeds from the single went to a charity engaged in mediation between the Earth's governments and unknown alien abductors.

Hear the Scientists Talk makes use of excerpts from a 1981 interview broadcast on popular British science TV programme, All Tomorrow's Worlds. It features the 2 Young Global Planetary Scientists of the Year 1980 excitedly discussing exoplanets. Interestingly enough, exoplanets wouldn't be discovered until a decade later. Gosh. Aren't children very forward thinking.

The instrumental The Sentinels was initially written as the background music for a campaign on CB radio promoting Society of Sky Sentinels, a network of UFO watchers formed in the mid 1970s.

Original front cover photo Luis Dalvan on pexels https://www.pexels.com/@luisdalvan tweaked by The Midnight Detective Club

Original back cover photo Kat Jayne on pexels https://www.pexels.com/@katjayne tweaked by The Midnight Detective Club

I release most of my music under the project names of Ice Line Drift (ambient electronic minimalism instrumentals), The Midnight Detective Club (80s inspired synthpop songs), and Replay in Neon (leftfield melodic electrocrunch). I also sometimes release orchestral orchestral music too.