Over the decades, Scottish musicians have made many classic, cult or under-appreciated albums that have stood the test of time. Today, we look back at Morning Dove White, by One Dove.

 

THEY could have been, as more than one critic subsequently noted over the years, one of the finest bands of the nineties.

One Dove – vocalist Dot Allison, guitarist Jim McKinven and keyboard player Ian Carmichael – made just one album, Morning Dove White, which was released in 1993. For various reasons the band imploded in 1996 and never recorded together again. But Morning Dove White remains a quietly magnificent piece of work, a heartfelt chill-out classic. As The Guardian once described it, it was a "whacking great wedding cake of a record. It was rich and sad and daring, and shamelessly romantic".

The album was produced by Andrew Weatherall, the renowned DJ-producer who had just made his name with Primal Scream’s groundbreaking Screamadelica. The Sunday Herald put it thus, in 2002: “If Screamadelica was the ultimate Ecstasy record, One Dove’s LP Morning Dove White was what to listen to while trying to put your head back together the next day. They should have been massive. But due to muddle and mismanagement, they acrimoniously disintegrated in 1996”.

‘’It was a magical time and [Morning Dove White] captured the magic of a moment,’’ Allison told the newspaper. ‘’It was at a spearhead of the dance movement and I think the pure magic is something that I will never trump with any record of mine. But it was a travesty that it wasn’t nurtured or understood the right way”.

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One Dove did not enjoy much chart success. Three singles –White Love, Breakdown, and Why Don’t You Take Me – peaked at 43, 23 and 30 respectively, and the album itself reached number 30. But the band’s achievement and influence have deservedly continued to receive much recognition in recent years.

Mixmag, for example, included it in a list of “10 Slept-on Albums That Should Have Been Absolutely Huge”, in July 2017. Writer Joe Muggs made a shrewd assessment: “Sixties girl group and country melodies; psychedelic guitar wrangling; slow, lolloping breaks; dub basslines out the yin-yang; outer space ambient chords; the breathy voice of Dot Allison whispering and crooning about secrets, sadness and intrigue, all bound together by the wild studio invention of a young Andrew Weatherall .... The music of Glaswegian trio Allison, Ian Carmichael and Jim McKinven was the ultimate expression of the bittersweet collapse of the comedown, and was a morning-after staple for those who knew”.

A few months ago, an online re-appraisal of Morning Dove White saw Pitchfork magazine conclude: “Even with its lyrical hints of tough breakups and pining sadness, it’s simply too sweet a record for our sour times. It’s fresh, alive, searching. Eternal qualities. Morning Dove White isn’t a record of any certain time; it’s a classic”. (Allison responded on Instagram: “I’m completely thrilled that @pitchfork has chosen to review One Dove’s ‘Morning Dove White’ which was certainly my debut as a recording artist, for the ‘Sunday Review’ and concludes by saying ‘It is a classic’ .... Thank you”.

Considerable media and industry interest had been stirred in the music being made by Allison, McKinven and Carmichael even before the album was released. As the Los Angeles Times reported in 1994, the trio had recorded, three years earlier, a demo tape that contained a rough version of Fallen, and had got it into the hands of Weatherall, who signed the group to his independent label, Boys' Own. The tape “became one of the hottest on the club circuit, receiving a barrage of press coverage before there was even an official record release”.

Critics used such expressions as "the Cocteau Twins just back from Ibiza", "King Tubby meets the Beach Boys" and, more derisively, "The Carpenters with a backbeat" to describe the band's music. But Morning Dove White – reputedly the tribal name of Elvis Presley’s great-great-grandmother – received lots of positive reviews on both sides of the Atlantic.

Melody Maker: “One Dove offer a rich, spectacularly melodic, unashamedly epic take on the great pop tradition which runs from Phil Spector and the Sixties girl groups through Bacharach and David, The Carpenters, Abba and the Cocteau Twins (no kidding), seamlessly infiltrated by the Nineties club fascination with ambience and dub. At times, they bring their music within one step of chocolate box, two steps of kitsch”.

Vibe magazine: “For once, the hype surrounding a new U.K. band is entirely justified. … One Dove … represent the next step in the evolution of post-rave music”. Select magazine: “Their album has the kind of easy grace and effortless depth Saint Etienne would swap a wardrobe full of ‘cheeky’ samples for. ‘Morning Dove White’ … is truly a thing of beauty”.

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One Dove’s distinctive sound aroused much interest in America. ”[The album] received a lot of requests when we first put it on,” the music director at LA’s alternative rock station, KROQ-FM, told the LA Times in February 1994. “It’s something that sounded really different. We’re all waiting to see what the next trend is in the whole ambient-dance genre, what is going to be the dance equivalent or counterpart to Nirvana and Pearl Jam, and it seems like they may be it.”

Neil Harris, director of A&R for London Records in New York, said: “Reaction to this record has been surprisingly positive. We expected the first single, `White Love,’ to simply be a set-up, to just introduce the band on their own terms. We wanted to let them establish themselves on their merit as a real band. We also wanted to avoid hyping them too much as the next big thing from the U.K., which only asks for a backlash, so we were going for a more low-key push. We’ve been a little surprised at how quickly and positively reaction has built”.

The album has only recently been added to streaming services. As Pitchfork pointed out, one track - My Friend - is repeated under the title of another song, Transient Truth. But the record's joys are many, and have lasted: Fallen, White Love, Breakdown: Cellophane Boat Mix, the gorgeous There Goes the Cure, Why Don't You Take Me. Listening to the album afresh makes you regret that the band never got around to making a follow-up.

Interviewed by Melody Maker in July 1993, the band spoke of the purity that they had aimed for in their songs. "I wouldn't feel comfortable if that wasn't an angle on it," said Allison. Added Carmichael: "Even musically, we strive for a certain purity. It's not contrived, it's pure. It's something everybody wants at some stage in their lives, but nobody can ever have. That's definitely what 'White Love' is about, first and foremost. Purity".

There Goes the Cure in particular has attracted much interest over the years via YouTube. "Still an absolute heartbreaker after all these years. Beautiful", comments one fan, five years ago. "So sad makes me cry every time, it's so romantic . And it haunts me", writes another. A third, posting nine years ago, observes that he "took this CD with me when I moved to rural Japan (the Noto Peninsula) in 1994. And listening to this song can take me back to that time in vivid detail".

Dot Allison herself was a pioneer in many ways. As she told The Scotsman in 1999 as she prepared to release her debut solo album, Afterglow: "I'm sensitive to being taken seriously as an artist because of attitudes in the past. Even in '92-'93, when the One Dove album was coming out, Bjork hadn't really happened. Leila Arab certainly hadn't happened, nor had a lot of these kind of programming, writing, singing, performing women that aren't just there for the ornamental factor. There were people like Liz Phair, P J Harvey and even Courtney Love. These people had facilitated the whole process, but not in electronic music. That was still a male bastion at that time."