No Idea (Earth Leakage Trip)

The Prodigy might have traversed some subversive territory with their 1991 hit "Charly", but there were freakier combatants still who threw their hats into the Toytown Techno arena. "No Idea", a hypnotically unnerving concoction by electronic duo Earth Leakage Trip (real names Tony Lobue and Neil Sandford), encompasses many of the same themes as "Charly" - mind-altering substances, children in peril, an ironic wariness of adult authority - all while taking an artifact from 1970s childhood and teasing out the sinister undertones that were lurking there along. Most of the dialogue heard throughout comes from Happy Monsters, a quirky children's record from 1975, which tells the story of two stray kids, Bobby and Betty, who take a wrong turn in the woods and end up in The Land of Ooog, a fantastical realm populated by monsters with an affinity for well-behaved children and a passion for funk music. Ooog shares many of the same features of our world, but everything has been tweaked and rearranged, evoking a world that seems eerily distorted and operates on an entirely different logic to our own - hence the track's most prominent sample, concerning Bobby's observations on Ooogian architecture: "The doors are where the windows should be...and the windows are where the doors should be..." In "No Idea", the sample has been slowed down, making the voice seem noticeably older but also as though the speaker is surveying their surroundings with the stupefied fascination brought on by a drug-induced high. In the original recording, Bobby utters this phrase just once, but here it is repeated over and over, creating the sensation that Bobby is trapped in a single looping moment, spiraling along a dizzying infinity of misplaced doors and windows. The sample dominates the track, and the effect is disconcerting. For what could be a more mundane, and yet more threatening subversion of the established order than a house where the doors and the windows are in the wrong place?

As was the basis of Toytown Techno, "No Idea" is all about evoking a kind of long-lost childhood euphoria, rendered accessible once again by the pleasures of the rave scene. That euphoria is, however, disturbed by the intermittent cries of Heather O'Rourke, who can be heard shrieking, "I can't hear you, mommy!", at various points throughout the track - this sample comes from the 1982 movie Poltergeist, a story of another child abducted by otherworldly beings. Its juxtaposition with the Happy Monsters sample is a sly reference to the potentially darker implications of Bobby and Betty's mind-bending excursion. On the album sleeve, Happy Monsters promises "a pleasant adventure into the impossible Land of Ooog", where "only good children can visit and talk with the happy monsters." The adventure is certainly a pleasant one, for nothing overtly menacing happens to Bobby and Betty in Ooog, but there is a more troubling subtext to be gleaned, in that it concerns a couple of lost children who, for all we know, never find their way home. The narrative, which occupies the entirety of Side A, amounts to something of a shaggy dog story, an extended build-up to a punchline in which the listener is instructed to turn over the record to hear the concert the monsters have promised to perform before their human guests. The problem facing Bobby and Betty at the start of the record - how to navigate back to their family's farm in an approaching storm - is left dangling. Meanwhile, Bobby's concluding observation that, "Even if it's not for real, it's such a happy place here," is a jarring reminder that Ooog apparently exists only in fantasy, making us question what, exactly, is happening in the "real" world. Are the children stranded in the woods and hallucinating from the hunger Bobby professes to feel at the start of the recording? Is this all escapism in order to avoid having to face up to the frightening reality of their situation? It seems that every little extra dash of whimsy in Ooog adds further apprehension to the mix.

The vocals heard at the start of "No Idea" are those of The Interpreter, a disembodied voice who directs Bobby and Betty around The Land of Ooog, but refuses to make itself visible on the basis that "Things are not always as we see them." It assures us that since we are "good children", the monsters who inhabit The Land of Ooog have looked forward to our "make believe visit". Already we can see a kind of subversion along the lines of that conveyed in The Prodigy's "Charly", for the rebellious ravers tripping along to Bobby's doors-and-windows fixation would likely not have regarded themselves as "good" children who were keen to follow the rules, while the specification that the visit to Ooog is only "make believe" is suggestive both of a parallelism between childhood fantasy and drug-induced hallucination and of the deceptive, potentially dangerous world we are traversing. There is a sinister ambience to Ooog that seems at odds with the values ostensibly being preached. Throughout Happy Monsters, there is repeated emphasis on the supposed condition that Ooog is accessible only through virtue - The Interpreter insists that Bobby and Betty must be "good" children, or else they would not have come there -  although what constitutes a "good" child is never expounded on. The closest we get is The Interpreter's presumption that Bobby and Betty would have done their homework and "studied [their] XYZs", suggesting that it has to do with a basic adherence to adult authority. And really, we have to take The Interpreter's word for it, because Bobby and Betty are never called upon to demonstrate their virtue, nor is their entry to Ooog precipitated by any kind of moral choice. They certainly seem like nice enough children, but we learn effectively nothing about them. Also not explained is why the monsters are so eager to meet with Bobby and Betty in the first place, a question explicitly put to The Interpreter by Betty that it seems to purposely duck out of answering. The story's apparent attempt to offer up some kind of moral teaching - "Every place is happy when children are good" - is so vague as to hardly seem sincere. The paradox of Happy Monsters is that, for all of its insistence on being "good" and following the rules, it is a story that revels in embracing the strange and subverting the established order, hence those spooky Ooogian houses with the doors and the windows in the wrong places. The Land of Ooog is both threatening and seductive because it does not obey the rules, the story engaging for the beguiling manner in which it explores the allure of the strange and the unknown, even if it is a fascination that goes against whatever parental authority (and Charley The Cat) might have told us. And, in order to reach this land, professedly open only to the obedient, the children have had to leave parental authority behind.

The implications of the Poltergeist sample are similarly two-fold. O'Rourke's voice, like that of The Interpreter, is disembodied, deriving from a scene in which her character, Carol Freeling, is calling out to her parents from another dimension (in a manner strongly reminiscent of the Twilight Zone episode "Little Girl Lost"). Her passage to the other side is facilitated by her family's subservience to a very different authority - that of the chattering cyclops. Poltergeist is a film that speaks to parental concerns about the increasing dominance of television, that ultimate source of mind-warping stupefaction, within the family home, and the possibility that it could supplant adult authority, should the parents be negligent enough to delegate their own responsibilities to the blinking light box. The television, ostensibly, is safe and domestic, but it offers a portal through which outside forces are invited to freely pervade the family home, and through which the child's soul, if they stare into it too long, could potentially be lost. The preoccupation, once again, is with the allure of the strange and unknown over the safe and familiar, and the horror and exhilaration this engenders. O'Rourke's cries emphasise a wedge between parent and child that is certainly disturbing (reminding us of the fate that might possibly have befallen Bobby and Betty), although her repeated insistence that she can no longer hear her mother is equally suggestive of a kind of gleeful liberation from parental control. These are renegade children who've left their comfort zone behind. Whether they'll be alright in their new environs remains up in the air, and that delicious uncertainty is to be savoured.

 There are gulls heard all throughout the track too, but I can't explain what those are all about.