THE ULTIMATE DREAMERS - Dark and respectfulThe Belgian cold wave/postpunk band made a remarkable comeback last year. With many concerts and releases. But it wasn't a really classic comeback, because after all, during their active period from 1986 to 1990, The Ultimate Dreamers were only on stage in their home country of Belgium. And hasn't released any songs either. That has recently changed. And now we're adding 'Echoing Reverie'.Fortunately, The Ultimate Dreamers are not a typical project in which the old singer wants to do it again with new colleagues, because most of the old line-up are still there, as singer Frédéric Cotton explains:
“Joel plays now bass and Bertrand has switched to guitar. They are both original members, just on different instruments. Sandrine is the new member, she plays keyboards and cello. I'm still the singer and play second bass on some songs."First there was supposed to be an album called 'Echoing Reverie', right? Why it has now become just an EP is quickly explained:
"We wanted to present new material. We have "Polarized", a limited edition 7" single, released in September 2022 on Komakino Records, our own label. Our plans were then to make an EP with 'Polarized' and five other songs. We found Wave Tension Records for the vinyl release. And of course we still have the deal with Spleen+. The digital version and a CD are available here. Both with eight songs. We kind of consider these versions in particular to be an album." For the release they recorded an AC/DC cover version - bizarre, but true:
"I'm not a fan of AC/DC at all, but "Hell's Bells" is a great song and I thought it would be interesting to do a completely different, respectful version - darker and slower. We played it a few times at concerts and people loved it."Concerts are important to them anyway. Did you play live in your early phase? Apparently gigs were already an important topic for Cotton & Co. back then:
“We played a dozen concerts in the late 80s. We lived in a region where nothing happened. So we decided to organize a few events ourselves and had some problems with the police, who believed that dark music was synonymous with drugs and violence. It all stayed very local, but it was successful."Uwe Marx