Billy Mackenzie & Alan Rankine first worked together in the cabaret outfit Mental Torture, playing hotel residencies to middle-aged patrons. Sharing an Edinburgh apartment, the pair hatched a vision for Associates from their shared love of film soundtracks, Burt Bacharach, David Bowie & Roxy Music. 
 The duo signed to Fiction and released The Affectionate Punch in early 1980, a striking debut album and the start of a rich partnership with engineer-producer Mike Hedges. The gameplan was to penetrate the charts, but songs from 1981’s Fourth Drawer Down were just too wayward, recalling the grandeur of Scott Walker or the desolate postpunk of Cabaret Voltaire. Undeterred, Mackenzie and Rankine went for pop’s jugular with Party Fears Two & Club Country which broke them into the UK Top 20. The deliriously inventive Sulk followed with a series of memorably mischievous Top of the Pops appearances, and another hit, 18 Carat Love Affair. 
 But on the eve of their first major tour, Mackenzie abruptly flinched from mega-stardom. Exasperated, Rankine quit. Associates continued sporadically but the momentum never recovered, and neither, in truth, did the magic. Fans dreamed that the dream-team would one day reunite to reignite their destiny. Once or twice it nearly happened, but Mackenzie’s tragic death in 1997 removed that possibility forever. What’s left is a compact and tantalizing body of work, some of the strangest and most swoon-inducing pop ever made ~ Simon Reynolds