Gina X Performance were ahead of their time in 1978 with their dark, detached synthpop and the glacial vocals of Gina Kikoine.
This fantastic slice of dark, detached electropop has sat stubbornly (for which read unplayed) in my vinyl collection since soon after its release in the late ’70s. More fool me.
With its crunchy, shimmering bedrock that prefigures Depeche Mode before they’d even formed a band, its burbling synths and dramatic Vocoder-ed vocals, it’s not just ahead of its time for 1978 – it’s positively futuristic.
I’m surely not alone in having been drawn to the album Nice Mover by Gina X Performance as much by the striking cover shot of Gina, a woman with strong Grace Jones vibes, as by the cool, sexy synthpop within.
Gina X Performance – aka GXP – was a German duo of an art student called Gina Kikoine, the singer and lyricist whose deadpan vocal recalled Amanda Lear, and composer / producer Zeus B. Held, aided by a bunch of studio musicians in their hometown of Cologne.
This song might not have made much of a mark on its release in 1978 but enjoyed a second lease of life in dance clubs when Andrew Weatherall included it on his Nine O’Clock Drop compilation of alternative dance tracks.
GXP made three or four albums also , the first including a tribute to Quentin Crisp called No GDM, and she later recorded a duet with Billy Mackenzie of The Associates, though she was replaced by Annie Lennox and neither version was released.
Held had already recorded seven rock albums playing keyboards in a terrible German prog group called Birth Control – here he is on their song Skateboard Sue – when he decided to turn svengali, creating a new project with Kikoine as its public face.
The idea, he announced, was “to create and perform music as part of a total combination of poetry, sounds and visual performance, to entertain, and to provoke thought and reaction.” Kikoine, catching his pretentious drift, described their creative vision as “the absolute union of music, poetry and travesty.”
Initially a hit in Europe, Nice Mover became popular at the hipper clubs in London and New York, including the Blitz, not least because its lyrics namechecking Studio 54 appealed to the fashion-obsessed New Romantics.
They went on to make a second album, X-traordinaire – also in my collection, also with a notable cover photo, this time featuring Gina as a sort of S&M toilet attendant – including a funky track with a brass element called Strip Tease, and a tune called Nowhere Wolf that supposedly features real wolves recorded on the Russian Steppes.
In 1981 an increasingly busy Zeus B. Held began working with Birmingham-based synth/funk band Fashion, co-writing and producing their second album Fabrique, and Gina would sing on their minor hit Love Shadow.
A third and final GXP album, Voyeur, came out in 1983, courting controversy with a pornographic image of gay sex on its inner sleeve and song titles like Pederast Dissection, and featured standout songs Babylon Generation and Hypnosis/Hypnose.
1984 Kikoine made a solo album, Yinglish, again co-written and co-produced with Held, but credited simply to Gina X. The featured singles were a brilliant deconstruction of The Beatles’ Drive My Car (not unlike Flying Lizards) and a teutonic take on Serge Gainsbourg’s Harley Davidson (a far cry from the original duet with Brigitte Bardot).
Gina promoted them with a show at Camden Palace, which I remember seeing, and an appearance on The Tube, which I don’t. Held, meanwhile, went on to have a successful studio career producing John Foxx, Dead Or Alive, Nina Hagen, Spear Of Destiny and Transvision Vamp.