In his brilliant 2006 book Fear of Music, Garry Mulholland listed Matt Johnson's second album – his first as the The – as one of the "Greatest Albums Since Punk and Disco". But, tellingly, he called it "a hidden masterpiece". That was nearly a decade ago, and since then Soul Mining appears to have dropped even further out of public view and off the critical radar. Perhaps that's because Johnson keeps a such a low profile these days: since a show at the Meltdown festival in London in 2002, the The's only new releases have been film soundtracks and a solitary song, Mrs Mac, released online in 2007. No one in 2014 seems to mention the The as an influence. Curiously, Johnson's legacy appears confined to dance music: if no hip young band or singer-songwriter drops his name, there's been a plethora of unofficial re-edits of Soul Mining's closing track, Giant, in recent years.
All this means that an extravagant, £40 deluxe box set version of Soul Mining comes as a bit of a surprise, although it's worth noting that, 31 years ago, the critics unanimously thought it was an album for the ages: reviews of the "most important pop artist of the decade" proliferated. Indeed, Soul Mining must have seemed weirdly unprecedented in 1983, even in the unlikely event that you had been paying close attention to Matt Johnson's career up to that point.
He had started out in 1977, posting small ads in the music press in search of musicians. They mentioned Syd Barrett and Throbbing Gristle as influences, and that's pretty much exactly what his early releases sounded like. Recorded with Wire's Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis, the 1981 album Burning Blue Soul and single Cold Spell Ahead offered up a kind of post-punk take on psychedelia, refracted through Throbbing Gristle's forbidding worldview: trebly guitars and dead-eyed Madcap Laughs vocals both drenched in effects, churning grey noise and primitive sound collages. They bore almost no resemblance whatsoever to the music on Soul Mining. When Cold Spell Ahead reappeared here under the name Uncertain Smile, it was virtually unrecognisable, the primeval drum machine and echoing guitar murk replaced by a flawless, rich production involving crack session players. Johnson played marimba, and his voice had changed from reedy and blank-eyed into something deeper and more emotive. The ungainly second half of the song had been excised in favour of a sumptuous extended piano solo from Jools Holland. The latter is a genuinely astonishing performance, marred only by the vague fear that a lightbulb may have gone on over the former Squeeze keyboard player's head while he was playing it – "I can play boogie woogie piano along with anything!" – and that the whole business may thus have planted the seed that flourished into the annual grimness of the Hootenany.
In fact, circumstances had conspired to make the change in Johnson's music look more sudden and extraordinary that it actually was: he'd recorded, then abandoned, a whole album of intermediate material between Burning Blue Soul and Soul Mining. Even so, the latter still seems like a startling album. Johnson was only 22 when Soul Mining was released. The lyrics contained the occasional hint of histrionic gaucheness – "the cancer of love has eaten out my heart" seems a pretty melodramatic way to say you got dumped – but more often they're strikingly precocious: Uncertain Smile's brilliant drawing of a confused relationship, The Twilight Hour's painfully accurate depiction of self-obsession. In fact, they often feel more nuanced and mature than the lyrics Johnson wrote later, when he developed an alarming tendency to say inarguable things about war and religion in a slightly pompous and condescending manner that made you wonder if you didn't feel like arguing about them after all. There's a wit and ambiguity about That Sinking Feeling's sly mockery of the Thatcher government's ethical crusades – "I'm just a symptom of the moral decay that's gnawing at the heart of this country," he sang, the sweet harmony vocal on the last word sounding like a musical wink to camera – that seemed to desert Johnson later on.
More striking still is the ease with which Johnson marshals a kaleidoscopic array of musical influences into something coherent and unique. Quite aside from Holland's boogie-woogie piano, over the course of Soul Mining's seven tracks, you variously hear folk fiddles and accordion, the popping basslines of contemporary funk, punishing industrial beats, electronics derived from New York's then current club music – both the post-disco boogie of the Peech Boys and D-Train and the electro of Newcleus and the Jonzun Crew – and African-inspired polyrhythms. But Soul Mining never sounds disjointed, never feels like an exercise in smart-alec showboating: Johnson's songwriting holds its disparate elements tightly together.
Curiously, all this eclecticism had the same chemical fuel as the similarly open-minded Balearic dance scene that would arrive half a decade on. Years later, Johnson would bemoan the fact that Soft Cell's Non Stop Ecstatic Dancing had beaten Soul Mining to the title of the first ecstasy album. Like his Some Bizzare labelmates, he was ahead of the curve when it came to MDMA: indeed, he consumed it so enthusiastically during Soul Mining's making that one set of recording sessions in New York had to be abandoned altogether. If it offers no reference as blatant as Cindy Ecstasy's rap on Non-Stop Ecstatic Dancing's Memorabilia, you can still make out the drug's influence on the euphoric communal chant that closes Giant, the horizontal, beatific atmosphere of the title track and the bittersweet cocktail of fuzzy elation and fragile introspection with which This Is the Day greets the sun rising after a long night.
An album made under the influence of a largely unknown drug that five years later would go on to change pop culture for ever, a patchwork of catholic musical influences stitched tightly together by one man's peculiar, expansive vision of pop: Soul Mining is a brilliant and very idiosyncratic album. Maybe that's why it's never really cited as an influence these days: you can't hope to mimic something this personal and unique.
