4 Responses to “Magic Roundabout - Up/She's A Waterfall (1987)”

1. #  Anonymous 6:58 PM

   Hey! First time I come on this site and there at the top of the page is some obscure band I used to know! Magic Roundabout were from the Manchester area 1986-88 and were a fairly typical JAMC/Velvets-looking 4-piece (can't recall names except that the guitarist was called Nick something. . ). They put out a few tapes - Up, their best song, was from the second - and appeared on at least one compilation tape: "Oozing Through The Ozone Layer", put together by a pre-Pulp Mark Webber (then known only as Zig). This featured 2 vastly different versions of She's A Waterfall.
   
   They had loads of great 2-minute noise-pop numbers but slowly got more arty and confrontational, whittling their set down to two vastly extended numbers. They're the only band I've seen who actually *did* play the same song for so long that the soundman came up on stage and unplugged the amps while they were still going. By this time their appeal had become so, er, selective, that there was little point carrying on. I'm not aware of any of them turning up in other bands, though the guitarist and bassist had a barely listenable improv spinoff group called The Living Floors (from a Young Marble Giants lyric).
   
   Somewhere I have a tape of more of their demos. . .somewhere. . .  

2. #  stephen 11:33 PM

   far out and fishy! hi chris, where have you been? It's been a long time, hope your well. I still have all those compilation tapes you did for me, where you introduced me to so many brilliant bands.
   To keep the post on subject Tom, I wrote about the magic roundabout in the first issue of my fanzine , must dig it out sometime and see what it was that I wrote about them.
   
   stephen tap  

3. #  Anonymous 8:45 PM

   hi to Stephen Out Of Bulldozer Crash! I knew I couldn't be on here long without my secret identity being rumbled. . .I kinda "left" the indie scene after getting a bit too involved in the pseudo-professional side of it, and with painful inevitability ended up in a band on Shinkansen after that. Anyroad, I seem to remember I did a piece on the Magic Roundabout in one of my earlier fanzines (was it Big Bad Fire Engine or The Dream Inspires?), I'll have to ferret about in the box under my bed and find out which one. . .  

4. #  simon 9:13 PM

   I knew the Magic Roundabout a bit, too. I also wrote about them in my fanzine in about 1988 or 1989 – or rather, Maria and Nicola from the band wrote the piece themselves, a potted history of the band (though they said the band was "sadly kind of non-existent at the moment"), and supplied photos of them all. The band were:
   
   Nick - drums (later organ, when Mark joined)
   Paul - bass
   Linda - vocals/guitar
   Karrie - electric violin
   Mark - drums
   Maria - tambourine
   Nicola - tambourine
   
   I have their demo tape, with 8 songs (and lovely hand-made sleeve), including Up, She's a Waterfall, and (the wonderful) Song For Gerard Langley, plus a 20-minute freaky jam type thing called Alice's Paperplane.
   
   I also have a live tape (can't remember where the gig took place, Manchester I suppose) and the Oozing the Ozone layer tape and fanzine.
   
   Funnily enough I don't have the single – I would love it though!
   
   The Magic Roundabout still sound good today. I wonder what their band members are doing now...  

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