A toy xylophone bought on West 48th Street opens one of the album's best-known songs, and a long piano solo became one of its best-known features. The The's debut album Soul Mining is full of such accidents and recoveries. On October 21, 1983, the record finally reached shops through Some Bizzare Records and Epic Records, produced by Paul Hardiman and Matt Johnson.
Collapsed New York sessions
The road there had been anything but smooth. Johnson began recording in New York after The The signed to CBS Records following a bidding war between labels. But those first sessions collapsed after just two singles, and Johnson returned to London to write and record the rest of the material. The sessions also drew on a wider circle of collaborators, including Orange Juice drummer Zeke Manyika, synthesizer pioneer Thomas Leer and Australian experimentalist JG Thirlwell, who worked under the name Frank Want.
What emerged was a record built on patience and repetition. Johnson wrote most of the songs in 1983, lying on the floor of his Highbury flat or at his girlfriend Fiona Skinner's place in Finsbury, pencil and notepad in hand, rewriting for hours. Without a sequencer, he played each instrument part over and over, sometimes for ten minutes straight, layering guitar, drum machine and synthesizers on a portastudio.
Jools Holland's one-take piano solo
The studio The Garden had a Yamaha C3 piano, and that instrument inspired a long piano solo by Jools Holland on the album version of 'Uncertain Smile'. Holland recorded it in one take, then played a second just in case. The single had earlier featured a saxophone solo by Crispin Cioe, but the album replaced it with the piano.
The British and European editions contained seven tracks and closed with 'Giant', exactly as Johnson intended. But in the United States, a label executive decided seven songs were not enough and added a re-recorded 'Perfect' — a decision that angered Johnson.
The fight over 'Perfect'
That battle over the tracklist would drag on for years. Only when early albums were remastered and reissued in 2002 did Johnson finally get Soul Mining released without 'Perfect', as originally planned.
The cover art came from Johnson's brother Andy Dog, who painted an image adapted from a photograph in The Face magazine: one of Fela Kuti's wives holding a marijuana cigarette.
Soul Mining was not an instant hit, reaching number 27 on the UK Albums Chart. But the single 'This Is the Day', released in September 1983, became one of The The's defining songs, and the album's reputation grew steadily in the decades that followed. A 30th-anniversary vinyl reissue in 2014, remastered under Johnson's supervision at Abbey Road, confirmed its status. That long afterlife eventually brought formal recognition: in 2019, Soul Mining was certified gold in the United Kingdom. The album runs 41 minutes. Among the extra tracks from the British cassette version, 'Waitin' for the Upturn' has never appeared on CD.
The album runs just over forty minutes, but its afterlife has been far longer. Johnson's refusal to compromise — from the one-take piano solo to the fight over 'Perfect' — turned a troubled debut into a record that sounds as deliberate today as it did 43 years ago.