MATTHEW LINDSAY
Dreaming Of Me’s playful mood of modern noir and surging optimism was further refined on their followup, New Life, which zoomed to No.11 in the summer of 1981 and got them on Top Of The Pops, lugging their instruments on the train from Basildon. A young Danny Baker summed up their appeal; “combing the artiness of the futurists with the fun of funk”. This was a band born close enough to the capital to keep their finger on pop’s pulse, yet removed enough to not conform to Blitz Kid haughtiness; the synthetic sound of the suburbs. They graced the cover of Smash Hits, telling the new pop bible how they differed from those electro-predecessors: those were “B&I” – Bleak and Industrial. The Mode, by contrast, were “UP” – Ultra-Pop.