Up until now, Bad Radio was the name of Eddie Vedder’s first band who, in the 1980s, used to perform Duran Duran inspired songs to audiences in San Diego. Fast forward a few decades and Bad Radio is the title of Leftfield’s new track, delivering a body blow of electronic dance music that simply renders the listener both shaken and stunned. The sounds going on in this record are astoundingly produced, reminding us of an era when dance music was not a throwaway affair, it was a statement of intent, a British movement that defined a culture and invoked the wrath of Parliamentary ire hastening in the Criminal Justice Act to stamp out its hedonistic footprint. It was deemed as both corruptive and recklessly emancipating to a generation of youths experimenting with drugs and social boundaries. In Leftfield’s own words: “We changed the possibilities of what you could do on a dancefloor.”
Leftfield returned with a new album this year called Alternative Light Source, its first since 1999, and first without original music partner Paul Daley, thus leaving Neil Barnes as the sole member of the group. But Barnes has been very open about his split with Daley, saying they both wanted to pursue different things. In an interview with the N.M.E’s Louis Pattison, Barnes candidly discussed his hiatus, saying he wanted to spend the last sixteen years raising his kids, also revealing that his battles with depression caused him to lose months of creative time to psychological trauma. Barnes says that Bad Radio is a track that was forged within the furnace of his emotional instability, claiming: “When depression hits you it takes you to a place where it seems like there’s no way out. That’s what Bad Radio is about. But out of all that, good things can happen. There’s light and darkness. Despair and hope. You go through it [and] then come out the other side.”
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