steve hillage - octave doctors (mp3)

a lovely beach-kissed balearic instrumenal for a rare sunny day here in manchester, this is taken from steve hillage's 1977 album 'motivation radio'. what starts off like a cosmic excursion into nick drake's 'joey' continues to build with multiple layers of echo and guitar licks into a psychedelic haze - fans of pyramid-era alan parsons could do well with checking this shit out ...

hillage has a pretty interested phoenix-from-the-flames story - he dissapeared for a few years in the 80s, but on hearing one of this tracks in a chill out room of a london club he got talking to the dj, who happened to be dr. alex paterson from the orb. they collaborated on a few pieces, and on the back of this hillage came back to the fore as a sough-after producer, having a hand in producing the charlatans self-titled album, as well as twiddling the knobs for three albums from scotch-rockers breakfast-clubbers simple minds. hillage was responsible for their blinding track 'theme from great cities', which i'm sure you'll agree is quite the claim to fame!