There’s a good chance you’ve encountered a band called Zenana over the last few weeks: they’ve been all over the media. The story of the Bedfordshire-based trio’s seemingly unlikely career renaissance, almost four decades after they were initially active, has proved popular with lots of outlets in the UK. Admittedly, it does have a strong narrative – crate-digging record dealer unearths their sole single, 19886’s ‘Witches’, gets in touch, and eventually it gets licensed for re-release with a ‘hot new remix’ by a cool European dance label – but even so, nobody would have expected it to result in live appearances on BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio 5 Live, Channel 5 News and Times Radio – or stories in the Times, BBC Online and Juno Daily. Or, for that matter, the Breakfast show of Chicago TV station WGN-TV.

That it has is, of course, brilliant. Music history is littered with acts who burnt brightly for a short period but were not conventionally successful, at least in traditional music industry terms. Zenana were founded in 1983 by Anita Gabrielle Tedder, who recruited two other band members – Penny Griffiths and Ruth Elder – and joined forces with her synthesiser-loving brother, Michael, to record songs in a basic studio he built in his front room.

From the start, Anita wanted it to be a vehicle for her ideas and social and political convictions, but also to offer strong depictions of women. That meant performing songs they wrote, about subjects that mattered to them and having control over how they sounded and looked. Penny developed a strong, distinctive visual identity for the band – designing the unique clothes and accessories they wore in photoshoots and on stage, which sat somewhere between punk, new romantic and Goth – and they were initially managed by Anita’s partner Steph (female managers were a rarity in the music industry at the time).

In some ways, they were pioneers – it would be another decade after they initially disbanded that the Spice Girls made ‘girl power’ a big part of their pop USP  while some of their songs reflected on same-sex love between women (again a relative rarity at the time) – though their moderate success in the mid 1980s amounted to briefly sharing a manager with Mel & Kim, an underground hit within lesbian venues (a song called ‘The Touch of a Woman’), one TV appearance, and a lot of gigs. Oh, and that sole seven-inch single, ‘Witches’ – a song about female agency partly inspired by Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

‘Witches’ is, and remains, a very good record – albeit a massively overlooked one. That’s unfortunately the case with many fine records, especially independently released ones, which for various reasons can fall flat on release, thereby crushing the dreams of those who made them. In the past, that would have been that, but in the Internet era nothing is really lost forever and there are many record collectors and selector DJs who have made a career out of rediscovering buried treasure – and a growing band of record labels of different sizes dedicated to tracking down artists and reissuing rare or little-known records.

I wrote about this process in 2016 for a two-part feature for Juno Plus (now re-born as Juno Daily) titled ‘Crate of the Nation’. The first part, which you can read here, looked at collector-selector-DJ culture, while the second – available to read here – focused on the processes labels go through to track down artists, find master tapes, and reissue forgotten music. Spoiler: some go to genuinely extreme lengths.

Kiernan Abbott, who started the unlikely Zenana renaissance, fits into the ‘collector-DJ’ category. The founder of a YouTube and Instragram channel called Fragments In Wax, where he shares some of his finds, Kiernan is still young (mid-to-late-twenties I think) and makes his living as a record dealer, archivist and researcher. He found a copy of the ‘Witches’ seven-inch while on holiday in Cornwall in 2022 and started playing it in his DJ sets.

Like many collector/record dealer sorts, Kiernan was intrigued enough to want to find out more about Zenana and the record. So, he set about tracking down Anita and Michael, eventually uncovering email addresses. Once they replied to his surprise email, the three got chatting and Kiernan recommended reissuing the record – he could see that it was a genuinely slept-on gem that was infectious and memorable enough to sell second time round, especially to DJs looking for something different that others don’t have (which, of course, has always been a big part of DJ culture, but especially to the ‘selector’ brigade whose entire USP is playing things other people haven’t heard or own).

This is where I come into the story. I have known Michael, Anita’s brother – as ‘dad’s friend Mike’ – since I was very young. Him and my dad were best buddies at university in the late 1960s and set up an alternative music club together (the fantastically named Progressive Hedonists Union of Culture and Creativity, or PHUCC for short). He and Anita emailed me and asked to discuss the possible reissue EP, which they’d do themselves. It would feature ‘Witches’ and other material recorded at the time, some of which had not been released previously.

I offered to write something for the back cover of the record, where I tried to put Zenana in context and explained Michael’s role in introducing me to electronic music. It was not insignificant: visiting his home studio in 1986 with my family, as an eight-year-old, was the first time I’d encountered synthesisers and drum machines up close (before that, it was just via synth-pop acts on Top of the Pops). More excitingly, Mike allowed my brother Simon and I to play with them. It’s one of the most vivid memories of my childhood, such was the impact it made on me. Put it this way: the only other part of that holiday I remember was having an enormous ice cream at Land’s End!

It was in Mike’s front room that all of Zenana’s demos were recorded – including the first version of ‘Witches’ (it was subsequently re-recorded for release at the fancy Sawmills Studio in Cornwall, a recording facility famously only accessible by boat). Some of those demos – in the shape of fully mastered unreleased tracks – are featured on the band’s Witches, With The Spell of Love EP. You can still get that EP, which was released in September 2023, via their Bandcamp page – on both vinyl and digital. I’d recommend picking it up, not least because the vinyl version comes with a brilliant booklet telling the band’s 1980s history in vivid detail – a document that may soon have to be updated given the interest in their revival.

When we were first discussing the reissue, I offered to remix ‘Witches’ with my Bedmo Disco DJ/production partner Gareth Morgan AKA Awon. When ‘Witches’ was originally recorded for release there was no dedicated ‘dance mix’, extended version or DJ-friendly dub, so that’s what I offered Anita and Michael. The ingredients were there to deliver something authentic sounding (IE like it was a remix done at the time by one of the greats of the 1980s club mix – Shep Pettibone, Francois Kevorkian or Martin Rushent) that could be played in clubs right now.

Gareth was initially a bit surprised that I’d offered to do a remix (which I don’t have the musical skills or production nous to do on my own – he’s the talented musician/producer in our partnership), but once he heard ‘Witches’ he just got it: it was great, the multi-track parts (taken from Michael’s eight-track 1985 home recording, as masters of the released version no longer exist) were usable, and we could easily do something good with the song. In fact, when I turned up at his home studio in Totterdown, he’d already created some killer bits which feature in the final version.

Once completed – and it took a couple of sessions to get it right – the remix was forwarded on to Anita and Michael, who were genuinely blown away by what we’d done. In September 2023, I headed over to Bedford to join the two of them, Penny, Ruth and Anita’s partner Steph at Slide Records for the launch of their reissue EP. I was charged with providing the soundtrack to the afternoon via the shop’s DJ set-up. Eventually, I dropped our remix of ‘Witches’ and a big cheer went up. It may have been a crowd of friends, family and curious locals, but it was still a great moment.

The consensus among the limited number of friends in music who had heard the remix was that it was pretty good and had a lot of potential, so I decided to send it to a few selected DJs and producers. The feedback was great. JD Twitch and Luke Una started playing it immediately and Trevor Jackson whacked it on one of his NTS shows, thinking I’d sent him an unreleased remix from the period (a great compliment given that we wanted it to sound like that).

Another DJ I sent it to was Antal, co-founder of Rush Hour in Amsterdam. He began playing the remix, got a great response, and emailed asking me to ‘keep in touch’ if we thought about ‘doing anything with it’. Anita, Michael, Penny and Ruth were keen to see it come out, so I went back to Antal to discuss the potential of us releasing it; much to my surprise, he offered to put it out on Rush Hour’s RSS series instead, which largely focuses on reissuing forgotten and overlooked gems, with replica artwork and usually a new remix or re-edit.

That 12” will land in stores in late spring/early summer – it is available to pre-order now directly from Rush Hour, but also via UK outlets (such as Juno Records of course) and others around the world.

News of that deal reached the BBC in the East of England via an email from Anita (they’d previously done pieces on the band in September 2023). They ran a story on the BBC News website about it and then all hell broke loose, with Zenana fielding umpteen requests a day from outlets asking them to tell their story.

From my personal perspective, it has been exciting seeing Zenana’s story spread like wildfire. So far not much of it has celebrated the music itself – which it should, as Anita, Michael, Penny and Ruth made some great music back in the 1980s – but hopefully that will come. Regardless, it has been great seeing them back together again, getting ready to perform some live shows (which may include them performing a version of our ‘Witches’ remix) while enjoying their moment in the spotlight.

As they would tell you, all that has happened since Kiernan Abbott got in touch in 2022 has been a surprise. It seems to have brought them back together – old friends reunited –and as much as it has been exhausting, it has allowed them to talk to the media about what they did in the 1980s – and tried to do with the band’s ethos and look. Not many independent artists from that period get that chance.

For those who do, like Zenana, it is not mere nostalgia, or belated affirmation that what they did musically in the past has merit, but an opportunity to revisit a period of their lives that meant so much to them. I’ve sat up late in Anita and Steph’s garden, chatting with them, Penny, Ruth and Michael about those musical adventures in the 1980s and what they meant to them; it was a joyous experience. Whatever they have done with their lives in the time since – and music has always played a part in it in different ways – they will always be bonded by what they went through as Zenana first time round – positive and negative.

I’ve not been through this process of musical rediscovery myself – I am a lot of things, but a musician is not one of them – but I have been fortunate to speak to many other artists who have, usually as part of reissue projects where I’m commissioned to write liner notes. Hearing the pride and joy in artists’ voices when they talk about something that meant so much to them, but went unacknowledged at the time, is never anything less than thrilling. We all deserve a second chance, and Zenana are a great example of what can happen, years down the line, when someone presents you with that opportunity.

Zenana – ‘Witches’ B/W ‘Witches (Bedmo Disco’s Spell of Love) will be released by Rush Hour in May 2024.