KB’s Look Back At The 80’s Music Scene: The Dream Academy

By Karen Beishuizen

Picture this:

London, England in the late 1970s.

Nick Laird-Clowes and Gilbert Gabriel meet and come up with an idea to create a different kind of music by mixing instruments and sounds together: strings, woodwinds, percussion, and synthesizers.

They form a band and call themselves The Politics of Paradise. Nick meets Kate St. John at a party and asks her to join the band. They change the name to The Dream Academy.
They shop their demos for almost two years and are rejected by every record label before Warner Bros. Records offers them a recording contract in 1985.

Their debut album “The Dream Academy” is co-produced by Pink Floyd’s Dave Gilmour who is a friend of Nick Laird-Clowes. Along comes the first single “Life In A Northern Town” and it is a worldwide success and a No. 7 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the US.

It was their only major hit. The band broke up in 1991.

Fast Forward to 2022:

Nick is a composer for film soundtracks and documentaries: The Invisible Circus, Fierce People, Wit Licht, Battle for Haditha, About Time, the Whitney Houston documentary “Whitney: Can I Be Me” and the Leonard Cohen film “Marianne & Leonard: Words Of Love”.

Gilbert Gabriel is a film composer, producer and lecturer at Cambridge, Liverpool, and Cardiff University.

Kate St. John is a composer, arranger, producer, and instrumentalist. She has toured with Van Morrison, Julian Cope, The Waterboys, Marianne Faithfull and Morrissey. She and her husband specialize in On Set music production in films.