A very rare b-side track I found on the flip of a promo single "This Heart" dating from 1988 which I don't think was ever released commercially. Reckless Sleepers - One More New Year's Eve By the way, isn't it time someone reissued Big Boss Sounds? A very underrated album in my opinion. Happy New Year everyone! [Update] I was pretty sure I had previously posted the only other non-album Reckless Sleepers B-Side previously, but no I had not - just mentioning it on the New Wave Outpost forum one time. So here's the B-Side to the only single released by the band, "If We Never Meet Again". Reckless Sleepers - When You Get That Look And here's their Christmas track, seeing as it's the holiday season. Reckless Sleepers - Every Day Will Be Like A Holiday
Been a bit busy lately, partly due to my obsession with the Star Wars Card Trader app. Here's a few random tracks from my USB drive. The Lucy Show - Wipe Out (from Undone, 1985) Beyond Words - On The Moon (from Beyond Words, 1986) In Pursuit - No Way Out (from City Without A Subway, 1986) Techniques Berlin - Scarlet Woman (not sure if it was released but it was recorded circa 1985-1986) To Heaven A Jet - Airfields (7" Single, 1981) I should have some new rips up shortly. In the meantime, subscribe to my spotify playlist to keep up with new stuff as I find it available.
22 Beaches - Dust (from the compilation cassette Another Spark, 1984)
The Another Spark compilation, an independent release, also included rare music by Microdisney, In Embrace, 1000 Mexicans, Perfect Vision, and many others.
I couldn't find the track from the Datblygu single referenced on LFDJ, so here's a track from a very limited cassette released a couple of years earlier.
My own find, this. A typically bizarre B-Side from the Captain, containing bits of his hit "It's Hard To Believe I'm Not" and what appears to be some factory boss bemoaning the fundamentally lazy British workers who clock in and read newspapers in the loo.
Frontier Scouts tracks can be found at the Chapter Music page on Bandcamp.
The only Suburban Sprawl album I could find information on was called Ice and was released in 1989-90. I'm presuming that an earlier album exists - the excerpts are quite tasty - but I can't confirm this.
Hello and thanks for stopping by today. Something a bit different this week, and moving forwards also. I've been meaning to comment on the slow pace of updates recently. My fiancee and I recently took on the full time care of two boys, one aged 8 and the other just a year. With my daily commute, three dogs, and living in a small house, it's been difficult to find the time and space to set up and use my turntable. For one thing, everything has to be kept out of baby's reach! So, like the Imajinca single I just posted, I'll do a few here and there but for the time being I'm largely restricted to music I've already recorded or obtained digitally elsewhere. So bear with me.
I was researching an album I saw on Discogs.com when I came across a very interesting, but old blog, namely La Folie Du Jour. It's been inactive for four years but the breadth of music showcased was quite impressive. Anyone who puts a Screen 3 B-Side in a compilation is o.k. with me! Sadly all the links were expired, but it did inspire me to go look for some of the music mentioned, so I'll be posting some here as a tribute to a great blog. I'll also try to comment on the bands as I go.
Portable People was a pretty obscure Pittsburgh band fronted by Rick Reynolds. Rick continues to record and release music through CD Baby. I don't know if PP recorded anything else.
Big Break was a snooker themed quiz show hosted by Jim Davidson in the early '90s. My vague recollections of this programme basically revolve around Dennis Whatshisface wearing stupidly large glasses, Jim Davidson doing what he does, i.e. not too much, and certainly, the memorable theme song:
It's only a game so put up a real good fight I'm gonna be snookering you tonight!
Now it seemed to me that such a tune was clearly composed specifically for the show, but it's true origins are actually a lot more interesting. The tale involves Captains, ships, mythical creatures, losses, bankruptcies and, yes, a beaver.
I mentioned a few months ago that I had 'discovered' Captain Sensible. In my musical stream-of-consciousness fashion, I was interested by his choice to cover "Relax" as a B-Side, and once I heard it - a pretty close reading of the original, with some nice sampled movie/TV dialogue - I looked for a few more things he'd done. I came into singles around 1985, which was after his really big hits and TOTP moments, so I looked for his first couple of albums, then his third (Revolution Now, from 1987) and also found a couple of odds and ends. One was a Syd Barrett cover ("Octopus") for a MOJO CD, the other was called "The Snooker Song" and was indeed what I remembered as the aforementioned Big Break theme. Now it transpired that this paean to a very British sport was from an '80s musical production, The Hunting of the Snark.
Previously I had purchased a copy of the reissue of The Hunting of the Snark CD/DVD for 99 cents about three years ago, and sold it last year, unopened, to a fella in Australia for about $40. So other than knowing the soundtrack had some value, I knew little else about it. This week, I looked it up on Wikipedia and YouTube. Being a big Midge Ure and Ultravox fan back in the '80s I was surprised to learn that Midge played guitar - pretty well - during the live concert put on almost exactly thirty years ago, April Fool's Day, 1987. The more I read about the production, the more interesting it became.
The composer behind The Hunting of the Snark, Mike Batt, was someone I was familiar with, but only vaguely. I had posted one of his albums before, as a request, but had to re-read the post as I couldn't remember it at all. (Actually I re-read my blog quite a lot. it might sound a bit egotistical, but it is one of the reasons why I have felt encouraged lately to write and post more - so as a reader you can't have it both ways!) I've always been interested in the craft behind songwriting and Mike is one of the most engaging composers I've come across. For example, in a Guardian interview, he insists on referring to his production as The F*****g Hunting of the Snark, because the whole production was so beset with problems and critical reproach. The live concert - at the Royal Albert Hall, no less - cost nearly a million dollars to put on and Batt himself would have cancelled the whole thing if he had been able to. The soundtrack album had never seen a proper release and the label had gone bankrupt without fulfilling the promotion promises they had made. And as Snark was based on a Lewis Carroll nonsense poem in the first place, at least on paper it sounded bonkers. (His own liner notes on the album re-release are thoughtful and unusually revealing.)
Where else could you find - within the same one hour performance - Captain Sensible singing music hall, Julian Lennon in a chef's costume, luminaries such as John Hurt and Billy Connolly reciting verse, Mike Batt himself conducting and singing in a naval commander's uniform and US soul diva Deniece Williams dressed up like a beaver. Oh yeah, and flippin' Midge Ure playing blistering guitar solos - while wearing a blue cravat the size of Kensington. Maybe you should just watch it already.
I could also mention that Mike got his idea for the production while sailing around the world for two years on a steam boat, that he composed both "Bright Eyes" and "A Winter's Tale" - two songs guaranteed to get me blubbing like a baby - that he discovered Kate Melua and a bunch of other artists, and much more besides. But for now I'll just say that by his own admission, much of his lyrical work has expressed a yearning for change, to explore new places and possibilities, and his commercial success has been well-won.
Out in the deserts of darkness and dreams,
Out though the oceans of sadness we sailed. Venturing onwards through mystical scenes,
Blown on the whim of the wind that prevailed.
We had no reason to doubt the truth,
Driven by danger and discontent,
And the drums of youth.
Don't let the memory die, Childen of the sky, heroes of the sea.
And as your life passes by,
Remember how it feels to be Children Of The Sky (from "Children of the Sky")
Although they only released one single, I love the Lemon Hearts. I took a chance on buying the single unheard several years ago, and then later I found the 12 inch. Last year I messaged producer Nick Tesco over Twitter and he confirmed that the Lemon Hearts had been a new incarnation of Epic pop hopefuls the Roaring Boys, last heard of in 1985. I may have featured a track or two before, but here's their entire recorded output, at least as far as I know.
Eclectic and idiosyncratic, Richard Hewson's RAH Band flitted around the UK pop scene from the late seventies, enjoying a couple of sizeable hits - including "Clouds Across The Moon", a Top Ten smash which lead to a memorable Top Of The Pops performance including a Logan's Run-inspired 'Intergalactic operator'.
After releasing several singles from the resultant Mystery album, "Sweet Forbidden" was the first of a number of stand alone single releases, and after being dropped from RCA, their follow up album Something About The Music remained unreleased until appearing on iTunes a couple of years ago.
Not everyone's cup of tea, but personally I find it easy to warm to Liz Hewson's delightfully unaffected vocals. The band has a website and a Facebook page.
For quite a long time I thought the Private Lives single, "Where Do I Go", was the earliest by John Adams and the band. Then I read about a year or so ago that "Kick Down The Door" was an earlier single released in the same year under a different name. In my continuing quest* to track down all the John Adams/Private Lives material I've noted the various different styles the man managed to commit to vinyl. Here John and co jump on the Police/pop reggae bandwagon. I believe I now have all the John Adams related singles from 1980 to 1987, so it's about time to put some sort of compilation together. You're welcome.
*like Star Trek, but without any kind of prime directive.
More pop merriment from Big Supremo Barry Flynn. I may have posted these tracks before, but I only just acquired the original vinyl - released just about exactly thirty years ago - so here's a fresh new set. This one actually had the song words printed in No. 1 magazine - but steered clear of the charts. The only Big Supreme single I don't have is "Let's Turn Our Love Around" which I think was the last one.
I wasn't familiar with Lypbox before finding this single listed on eBay recently. It caught my eye looking as it does a bit like the great This Other Eden singles from the late eighties. I'm not sure but they may have been a Cambridge based band, with this their only release.
