Back when I was younger (weren’t we all?), I religiously followed every single little issue of a Dutch music magazine called Oor. Around 1993, it briefly discussed an album of Delicious Monster (‘Joie de Vivre’), a British band with an unknown lead singer, Rachel Mayfield.
A couple of months ago, Alfons was able to wire some of my musical collection (rumours has it that in the heydays of my Twenties my music collection spanned 200 CDs) in MP3 format: one of them was (naturally) Delicious Monster’s debut album. The music and songs of that CD are so-so: however, no matter how you turn it, Rachel Mayfield’s voice is amazingly brilliant and clear. In ‘In You – In Me’ (a typical ‘dilly-dally-lilly-lala’ song), it’s her voice that carries the song and everytime I hear that particular portion (MP3) of the song I wished she had a better (and more appropriate) songwriter. It could have been a darker song instead of the typical teenage-uh-uh song.
Once again, don’t bother looking for her name around. After the one-album stint with Delicious Monster, Ms. Mayfield disappeared for two years, to come up with an unknown solo-album (per 04/22/07: Defunct!). Blame Amsterdam. Her name sometimes dives up in combination with bands called ‘Gallon Drunk’ and ‘Ezio’ and yes, there’s an old promotional website, which can now only be seen with the help of the brilliant engineers at The Internet Wayback Machine.
What a sin.
04/22/07: I just discovered that ms. Mayfield now has her own website and MySpace pages. You go girl.