Dreadzone: A Canterbury Tale

With the BBC holding a miniature Powell and Pressburger festival these past few days, there's no better choice than this.

It did feature here some years ago, but my excuse for choosing it again is that this version has Eric Portman's monologue at the start. (Besides, two tracks - Paint it Black and Bryan Ferry's version of A Hard Rain’s A‐Gonna Fall - have appeared here twice without my noticing at the time, and the world didn't end.)

A Canterbury Tale comes from Dreadzone's second album, Second Light, which was a favourite of John Peel's.

Reviewing it in the Independent, Phil Johnson wrote:

A scholarly regard for the treasures of the British film industry is not the first thing one associates with the British dance music scene, but Dreadzone's excellent album Second Light incorporates dialogue samples from Powell and Pressburger's classic A Canterbury Tale, as well as the song from Thief of Baghdad and the headmaster's spoken vision of the future from Lindsay Anderson's apocalyptic If. 

There's even a spot of Derek Walcott's epic poetry and sundry ironic messages from the channel-hopping trawl of a stoned viewer's late-night television habit, like the opening track's ancient cheery documentary voice-over of This is Britain!, immediately subverted by the onset of a deep reggae bass-line. 

Second Light is ... a big ideas album, deconstructing received notions of Britishness with the kind of multi-cultural perspective to be expected from two survivors of Big Audio Dynamite and the post-punk Notting Hill scene, plus their fiendishly clever knob-twiddling third partner, Tim Bran. 

The effect is - largely because the music itself is so good - enthralling, and it runs counter to the current renaissance of guitar-driven bedroom angst posing as serious pop. 

Reader's voice (resignedly): Haven't you written a post about A Canterbury Tale and why it's not a film to be taken lightly?

Liberal England replies: Why, yes! So I have.