Ilan Bluestone & Gid Sedgwick – Save A Prayer
From the dawn-of-the-synthesiser/New Romantic era, there’s a relatively slim list of tracks that can be convincingly ported into the Gen X world. By the same token though, there are few tracks from those more elaborate times that still manage to positively ache with nous, timelessness and savoir faire. ‘Leave In Silence’, (or ‘Enjoy The Silence’ for that matter); ‘Fade To Grey’; ‘Ghosts’, ‘Say Hello’ – you get the idea.
Regardless, it does takes a certain combining of producer and vocalist to rebottle that type of lightning and produce something that both embodies the essence of a track like ‘Save A Prayer’, while also successfully contemporising it.
And that’s where Ilan Bluestone and Gid Sedgwick come in.
Releasing a six-minute, mood-laden, synth-heavy torch song like ‘Save A Prayer’ was considered a risk in ’82 by both Duran Duran and their label. For a band already known for a certain fashion and energy, releasing something as musically slow-burning and ‘dream-pop’-like was far from a commercially obvious move. When Ilan and Gid were mulling another outing together, it was there united admiration both for the track and its cultural dissidence, that saw them elect to pass it through their own shared lens.
Of the release, Ilan commented, “I’ve regularly found myself gravitating towards ‘80s-inspired sounds”. “Tracks like ‘Paid For Love’ and ‘Can You’ both drew from that world and really seemed to connect with people. Then Gid and I started writing ‘Slow Down’ in 2019, which leaned even further into the synthwave sound, and was finally finished and released last year. In many ways, ‘Save A Prayer’ felt like the natural next step in all this.”
Production-wise, ‘Save A Prayer’ plays perfectly into Ilan’s measured, progressive inclinations, albeit (naturally) now set against a significantly elevated tempo. Through subtle intonational shifts, Gid moves its wistfully longing centre towards something just a hint broader and brighter, while still carrying just the right degree of yearning vulnerability and bittersweet romanticism along with it.
Only the rarest of songs maintain their original relevance over eras, plural. More than four decades on, ‘Save A Prayer’ still asks the same of its listener – only now experienced through Bluestone and Sedgwick’s inimitable prism.
Find it here from today [blackhole.lnk.to/SaveAPrayer].
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