Belbury is a fictional space but it’s easy to imagine it as a real English village or parish that is still stuck somewhere in the mid-1970s.
It is one of locations that make up the world of Ghost Box imagined by Julian House aka The Focus Group and Jim Jupp aka Belbury Poly .
In this months Wire Magazine , House and Jupp are interviewed by Rob Young in the Invisible Jukebox slot. A very fine piece it is too and a timely one as it coincides with the release of the splendid Belbury Tales – one of the best Ghost Box creations to date.
The album has a more expansive sound than other records on the label helped by real live musicians: drummer Jim Musgrave and bassist and guitarist Christopher Budd . The atmosphere, as ever, is that of a more parochial pre-digital age. Julian House says in the Wire interview: “I still don’t think what we do is nostalgic. It’s more like a kind of weird regression” .
This is music to the ears of someone of my generation (born 1958) but if you can’t imagine a world before technology ruled the earth, the spoof comedy of Look Around You gives a good idea of what TV and ‘the computer world’ was like back then:
The original ghost boxes were devices invented by 19th century spiritualists as a means to communicate with the dead, a communication channel between the earthly and spiritual realms.
