Description

https://music.apple.com/nz/album/orgasmaphobia/251927107

Circa 1998 & the 1st tv appearance outing on the then very popular James Whale Radio Show for the opening song ‘Some People’, available on the album ‘ORGASMAPHOBIA’.

THEN JERICO Orgasmaphobia (Scarce 1998 UK 12-track advance promotional-only CD featuring the outstanding album release from the rock outfit. Custom silver disc with with red text including track listing with custom picture sleeve EAG012P).

Then Jerico  – Orgasmaphobia
Label: Eagle Records  EAGCD012
Format: PROMO CD, Album
Country: Europe
Released: 1998
Genre: Electronic, Rock
Style: Pop Rock, Synth-pop
Tracklist
1 Some People 4:01
2 All In All 5:27
3 Never Surrender 4:27
4 Feel You More 5:48
5 Don’t Ever Leave 5:29
6 Iain Banks 1:19
7 Walking On Glass 4:06
8 Orgasmaphobia 4:47
9 Breakdown In Paradise 4:09
10 Euphoria 6:07
11 Brotherman 8:09
12 Energy 3:23
Notes
A Murder Production.

In 1998, Shaw re-activated THEN JERICO, writing the material for Orgasmaphobia, a self-financed album released on Eagle Rock. The album was co-produced by Shaw and Taylor with collaborations from Taylor, Simple Minds’ keyboard player Mick MacNeil and author Iain Banks.

Orgasmaphobia is brilliant – not like their older stuff but the voice is still unmistakeable and some of the tracks are amazing (Breakdown in Paradise and All in all especially). It’s well worth a listen.  Almost very rare, hard to find!

THEN JERICO Orgasmaphobia (Scarce 1998 UK 12-track advance promotional-only CD featuring the outstanding album release from the rock outfit. Custom silver disc with with red text including track listing with custom picture sleeve EAG012P).

UK 12 TRACK PROMO CD P/S (EAG012P)

Really fantastic – the guys are back!
New material of Then Jerico. The last information was that they split up in 1989 and there was some misunderstanding amongst group members. They are back! When you listen to their album you will think that they have never gone away. Great guitar and drum music. Why aren’t they in the charts? They should be popular again like they were in the late 80s.

In recent years Mark Shaw has enjoyed a successful solo career, releasing four more albums: a solo album, Almost, on EMI, and three more albums as Then Jerico – Orgasmaphobia, and two live albums, Alive & Exposed and Radio Jerico – and has branched out into stage and film acting. Also, as a member of the SAS Band, Mark has performed all around the world alongside Tony Hadley, Paul Young, Fish, and Brian May and Roger Taylor of Queen.  Mark also headlines the monthly club night The Kitsch Lounge Riot in London’s West End, and is currently in the studio writing new material – Warner’s/Rhino will release a Best Of album later this year.

Then Jerico made their way into, in the first place, with their 1987 debut First (The Sound of Music) and the 1989 follow-up The Big Area, but nearly a decade away should be enough to extricate the band from most of them. Leader Mark Shaw made a solo album somewhere in the interim, which I haven’t been able to find, but for Orgasmaphobia (which came out last year, but it’s taken me several tries to get a copy shipped over here) he reassumes the band’s name and, hearteningly, their legacy. It has become a stifling environment for grand gestures in music (for grandness of any sort, anywhere, really), but Shaw doesn’t appear to have noticed. “Some People” surges to life with shiny, roaring guitars, springy bass, swirling vocal processing, twinkling synthesizers and Shaw’s wonderfully flawed voice, perpetually on the verge of fraying. A cracking every-beat snare gives way to a humming, textural murmur in the yearning “All in All”. The languid, wistful “Never Surrender” is like the Alarm’s “Spirit of ’76” revisited, now that we’re older, no longer surprised that our conviction flagged, and trying to figure out how to reconcile muted adulthood with our collections of principles we keep refusing, whether they’ve gotten much use lately or not, to discard. “Feel You More” bounces cautiously, chime glissades a concession to pleasures for which kids are usually too impatient. The mid-album intermission “Iain Banks” is a slow synth-string meditation over which Banks reads an odd fragment about discovering language inside the split stones of a crumbling castle wall, but “Walking on Glass” is unabashed rock strut, complete with brass flourishes and more than one moment that strikes me as a compromise between INXS’ slinkiness and some of the louder Roxette songs. The sampled moans on the title track seem like a lapse in judgment (although I can’t think, offhand, of any song I felt was improved by simulated sex noises, so maybe this is just me), and the jittery drum-and-bass intro to “Breakdown in Paradise” threatens to be a impressively misplaced impulse, but “Breakdown in Paradise” turns out to be a glorious, unhurried dirge, halfway between the Alarm and Puressence. The dreamy, pulsing “Euphoria” is the sort of song every New Wave LP’s second side used to have at least three of. A white singer saying “Be satisfied with what you have” in a song called “Brotherman” is probably dangerous, but the song is about how our own expectations often determine our fates as much as anybody else’s plans for us, which seems to me like a fair and useful point, and besides, the music industry works very hard to make sure that black people don’t listen to music like this. (I wish I had a clearer idea why. Who makes money from race tensions?) “Energy” sounds like it wants to break into Frankie Goes to Hollywood, but in the end never quite musters the necessary nerve. I feel a little like the whole album suffers from this last-minute failure of courage, like the scars from Then Jerico’s first brief life have left Shaw reluctant to invest so much of himself in his music this time around, reticent about making these songs sound as distinctive as they could have, hoping that if he suppresses some of his youthful instincts, he’ll get farther. I doubt it will work. I don’t think the problem with Then Jerico was ever that they sounded too much like themselves, I think it was that music this open-hearted was only commercially viable for a short time, 1984 to 1987 or thereabouts (starting with The Unforgettable Fire and ending with The Joshua Tree, approximately).