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Belbury Poly turns its haunted synths to 80s fantasy [1]

['Rob Beschizza']

Date: 2026-08-29  

Belbury Poly's brilliant 2012 album The Belbury Tales (previously at Boing Boing) was a high point of hauntology, right at the point it wandered into folk horror and related aesthetics of "this municipal library used to be an auroch burial ground and contains strange Usborne books about computers that didn't exist" (Scarfolk, Wyrd Britain, Windows 95 Tips). 15 years on, the cover of the latest album, Sorcery, snaps me right back to attention.

Sorcery is the ninth album for Jim Jupp, aka Belbury Poly. It grew from Jupp's love of early to mid-80s electronic music and a rediscovery of how that music had soundtracked his childhood love of all things sci-fi and fantasy. It's moody and melodramatic electronica rendered in bright and evocative 80s sounds. The not quite 80s tunes have Belbury Poly's trademark earworm melodies and are ever so slightly tongue in cheek. Jupp returns to a simple line up for this album – it's a very electronic sound with fretless bass, guitars and e-bow provided by regular Belbury Poly collaborator, Christopher Budd.

The track titles alone!

1980s BBC announcer voice: wither thou goest, sparkweevil? I'm a huge fan again. The Futura Condensed paperback look is a slightly older echo than the 80s music. I wonder who painted the landscape? It seems more Rodney Matthews than Roger Dean. My own nostalgia here is for 1990s Psygnosis games (let's not call it Psygnosiscore) whose design represented a renaissance (or early-arriving wave of nostalgia?) for those literary and illustrative stylings here.

It's also an era that's now seen as something of a golden age for fantasy and science-fiction books, comics, TV, movies and games (particularly in Britain where it was fuelled by a satirical post punk reaction to Thatcherism). In Jupp's memory these things go hand in hand; as a child his nerdy fandom was soundtracked not as it was for most by Heavy Metal, but by the electronic pop of Bill Nelson, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Japan, and Frank Chickens. Also, by otherworldly TV soundtracks & production music of the era: Elizabeth Parker and Paddy Kingsland at the BBC, The Parry Music Library, Rod Argent's new age library albums and even Clannad's Robin of Sherwood score.

Lands near fantasy synth, but without the medieval cheese. If there's an incipient genre here where hauntology and fantasy meet, the name Fantology is already taken.

Previously: Mixtape of the Lost Decade

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