arabchanter wrote:

Album 502.
New Gold Dream......................(81,82,83,84)   (1982)













Although Simple Minds had five albums under their belt before New Gold Dream, it's release marked the breakthrough that would ultimately establish them as one of the big rock names in the late 1980's.


"Glittering Prize" and the albums other big single, "Promised You A Miracle," encapsulate Simple Minds ability to craft dazzling and sophisticated pop anthems. Combining a warm romanticism with their blend of new wave pop, the album illustrated just how capable and diverse a songwriting unit Simple Minds was.


The pop-savvy "Promised You A Miracle" and "Glittering prize," along with "Someone, Somewhere in Summertime," indicate collectively why this was the album that broke Simple Minds in America.


 

What an album.
 

Album 501.
Kevin Rowland & Dexy's Midnight Runners...................................Too-Rye- Ay   (1982)













"Too-Rye Ay" for me, was a a bit of a disappointment, coming after an album that I loved to this, more or less a fiddley-diddley tribute band was a step to far for this listener.


In saying that, I don't mind it in context ie in an Irish pub or at a ceilidh you're there voluntary so you gets what you've paid for, and I must admit I've had many a fine night at both. This album had a couple of no' bad numbers, "Jacki Wilson Said (I'm In Heaven When You Smile,) "I'll Show You," and my personal favourite "Let's Make This Precious."


I wont go on about "Come On Eileen" as I said enough about it in the last post about "Dexy's"  ( #1716,) and the more I got to know about Rowland the more I disliked him.  So to sum up didn't particularly like this,but also didn't hate it, it just didn't even warrant a second play, so this album wont be going into my collection.

But weirdly I did like the album cover.




Bits & Bobs;


Have already written before about this mob in post #1716 (if interested)


Dexys Midnight Runners – Too Rye Ay

By the spring of 1982 Dexys Midnight Runners finally seemed to have gone off the rails. Following 1980’s number one, “Geno”, and the incendiary debut album, Searching for The Young Soul Rebels, a couple of relative flops saw a band revolt, an attempted coup and the eventual expulsion of five members.




In an unrelated development, founder member Kevin “Al” Archer departed more amicably to work on some sketchy ideas for his own string-driven things. Undeterred, Kevin Rowland forged a new Dexys, now recast as boxer-boys of soul, and, if anything, they burned with an even greater zeal – as captured on this year’s Projected Passion Revue collection.



But their commercial moment seemed to have passed, and further singles such as “Plan B” failed even to break the top 50. Towards the end of 1981, Rowland heard some of the demos Archer had been working on – featuring a young student fiddle player called Helen O’Hara – and the seeds of Dexys Mark Three had been planted. Word that Rowland intended to replace the brass section with strings inevitably filtered back to members of the band, and Big Jim Paterson and Brian Maurice promptly left.




Nevertheless, recruiting O’Hara, along with the Emerald Express strings, Rowland pressed on. The first fruit of the new soul vision, the “Celtic Soul Brothers”, was released with great expectations in March 1982 – and then fizzled out, ignominiously short of the top 40. “Our stock,” as Rowland says now, “was at an all-time low.”




That Dexys managed to recover from the kind of intrigues more common among feuding political factions than pop groups, and wound up recording one of the biggest selling albums of the year – as well as a single that seems to have transcended its time and place altogether – is one of the great miracles of early ’80s British pop.




Recording in the same studio where the Human League had just finished Dare, watching as ABC, The Associates and even OMD stormed Top of the Pops, Dexys had seemed a band out of time. But in some ways they were just as much a New Pop confection as any of their peers. Rowland would be the first to admit he owed as much to Roxy Music (his weird soul yelp is a descendant of Ferry’s) as he did to Van Morrison; and he understood instinctively that pop was less about plain music than epic theatre, a complete, minutely detailed vision – in this new incarnation, a raggle-taggle world of earnest, proselytising troubadors in threadbare dungarees.




He also did a fine line in meta-pop sloganeering. In the context of the album the stalling “Celtic Soul Brothers” is their Sgt Pepper-style introduction to the concept, with the band chanting “More please… and thank you” like modern day Olivers demanding an extra serving of the thin gruel of pop acclaim, reclaiming their pop stage from the vain pretenders.



The horns blare back in on the delirious “Let’s Make This Precious” – part call and response, part Catholic catechism: “But still we must forsake all to win / (All temptation?) / Everything! / (For salvation?) / Now you’re talking!”. In many ways, Too Ry Aye is one long pep talk, postponing its reckoning amid recriminations (“All in All”, “Liars A to E”), bad memories (“I’ll Show You”, “Old”), inspirational readings (the straight cover of Van’s “Jackie Wilson Said”) and ascetic affirmations (“I’m going to punish my body until I believe in my soul”).




The pay-off is the final track: “Come On Eileen”. Fascinatingly, producer Clive Langer now says that the song was originally called “James, Van and Me” – referring to James Brown, Van Morrison and, of course, Kevin Rowland. And you can imagine that song being a new version of “Geno” – a testament to the inspirational glory of soul, Kevin fixing himself in some new starry trinity.




You can only speculate as to what thunderbolt caused him to take a more secular tack, but by giving into earthly lusts (“my thoughts, I confess, verge on dirty”) and writing an indisputably classic love song, Kevin Rowland finally endeared himself to a mainstream pop audience, saved his band’s career, secured his pop immortality… and seemingly incurred a whole lifetime’s worth of guilt (partly in the belief that he had ripped off Kevin Archer).




“Eileen” was unstoppable: number one in the UK throughout the whole of August 1982, and then again in the US the following spring, ensuring that, after its shaky start, Too Rye Ay was a pop triumph. Yet 25 years later, as an album it feels distinctly patchy. The band sound caught in limbo: between the old disciplined zealotry of ’81 (having left before recording, the horn section were persuaded to return as session musicians, creating a some intensely awkward recordings), the commercial instincts of producers Langer and Winstanley (fresh from minting the music hall pop of Madness), and the new celtic soul vision of Rowland, caught in an infatuated anxiety of influence with Van Morrison, compelled to pursue success, but half-hating himself for doing so. Compare the band on the additional disc here, recorded live in Newcastle in the summer of 1982, with that on Projected Passion Revue and it’s like a Jesuit soul army have been replaced with by a gang of milksops and mercenaries.




Dexys purists are always going to prefer the albums either side: the earnestly questing ‘Searching…’ and the maverick yearning of ‘Don’t Stand Me Down’. But for one or two moments – “Eileen” and “Precious” – Too Rye Ay might convince you that Dexys were at their best when they were at their most impure – their most insecure, most lustful, most ambitious. For better or worse, on every jukebox, at every closing time, at every wedding reception, Kevin Rowland will sing this tune forever.




"The Celtic Soul Brothers"


This song was written by Dexys lead singer Kevin Rowland along with their trombone player Jim Paterson and keyboard man Micky Billingham. The song is about the band, who had Celtic roots (Ireland and Scotland), and a love for Soul music, which they made clear in songs like "Jackie Wilson Said" and "Geno" (about the American singer Geno Washington).


 
The music phrase that dominates this song was inspired by the song "(There's Always Something There to Remind Me)," which was written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. That song became a hit for the British singer Sandie Shaw, but it was originally recorded by an American Soul singer named Lou Johnson, putting it squarely in Dexys' range of influences.



Kevin Rowland said: "We wanted a good rhythm, so we got that. That's a great song. We often do that. We put a song on and we say, 'We want to write something as good as this.' We might use one phrase, but it's not really nicked because the chords are different, so the harmony's different. The harmony of the melody over the chord."


 Too-Rye-Ay was the band's second album, but their first one released in America. In the UK, Dexys had seven Top 40 hits by the time this charted, but in the US, it was just their second single, following their massive hit "Come On Eileen," which rose up the ranks thanks to a video that made hot rotation on MTV.



"The Celtic Soul Brothers" had a video, but it lacked the storyline of "Eileen" and was ignored by MTV. It got little radio support and topped out at #86 on the Hot 100, leaving the band on one-hit-wonder turf in America.


 
In the UK, this was released ahead of "Come On Eileen," but made it to just #45 on the charts. This prompted a change in marketing strategy for the band, who had declined all interviews when Too-Rye-Ay was released, choosing instead to promote the album with full-page ads explaining their reticence to do press and making their case for the album.



When it came time to release "Eileen," the band once again accommodated journalists, resulting in some very contentious interviews with lead singer Kevin Rowland, who turned standoffish and insulting when questioned about his stage antics or raggedy attire. The interviews served their purpose, and "Eileen" became the biggest-selling single of 1982 in the UK. In its wake, "The Celtic Soul Brothers" was re-released, this time making #20.



As the first song off of Too-Rye-Ay, “Celtic Soul Brothers” represents an introduction to a Dexys in transition. Their first album, Searching For the Young Soul Rebels was a massive hit in the UK, presenting a horn-driven, Motown-style white soul sound. During the run-up to Too-Rye-Ay, the band experimented with adding more Celtic traditional influences, inspired by the folk music of their childhoods. The result was a punchy combination of The Temptations and The Chieftains, a “Celtic Soul” fusion.


 Eventually, tensions about the band’s direction would lead to the departure of the TKO Horns, and the Emerald Express strings becoming full members of the ensemble.


"Jackie Wilson Said"


Van Morrison wrote this song and released the original on his 1972 album Saint Dominic's Preview. It's a tribute to Jackie Wilson, a soul singer from Detroit famous for hit songs like "Lonely Teardrops" and "Reet Petite." Wilson died in 1984 at age 49.


 
In what seems to have been a practical joke on the part of the props men, on the famous British Pop show Top of the Pops in 1982, the band were performing this in front of a huge picture of portly Scottish (now sadly departed) darts player Jocky Wilson.


 
Too-Rye-Ay was the band's second album, and at first, Rowland refused to do interviews to promote it as the music press had left him jaded. When the first four singles from the album underperformed, he once again granted interviews, and the fifth single, "Come On Eileen," became the #1 UK hit of 1982.



"Jackie Wilson Said" was the next single issued, which left Rowland to comment on the song and his Soul music influences. "I'm really pissed off with all these Van Morrison comparisons," he told The Face. "I am part Irish but it isn't real Celtic music and it's definitely not folk... we still use a brass section you know! We've just mixed a lot of different influences, including jazz and blues, to create an original sound. It was a very gradual process,I didn't suddenly start listening to Irish records like I did the soul ones before... and there's nothing Irish about our dungarees."



"Come On Eileen"


Written by Dexys lead singer Kevin Rowland, trombone player Jim Paterson and guitarist Al Archer, this song was an enormous hit, going to #1 in America, the UK and Australia.



While the song will fit nicely in an '80s music time capsule, it sounded nothing like the other hits of the era. There are no synthesizers on the song, but there is banjo, accordion, fiddle and saxophone. Rowland explained how the song came together:



"We wanted a good rhythm and we found one. Lots of records we liked had that rhythm: 'Concrete and Clay,' 'It's Not Unusual' by Tom Jones. Lots of records we liked had that 'Bomp ba bomp, bomp ba bomp.' We felt it was a good rhythm. We came up with the chord sequence ourselves and just started singing melodies over it. I remember thinking, 'We're really onto something here.'



I came up with that, 'Too ra loo ra,' and I remember thinking, 'Wow, this is sounding really good.' You get a feeling when you're writing a song. Something happens. And in the end it kind of finished itself."


 
This song is based on a true story. Eileen was a girl that Kevin Rowland grew up with. Their relationship became romantic when the pair were 13, and according to Rowland, it turned sexual a year or two later.



Rowland was raised Catholic and served as an altar boy in church. Sex was a taboo subject, and considered "dirty" - something that fascinated him. When he wrote this song, Rowland was expressing the feelings of that adolescent enjoying his first sexual relationship and dreaming of being free from the strictures of a buttoned-down society:



You in that dress
My thoughts I confess
Verge on dirty



The song describes the thin line between love and lust.


 
Dexys Midnight Runners had no American distribution for their first album, which did very well in the UK and contained a #1 hit called "Geno."



"Come On Eileen" was their first single issued in US, and was the only American hit for the band - "The Celtic Soul Brothers" was served up as a follow-up single, but petered out at #86. Much of the US success for "Eileen" can be attributed to its video, which got constant airplay on MTV and remains one of the most memorable and beloved clips of the era.



Most videos at the time were slick productions featuring impossibly pretty people in unexpected locations, but Dexys' video was delightfully different, with the overall-clad band acting out the love story on a gritty street. Kevin Rowland doing an earnest jig became a defining image of the early MTV era. When we asked him about shooting it, he told us: "It was one day. We started at 6 in the morning, we finished very late at night. It just kind of worked."


 
When this hit #1 in the US, it knocked Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" off the top spot.


 
Dexys Midnight Runners released their first album, Searching for the Young Soul Rebels, in 1980. It contained the #1 UK hit "Geno" and earned the band lots of acclaim in their home country of England.



For their second album Too-Rye-Ay, the group added fiddles and switched to more of an Irish folk sound. Kevin Rowland changed out every member except for Jim Paterson and also updated their image, going from a stylish, rustic Italian look to a ragged, unkempt appearance.



This hillbilly theme was a great complement to their new sound and made for a striking visual. Rowland sold the look by appearing in patched-up denim offstage and insisting that it was not an act. When Smash Hits writer Dave Rimmer broached the subject in 1982, Rowland snapped: "I take deadly serious what I do. It's very important to me to be an individual. I don't care if people laugh. That's what Dexys Midnight Runners is all about: showing your feelings and not giving a damn what other people think."

 

The song leaves an impression with a group vocal breakdown at the end which is followed by an uptempo fiddle part. This fast section was modeled on the Hebrew wedding song "Hava Nagila."


 
This was the biggest-selling single of 1982 in the United Kingdom.


 
In the UK, four songs from the album were issued as singles before "Come On Eileen" was released. The second single, "Show Me," reached #16 but the next one ("Liars A to E") failed to chart and "The Celtic Soul Brothers" topped out at #45. Kevin Rowland had become fed up with the British music press, so in lieu of interview, Dexys took out full-page ads in music magazines explaining their new album and why they refused to talk about it.



Determined to send "Eileen" up the charts, Rowland called off the media blackout and granted some interviews for the purpose of promoting the song. These talks were often contentious, with Rowland sometimes abasing journalists and dismissing any questions he didn't deem worthy of an answer. The press served its purpose, as the song was brought to the attention of the public and rocketed up the charts.


 
Kevin "Al" Archer was a guitarist in the early days of Dexys Midnight Runners. He left the group after their first album. Archer explained why to Mojo magazine July 2009: "Kevin (Rowland) ruled the group with a rod of iron - he wouldn't speak to us personally. After shows we'd be in a room on our own, it became 'hate Kevin Rowland time.' We were in Switzerland, we'd played to 2,000 people, and Kevin and I got on a plane to Luxembourg and the rest got in a van and went to England. That was it. Kevin got me to help form a new group, rehearsing in a freezing industrial unit in Birmingham. He was irritable, treating everyone like they were nobody. I did the (1981 single) "Plan B" demo, Kevin wasn't happy with it. It got too much. We met in the little Nibble caff in Bearwood and I said I was leaving. He never showed any emotion. He got me to go round to Billy (Adams) the new guitarist's house to teach him the new chords. I formed The Blue Ox Babes, and I lent Kevin a tape with three of our songs on including 'What Does Anybody Ever Think About.'"



Shortly afterwards this song became an international hit. Archer was not impressed as Rowland had stolen the build-up of "What Does Anybody Ever Think About" for it and Too-Rye-Aye's whole style and sound was that of The Blue Ox Babes. Rowland later admitted that the sound of Too-Rye-Aye did indeed come from Archer and paid him royalties from the album.


 
The band's name was inspired by the amphetamine drug Dexedrine, which is commonly known as "Dexys" (Contrary to popular belief, the band's name does not have an apostrophe). The band itself steered away from drinking and drugs, saying nothing should interfere with their dedication to music.


 
After this album, group leader Kevin Rowland kept the band going, releasing Don't Stand Me Down in 1985 with a new set of musicians. He started a solo career, but didn't re-form Dexys until the early '00s. Their fourth album, One Day I'm Going to Soar, was finally issued in 2012. "We tried hard to get it done beforehand, but it just wasn't the right time, whether we weren't personally ready or musically ready," Jim Paterson told us. "But then suddenly, it did."


 
The girl representing Eileen in the video was played by Maire Fahey. The actress' sister Siobhan Fahey was a member of Bananarama ("Cruel Summer") and Shakespear's Sister ("Stay").


 
The band was building quite a legend at their live shows when this song took off. Rowland would often slow songs down and do vocal improvisations. When he did it during "Eileen," the crowd would sometimes simply sing over him, preferring a bawdy sing-a-long to a quiescent monologue. It should be noted that these interludes were offset by rousing performances, and that reviews of the shows reveal a good time had by all.


 
Producer Clive Langer recalled to Uncut magazine August 2007: "We recorded it as James, Van and Me - James Brown, Van Morrison, and Kevin. That was the original chorus, singing about people who influenced him to write the song - like he mentions Johnny Ray. And then he came in one day and said I want to change the lyric completely, it's a working lyric. And we actually liked James, Van and Me! Because we'd been working with it and got used to it."



Kevin Rowland added: "It did give me confidence when I wrote 'Come on Eileen.' But you know, when you write something you get confidence momentarily. Clive didn't think it would be a hit! He told me that! He said it wasn't as good as Celtic Soul Brothers. And my manager didn't think it would be a hit. He said he thought it was trying too hard. The record company wanted to release 'Jackie Wilson.' But in the studio we got some things right, and we got that right."
 

Last edited by arabchanter (18/3/2019 2:33 pm)

Album 502.
New Gold Dream......................(81,82,83,84)   (1982)















What a fuckin' album, like I mentioned earlier they had five albums under their belt before this one, and I think this is where they "shook the tree" and the earlier arty stuff sort of withered, while the more mainstream commercial music was evergreen and was the way to go.


I would love to take credit for this line but unfortunately I can't "Bass lines that grab you by the waist and have their way with you," that for me says it all, add Kerr's vocals, and the bliss of the synths and you have a superb album with tracks that have never aged or have lost any of of their shine.



I Would find it almost impossible to pick a favourite track as they are all, in my humbles sublime, and if you've been in Outer Mongolia or the like and haven't heard this, give your ears a treat and listen to this classic album.



This album will be going into my collection.





Bits & Bobs;


Simple Minds took their name from the line "He's so simple minded he can't drive his module" in David Bowie's "The Jean Genie."


 
Frontman Jim Kerr and guitarist Charlie Burchill have known each other since they were eight years old. They are both founder members of Simple Minds and the band's chief songwriters.



 
Jim Kerr married Chrissie Hynde, lead singer of The Pretenders, in 1984 and, following their divorce in 1990, he wed actress Patsy Kensit in 1992. They divorced in 1996.




At the time of their hits "Waterfront" and Promissed You a Miracle", Jim Kerr was still living in a council flat in a Glasgow high-rise.



 
Jim Kerr said about his songwriting partnership with Charlie Burchill.



"Charlie and I can work anywhere. In the old days we'd go to the rehearsal room and knock things around and stuff. Now I can be on the other side of the world, Charlie will send me an MP3, and say, 'I was messing around with this last night.' And I can have something back to him from the other side of the world, and say, 'Actually, it made me think of this kind of melody.' That's happened.



But we still do it the old way, as well. We still get in a room together and he'll say, 'Yeah, I've got these.' Maybe we haven't seen each other for a couple of months. He'll say, 'I've got about a half dozen ideas.' Some of them might be fully formed, others will be a spark. And usually, I'll have a few things in my notebook that will match the atmosphere of what he's been doing."


 
Charlie Burchill's nephew Mark Burchill is a former professional football player who was capped six times for the Scotland national team.




Julie Burchill's Kerr quote "How does Jim Kerr get his cock to be seven inches? Fold it in half"



The Kensit shagged everyone, he was just another notch for her cos Simple minds were big at the time...then she moved on to the next one

Simple Minds: the making of New Gold Dream   As the 80s dawned, Simple Minds were in crisis. But, believing that life was without limits, they recorded the album New Gold Dream. And the dream became reality...
“I remember this high-rise block we were staying in,” Simple Minds singer Jim Kerr says of his Glasgow youth, “and I loved staying in it because you could see the whole world from up there. And it seemed to suggest that there was a whole world out there, and stuff to experience, and stuff to get into. And we couldn’t wait. Mentally and physically, your world either ends at the end of your street or it begins there; your mind ends within you, or you’ve got a mind that wanders.”


 ‘Everything is possible,’ Kerr went on to sing in Promised You A Miracle, the single which epitomised Simple Minds’ unquenchable optimistic spirit and set them up to jostle with U2 for stadium success. Indeed the landmark 1982 album that song first appeared on, New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84), influenced heavily U2’s The Unforgettable Fire, as well as later bands such as the Manic Street Preachers. Now reissued as a lavish box set, New Gold Dream is the point of equilibrium between the cult synth experimenters Simple Minds were and the stadium rockers they became in 1985 after appearing at the Philadelphia leg of Live Aid and having Don’t You (Forget About Me) on the soundtrack to The Breakfast Club.


 But such heights were dauntingly distant as the 80s began. The band’s first Top 30 album, 1979’s Life In A Day, hadn’t been matched commercially by it’s follow-ups on Arista Records: Real To Real Cacophony and Empire And Dance, which, though admired by the rock press for their cinematic, atmospheric strengths, saddled them with a ruinous £140,000 debt, battering morale. It would take a miracle, it seemed, for Kerr and his old friend, guitarist Charlie Burchill, to meet the dreams they’d set out from Glasgow to achieve.


 “One of the greatest things that happened to us was to have the madness to believe, Charlie and I, that we could put something together that people would like,” Kerr says today, talking on the phone from Sicily. “Even in [their 1977 punk band] Johnny And The Self-Abusers we turned up for our first gig and people went mental. Charlie and I also had a hitch-hiking trip round Europe when we were seventeen, and the people we met and the things we did gave us a sense that anything is possible, if you get up and make the move.”


 “Jim and I didn’t panic at Arista,” Burchill confirms. “And really quickly we managed to get [Virgin Records boss] Richard Branson up to Glasgow to listen to demos, and he signed us to Virgin. I never really had time to dwell on the fact that my drummer had left [Brian McGee was replaced by Kenny Hyslop in 1981] and things were not looking too good. Virgin were much more musical, cooler people. We made a really experimental double album, Sons And Fascination/Sister Feelings Call, and they never flinched.”


 Sons And Fascination reached No.11 but its single, The American, stalled outside the Top 40, leaving Simple Minds still without a hit song. But their potential was made clear on a revelatory Australian tour in October 1981, where Love Song hit the Top 10.



 “We got our first gold record down there,” Burchill recalls fondly. “They had these big pubs you could play, with thousands of people. They were really hot and sweaty and quite mad. They felt really charged, and we fed off of that.”


 For Kerr, “the penny dropped then, and we started thinking: maybe we can be pop stars as well. All that positive backdrop led us to the early writing sessions for New Gold Dream.”


 For the next move, 20-year-old Pete Walsh, fresh from making Heaven 17’s hit album Penthouse And Pavement and with a CV as engineer which included Stevie Wonder, was suggested as producer. His work with Burchill remixing Love Song had already impressed the guitarist. Walsh went to see Simple Minds play in Liege, Belgium, and they made an indelible impression.


 “There were four hundred people there, and it was quite goth but really electric,” Walsh remembers. “There was the atmosphere at the gig and also the atmosphere of the music, the way the keyboards and guitars were linked together. Texturally it was very cinematic, and I saw a colour in the sound, as well as the way they looked and the lights they were using. It was very vivid and very moody.”


 Walsh met Kerr in his hotel room after the show. “He struck me as being more elusive than Charlie,” Walsh recalls. “A quieter figure, softly spoken, but very together, and really focused on what he wanted Simple Minds to be. For him it was a family. Foremost was how they got on together and how they enjoyed making the music. And like a family, he was very protective of the people in it and what it stood for. And it was obvious to me that there would be boundaries, that he would be keeping a lid on going too commercial. He was protective of the fact that they had a very unique sound.”


 Kerr and Burchill, who had both just turned 21, seemed sharp, together young men to Walsh, not prone to fucking up. “They were very focused. They were also having a great time. And they weren’t worried in any way. They knew that they were good.”


 The band had returned from Australia at the end of 1981. The 80s until then had been unremittingly grey,with rocketing unemployment at the beginning of Thatcherism reflected in a post-punk indie scene still in Joy Division’s bleak, stark shadow. But as 1982 began, Simple Minds noticed a welcome sea change. Like 1965, when pop seemed to turn the grey country Technicolor, a ‘new pop’ movement turned up the brightness of the music. “If I think about ABC’s Lexicon of Love or New Gold Dream or The Associates, it was colourful music, colourful clothes, colourful everything,” Burchill says. “And when people started using ‘new romantic’ as terminology it all felt vibrant and flamboyant compared to the late seventies.”


 As Walsh watched them in Liege, he began formulating how Simple Minds could benefit. “I taped that gig on my Walkman,” he says. “I wanted to capture that sound that I’d heard, that excitement. I thought their songs were ready-made with hooks and very melodic parts, but obscured by long arrangements. The idea was to cross them over into a more mainstream position. You have to come close to radio’s average sound. And everything on it at the time was vocal-led; Heaven 17, Human League, Spandau Ballet, ABC, Talking Heads, Roxy Music, Bryan Ferry and Grace Jones was what they were listening to – and competing against. And they were listening to bands like Can. Simple Minds sounded like a mixture of a lot of artists, and we were trying to give them their own identity. And ultimately that identity came from Jim. So I felt like Jim had to step up and compete. Which is where Promised You A Miracle came in.”

  “There was a far brighter, more optimistic slant on what we were doing,” Burchill remembers of the music he and keyboard player Mick MacNeil started to write in January 1982 in the band’s default base, rehearsal rooms at Rockfield studios in Monmouthshire, Wales. “Promised You A Miracle was written then, way before the album. We were just looking for a hit. And we heard the beginnings of a new kind of sound. New effects and new amplifiers drastically changed the colour and played a huge part in things back then. The guitars are very distinctive on the whole album that followed, and very different to how I’d played before – cleaner, more melodic, lighter.”



 Kerr’s exultant line ‘Everything is possible’ in Promised You A Miracle described Simple Minds’ mood then. “That’s how the music felt, and the language it brought out in me,” he says. “As soon as the riff for Miracle came up I wrote the lyric, and I think the vocal was on within seconds. Everyone at the record company said: ‘That’s a hit’, based on the song but also our momentum. Sometimes you get a song at the right moment.”  Quickly taped for a Radio 1 Kid Jensen session, Promised You A Miracle was done at The Townhouse studio in West London. “I wanted to make them more understandable,” Walsh says of his blueprint, “but still slightly out of focus, not to bring things out too much. We worked a lot on diction, and getting the hook lines and melodies repetitive and memorable.”

 Released in April 1981, the single finally cracked the UK Top 40 for Simple Minds, peaking at No.13. Even as it climbed the chart the band were in The Old Mill, a church-like former pig farm in Fife, preparing music for what became New Gold Dream.


  Simple Minds relished their belated Top Of The Pops debut. As with their earlier TV appearances, seeing them made a powerful impact on old acquaintances back in Glasgow. “I saw a really good mate recently who I hadn’t seen since those days,” Kerr muses. “And he said: ‘I hadn’t seen you for a couple of years. I knew you were messing about with a band. I was watching the fucking Whistle Test one night and there you were.’ It felt so strange to him. He couldn’t relate to it. There was no one we knew back then in Glasgow that had a record deal, or toured, no source of reference. It was like you’d gone to the moon. In some ways we had.”




 Starting in May 1982, recording the new album began back in The Townhouse. “We’d work from noon until nine or ten and then go out,” Kerr says of their schedule. “Not so much clubbing, but to the great art-house cinemas London had then, where you could go at half-ten and see something obscure, and at least visually it would inspire a lyric. I always loved the German director Werner Herzog, and he had a movie at the time called Fitzcarraldo [about a deranged effort to, among other things, haul a steamship over a mountain in the Amazon basin]. In the film, actor Klaus Kinksi’s anti-hero declares: “It’s only dreamers who ever move mountains.” And that line brought Kerr out of his seat. “I loved the romance of that,” he says. “I loved the madness in it. And that line’s not a kick in the arse away from ‘Everything is possible’.


 Some would see Kinski’s character’s ruinous obsession less positively. But Burchill is on Kerr’s side, neither man into half-measures: “You either believe in the dream,” he says, “or go for the mundane and banal, which is nothing changes, nothing happens.”


  “Me and Charlie were also watching French films like Godard’s Alphaville,” Kerr continues. “That was a huge thing. So was Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz and Jean Cocteau’s movies Fellini, Pasolini. It would all have been European, and giving us a sense of all the great stuff that was out there, even if much of it went over our heads.

  “The books, too, like The Tin Drum and Camus – it wasn’t enough to have a record collection, you needed to have a book collection too. On the way to Australia, Charlie and I decided to get off in India, because we were reading Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. We’d bitten off more than we could chew when we got there! But that’s how much all these things meant to us. Wherever we were, we were living it. And the songs come from everything that you’re taking in. People would give you stuff as well, and it all went into the pot.”


  There were more fruitful discussions when Kerr and Burchill returned to the Columbia in London, an already notorious rock’n’roll watering hole, where the whole band were staying. There they’d find themselves in earnest discussion with the Teardrop Explodes’ Julian Cope, or ABC’s Martin Fry. “Bands from the ‘provinces’ all started staying there,” Kerr explains. “It wasn’t a cool, posey hang-out scene, it was just people were busy, and they were coming back at night and playing you their stuff. We were all kin in that if you went through all our record collections… I’m not sure Martin Fry, say, would have been a fan of Krautrock, but he would have been a fan of Roxy Music. Then you had people like The The’s Matt Johnson, coming in and really sounding wonderful. Melody was a big thing. Everyone seemed to have a great tune. Orange Juice would come down with Rip It Up.”


 Not that it was all cultural exchange and bon mots at the bar. “We had many mad nights at the Columbia. It was well-known for being riotous,” Burchill recalls. “People would end up making their own room service. But you need a gathering place, for stuff to bleed in.”

 

 “There seemed to be more of an accent on… I don’t know if it was fantasy, but it was quite contrary to the Falklands, the later miners’ strike and all of that stuff,” Kerr says of his eager, razor-witted new generation. “[The Associates’] Billy Mackenzie was like a pools winner gone mad, spending all his money. This live-for-the moment thing was starting to be celebrated. Those times got a bad rap because of the yuppie phenomenon, and ‘greed is good’, and sometimes it’s hard to separate stuff. I don’t remember anyone in bands ever talking about money. But everyone wanted to be doing well, wanted the spotlight. I can tell you why we wanted it: because it wasn’t so long ago when we were drowning in debt and looking like we were about to get dropped [from their label], and playing to two men and a dog in Dortmund.”


Back in the studio, Walsh watched the crucial contributions of bassist Derek Forbes and keyboard player Mick MacNeil. “Derek played bass almost like a lead guitar,” he says. “His bass lines on the album were very melodic, very much like Joy Division/New Order. He influenced them in the end. Just looking at him playing was so elegant. It was like he was almost in a trance. And Charlie and Mick were great partners. Mick was an anchor for Charlie to weave in and out of.”


  Also in and out were drummers, as Simple Minds’ drum stool continued to spin. Kenny Hyslop quit after Promised You A Miracle and was replaced by Mike Ogletree. Although Ogletree came up with the odd drum part on New Gold Dream he was felt to be too slow in the studio and soon relegated to percussion. He was replaced by Walsh’s friend Mel Gaynor (still with Simple Minds today). As a humane gesture from Walsh, the two drummers played the song New Gold Dream together, surrounded by a forest of mics.


  Kerr watched the music being recorded from the control room, scribbling in notebooks, then listening back to tapes of it on each morning’s stroll to the studio. “The music sounded fully fledged,” Kerr remembers. “A lot of it was pretty. Even the weather was bloody good. At weekends we played European festivals, and we would come back buoyant from that as well.”


 “It was a great time,” Burchill agrees, “because we were jamming a lot, and Jim would have weird working titles, like Gold or Glittering or Summertime, defining the direction with a word or two. We let the songs develop slowly, but kept them short, and light. Later, when he sang, Jim could be introverted and thoughtful, a bit more gentle.”




 The band relocated to The Manor studios in Oxfordshire for Kerr to complete lyrics and add vocals. Finally, only what became the title track was left to do. “I was meant to sing it one Friday, but I was playing for time,” he remembers. “It can feel very fragile when you walk up to the microphone if you’re not convinced of your idea. I sound-checked in a Swedish festival that Sunday, went back to the hotel, and convinced myself to finish it.”

He added the exhilarating chant from past to future in the chorus, ‘81-82-83-84’, that made it sound like the times belonged to Simple Minds – and their listeners. “It might have been one of those amazing sound-checks – like, fucking glorious,” he says, “and I probably went back feeling: ‘This is the dog’s bollocks, and I’m going to write this as though it’s the dog’s bollocks.’ This is where we are now, this is where we’ve been, and where we’re going.


 “It sounds stupid and pretentious, but to me New Gold Dream sums up the paths that we had gone on on the first four records. Some with really dark moods, some intense, some claustrophobic. And the storm broke, and then the next day you have a beautiful morning. New Gold Dream, the title, the artwork, the language of a lot of the songs, resonates that to me.”

  New Gold Dream still sounds like a classic album. Guitars and synths glisten and glide, retaining the cinematic scope and atmosphere of earlier albums. Although the singles sound anthemic, Kerr murmurs some lines, drawing you into the shadows. Released in September 1982, it reached No.3 in the UK. Promoting it in London, Kerr had to look at the trees in Hyde Park to remind himself which month it was, so fast were things moving.

  He and Burchill have become well-rehearsed at apologising for Simple Minds’ eventually crass stadium years that followed, which lost old fans even as they gained armies more. “I remember even on New Gold Dream we were heavily criticised for sounding over-optimistic,” Burchill says, of an album that lifted your head out of dole queues, to the skies. “We were just feeling that it was all to be had if you really wanted it. And probably that led to hubris, and stadium rock.”

 That may have been responsible for some misguided music. But optimism defines Simple Minds’ two main men, ever since they looked at the crumbling, violent Glasgow in which they grew up and saw only the possibilities on the horizon.



 “I’m standing talking to you just now on a small terrace,” Kerr tells me. “I’m looking at smoke plumes coming out of Mount Etna. I’m still looking at these landscapes and thinking about what’s out there.”






"Promised You a Miracle"



 
After producing five critically acclaimed art-rock albums, Simple Minds decided to adopt a more radio-friendly sound. This was one of the first results and it became their first UK Top 20 hit. This new slick, sophisticated sound caused the band to be lumped together with other bands such as Duran Duran, as part of the New Romantic movement.



 
This is the only Simple Minds studio track recorded with former Slik and Skids drummer Kenny Hyslop. He joined Simple Minds in 1981 but his time with the band was brief.


 
This featured on the soundtrack of the 2005 Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst movie Elizabethtown.



 
The album title New Gold Dream was taken from the headline on a magazine review for the hit art-house movie Fitzcarraldo. Frontman Jim Kerr explained to the Daily Mirror May 23, 2008: "Our previous albums had a darkness. Traveling through Europe at that time there was the Red Brigade in Italy and the neo-Nazis in Germany. We passed through Paris and a bomb had just gone off in a synagogue - it all made a big impression. New Gold Dream was a new dawn."



 
Hyslop did make a large contribution to the band's commercial breakthrough. A devotee of funk radio stations during the 1981 US tour, the drummer told Mojo that he taped one track with a nagging horn riff. Hyslop gave it to keyboardist Mick MacNeil who "ripped it off big time" at the January 1982 writing session in Rockfield that produced this song.





 Third and final single in promotion of “New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84),” originally bore the title “Summer Song”. Had its compact vinyl released in November 1982, two months after the album’s release.


 The well-known studio version produced by Pete Walsh is accompanied by a melodic section of keyboard and bass that catalyzes part of the atmosphere between dream pop and the new romantic. The atmosphere is decorated with Charlie Burchill’s guitar work that strengthens an abstract texture to the song.




"Colours Fly And Catherine Wheel"


 The second track from the band’s sixth album, initially it was the work of two songs, one of them “Arpeggio Song” already containing the melodic base keyboard developed by Mick Macneil and the second entitled “Skyscraper Guitar Riff” was basically Charlie Burchill’s guitar work.


 The lyrics of Kerr don’t have a linear narrative, they work structurally with the music playing images in words to form a kind of scenario.


 The title from Kerr lyrics, refers to Catherine of Alexandria, also known as Saint Catherine of the Wheel, which continues as one of the strong religious images used in the context of album metaphors.




"Promised You A Miracle"


 Besides the softness melancholic contained in the first two tracks, “Promised You a Miracle” with "Glittering Prize" are the only tracks with positive density and euphoric optimismer in "New Gold Dream" They announce a more pop script that the next works of the band would bring, functioning as one of the passages to the mainstream exposure that the band would take some time after. Especially “Promised You A Miracle”, for the lead singer Jim Kerr, was the chance to start this:



And, again, when we’d written it, we thought this is the first pure pop-song we’ve written, and at the same time the ambience around – ABC were coming up with pop, Depeche Mode were coming up with pop, The Associates were making this spooky pop, and we felt we had the chance of having our first hit with Miracle. And, indeed, that was to be the case.


Jim Kerr, Sunday Herald interview, 2008.







 

Enjoyed the above three bands in the 'eighties, but think the Cure's Pornography is the weakest of the trio and one of the poorer Cure albums. 

Too-Rye-Ay is a different kind of gravy though. Ignoring Kevin Rowland being a bad bastard and simply based on the music, the influences for which he stole, I enjoyed every track on that album then and now,even although Rowland comes over as a bit pretentious with the strained lyrics.

That was Maire Fahey (Siobhan's sister) in the video for 'Come On Eileen' too, which boosted the appeal. 

I was just playing the New Gold Dream album recently on my birthday present record player. Great bass from Derek Forbes too, he was a sad loss to the sound when inexplicably sacked a couple of years later.

What I can recall at the height of their world fame, which this album triggered, were some shit rumours emanating from (who else) Rangers supporters that Simple Minds were channelling money to the IRA. This because Jim Kerr was a known Celtic fan.

This was at the same time as the Ibrox mobs were boycotting McDonalds which was under the same suspicions....because in the USA deductions were made on employees payslips for 'IRA'. So it must have been going to Noraid in the limited world of the bigot. Of course, IRA means Individual Retirement Accounts in the US, and McDonalds were contributing towards the superannuation of their employees......

A bit off topic there, but this is a thread on a football forum about music.

Album 504.
Donald Fagen...............................The Nightfly   (1982)













Released in 1982, The Nightfly refers to Fagen’s “cautiously optimistic” childhood in suburbia during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Fallout shelters and rampant optimism of the era are tentpoles of this album.

Although not a Dundonian, I love seeing these old adverts, especially the band listings in the final one, a/c.

Album 503.
Madness...........................The Rise And Fall   (1982)














Madness for me have always been a "singles" band and also a proper good day out in concert, absolutely brilliant in concert, but as an album band I cant really sit down and do a whole album, even the greatest hits would be too much "nutty boys" for this listener, I'd probably skip through that as well, but obviously stopping to pay homage to "The Prince" by a mile my favourite Madness song.



Anyways "The Rise And Fall," this was a departure from the nutty boys theme that had served them so well (and still does) to a more rich lavishly produced album with over elaborate arrangements in my humbles. The brass had moved away from ska influences and now sounded more big band. The album has been touted in some quarters as Madness's "The Kinks Are The Village Green Society," absolute poppycock, the clever insightful writing of Ray Davies should never be compared to this.


This album was pretty poor and for me just trying to hard to be different, the singles "Our House," and "Tomorrows Just Another Day"  were the only nuggets for this listener, it seemed like they thought if they threw everything they could into it, people would see them in a different light, hopefully they realised that they already had all the light they needed as "the nutty boys," and god bless them.


This album wont be going in my collection.





Bits & Bobs;



Originally named The Invaders, they changed to Madness in 1979.


 
Their debut album, One Step Beyond (1979), stayed on the UK charts for 78 weeks, peaking at #2.


 
The band starred in a 1981 movie, Take It or Leave It, that portrayed their own rise to fame.


 
Formed their own label, Zarjazz, in 1984.


 
They broke up in 1986, but re-formed as a four-piece band in 1988 with the name The Madness.


 
The 1992 UK-only compilation album Divine Madness reached #1 in that country.


 
The original members all reunited in 1992 to play two open air venues in London known as "Madstock."


 
They released their first studio album in 14 years in 1999.


 
Another early name of the band's: Morris and the Minors.


 
They got the name Madness because that was their favorite song by Jamaican ska and reggae master Prince Buster.


 
They were dropped by Sire Records in the United States after their second album in 1980. They didn't have any American label representative for two years.


 
The Madness, from the late 1980's, the band was augmented by keyboardists Steve Nieve, Jerry Dammers, and bassist Bruce Thomas. Dammers was from the Specials. Nieve and Thomas were in the Attractions.


 
They influenced several ska bands of the 1990s, including No Doubt, Mighty Mighty Bosstones, and Reel Big Fish.


 
One of the most successful UK bands in the 1980s, Madness spent 214 weeks on the UK Singles Chart during the decade.


 
A musical based on Madness songs, Our House, opened at the Cambridge Theatre in London on October 28 2002. It ran to 16 August 2003 with Suggs playing for a period of time the central character's father. The production won an Olivier Award for best new musical of 2003.


 
Frontman Suggs real name is Graham McPherson. The band hand-picked his performing moniker at random from his mother’s encyclopedia of jazz musicians (Peter Suggs) after people made fun of his Scottish surname.


Review: Madness – The Rise & Fall
 
 By long player number four, Madness were still following their album a year form. Somehow between the constant grind of touring and promotion, they managed to find time to record their most adventurous outing yet. Originally conceived as a concept album based on the band members’ childhood, ‘The Rise & Fall’ presented a bleak document of bittersweet nostalgia.

 The highlights, as with previous albums, include the singles. Strange though, that ‘Tomorrow’s (Just Another Day)’ was such a success given that its consistently depressing lyrics (“It’s down and down there is no up”) were based on Chas Smash’s experiences behind bars. Then of course there’s ‘Our House’. It’s a testament to the enduring quality of the song that it still retains its charm after the countless times it’s been played on commercial radio. Amongst other tracks, ‘Primrose Hill’ features the prettiest of piano melodies and a brass band segment. Meanwhile, ‘Blue Skinned Beast’ attacks Thatcher’s handling of The Falklands War and ‘New Delhi’ takes on Eastern influences before it became fashionable.



 ‘The Rise & Fall’ is arguably Madness at their most articulate yet but falls a few songs short of its predecessor’s consistent excellence. That said, Madness deserve great credit for experimenting with their sound when they could have sold records by the bucketload, by sticking to their tried and tested Ska formula.



In 1979 they made their first appearance on Top of the Pops performing their first single “The Prince"


Their debut album “One Step Beyond…” peaked at number 2 in the UK and stayed in the charts for 78 weeks, it featured hits such as: The Prince, One Step Beyond and My Girl.


They have released 36 singles, sixteen of which went top 10 and twenty two went top 20.


 
Frontman “Suggs” and Drummer “Woody” are avid Chelsea Football Club supporters, Suggs wrote and performed the song “Blue Day” as Chelsea FC’s official song for the 1997 FA Cup Final and Woody has made appearances on Chelsea TV. 
One Step Beyond is now played when Chelsea win against big opponents at their home stadium, Stamford Bridge.



Madness have won multiple awards including two Ivor Novello awards for Best Song with “Our House” and Outstanding Song Collection.



"Our House"


This won the Best Song award at the 1983 Ivor Novello Awards.


 
This was Madness' only Top 10 hit in the US. Much of the song's success in America was down to its witty music video that went down well during the early days of MTV.


 
This was played in a 2007 TV commercial shown in the UK for Bird's Eye Fish Fingers, which featured Suggs. In the advert the Madness frontman is sitting with a family at tea time. The daughter is studying for her school exams and asks Suggs where Omega 3 can be found. He offers the answer of Birds Eye Fish Fingers.


 
The song's video featured the band as a cloth-cap wearing family squashed into a terraced house. Drummer Dan "Woody" Woodgate recalled to Q Magazine August 2008: "The knocking-on-the-door bit where somebody comes out, goes, 'Where are they?' and the others sneak in and close the door… That's The Flintstones. We stole lots of ideas from the Keystone Kops and Benny Hill."


 
Frontman Suggs recalled to The Daily Mirror September 18, 2009:"This was the first time we worked with the string arranger David Bedford. It was clear to him what our records needed and he did great things for us. It's strange now to think we were so philosophical about such everyday things."


 

Here's an interview I found QI;



Madness: ‘We dressed as coppers and raided the Clash. They didn’t speak to us for five years


Suggs and co have battled through knife (and fork) fights, fascist fans and being banned from TOTP (four times). Is their 12th album further proof the Nutty Boys have survived ‘Rod Stewart syndrome’? 



 Thu 27 Oct 2016 15.08 BST Last modified on Mon 3 Dec 2018 15.24 GMT



 


Mike Barson, Suggs, Mark Bedford, Dan Woodgate, Lee Thompson (AKA Kix) and an absent Chrissy Boy (played here by a doll). Photograph: Rob Greig for the Guardian


We’re sitting outside a pub in Camden Town, north London, watching the world go by. This is Madness’s old stamping ground. Forty years on, it’s still their stamping ground. The man who just passed, says singer Suggs (Graham McPherson), is the richest fella in Camden. A couple of hundred yards away is The Dublin Castle, the Irish pub where Madness were given their first residency. You’ve got to watch the world, says saxophonist Kix (AKA El Thommo, AKA Lee Thompson), drink it all in. If you aren’t watching, he says, you might as well call it a day.



 Which is what Madness did for six years from 1986 to 1992. The fun had gone for pop’s most fun band. The self-proclaimed Nutty Boys had spent years bringing smiles back to the upper regions of the charts – Our House, It Must Be Love, Baggy Trousers, House of Fun, My Girl, Ebarrassment, and so many more. Like the Kinks before them, they chronicled London, but their version was less lyrical; more singalong, more laddy. It was music at its most infectious.


 Now Madness are back with Can't Touch Us Now, their 12th album. The tunes haven’t changed much over the decades, but there is a new depth to their storytelling. Here are wonderful character vignettes, about Mr Apples, (devout by day, whorer by night) and Pam the Hawk (London’s most skilled tramp, who pisses her earnings away on fruit machines).


 I’m hoping to meet all six of Madness in the pub, but their publicist says that will be impossible. Why? Well, it’s hard to get them all together at any one time, he says. Which is true. But it turns out there is another, more important reason. You won’t be able to cope with them all, he says. In the end, we settle on Suggs and Kix. It turns out the publicist was right. Just the two are a handful.


 Madness were every bit as nutty as they made out. Kix had done time in borstal for stealing cars; Suggs was an aspiring football hooligan. There was nothing special about that back then, Suggs says – they were all hoolies. “Everybody from the estate I grew up on went to the football, and you ran around shouting at people and booting people up the arse. We were all prone to behaving badly.”  Kix doesn’t like to think what would have become of him if he hadn’t found Madness. He talks of an old friend from the criminal fraternity who recently died. “There was only two people at the church. His son and his brother. They couldn’t bury him for four or five weeks because they couldn’t afford the coffin. Very sad. Real sad.”


 “More so for Kix but, for all of us, that band was a saviour from getting stuck in the world that had been preordained,” Suggs says. He pauses. “Pre-whatever-it’s-called.”


 Suggs is a big lad these days, with imposing gnashers and a hint of James Bond’s Jaws about him. Kix looks like the kind of wheeler-dealer you would have second thoughts about returning soiled goods to. They are smoking liquorice-flavoured rollies and supping on half-pints of lager while reminiscing about their pre-Madness days.



 “Peter O'Tooles’s daughter would have a house party in Hampstead and they’d be away and there’d be 150 people in the house for a weekend,” Suggs says.

 Wow, I say, how come you were invited to such posh parties?

 “We didn’t get invited, no!” they say simultaneously, and start giggling.

 “We invited ourselves and sometimes left with an odd record or two,” Kix says. “A suitcase appeared out of the window with a knotted sheet.”


 A police car passes with its siren blaring. “They’ll never sell ice-cream at that speed,” Kix says. And they’re in fits again.


 They were funny old days, they say – rough, too. Mods, rockers, Teddy boys, all spoiling for a fight, and hapless hippies caught in between. They had a pal with long hair and opinions who had cause to regret both. “He turned up at a Bazooka Joe gig. Adam Ant was the bass player, and [Madness keyboard player] Mike Barson’s elder brother was the singer. They were the band the Sex Pistols supported in the first-ever gig they did at Central St Martin’s. That’s the history of that,” Suggs says, who does pride himself on being a bit of a social historian.


 Kix: “Anyway, our mate with the hair had a disagreement about something and he took a chain over the head.”

 Suggs: “They were the days ... bicycle chains.”

 Kix: ‘“Bicycle chains, yeah.”

 At times, they sound like a Derek and Clive sketch.

 What happened to their mate?

 Kix: “He ended up getting several stitches in his head and shaved his head from that day on.”

 Suggs: “Legend has it that’s why we all got short hair at that time, when it wasn’t fashionable.” Though, to be fair, he says, he can’t remember.


 Madness formed as the North London Invaders in 1976, and by 1979 they were making hits. The all-white band playing black music attracted a racist following in the early days. “It was very tough for us,” Suggs says. “No one can know what we went through, seeing a thousand people sieg heiling. We’d jump in the audience to try to put people off, but there came a point where it was overwhelming. It was fucking everybody, and you’d see the NF geezers at the back organising these skinheads. You’d see people you knew with a swastika tattooed the wrong way round on their forehead. I don’t think they even knew what the fuck they were on about. We got the credit for it, but they were doing it at Specials concerts, too. It was all over the place for a bit.”


 Suggs says Madness took the blame because, in one interview, one member had said he didn’t mind who came to the gigs so long as people had fun. “The headline comes out that we don’t care who comes to our gigs, with the implication that we were encouraging racist skinheads, which we certainly weren’t. All we could do in interviews is say, ‘We don’t like it,’ and continue to make music of black origin.” He grins. “We weren’t the brightest sparks.”


 Apart from that, they say, those were wonderful days. “It was a bunch of fellas just having a whole lot of fun,” Kix says. Music seems so much more manufactured these days, he adds.


 “Chrissie Hynde said that London in the 1970s was made for musicians; transport was cheap, you could go on the dole, you could squat,” Suggs says. “Nowadays, you can’t even find somewhere to rehearse unless your mummy and daddy can pay for you. All the arts are just fucking old Etonians and that is a big problem. And it’s boring. Where are the urchins? We certainly wouldn’t be sitting here now.”


 Madness were a constant presence on Top of the Pops back then. They would get to Television Centre early and pass the day boozing.


 “We got to know the commissionaire at the BBC bar, an old Irish geezer who would let us in because he liked us. And we’d have eight hours in the fuckin’ bar,” Kix says.


 “By the time we went down to the set, we were off our crackers,” Suggs says. “D’you know we got banned from Top of the Pops four times?”


 He starts counting on his fingers. “Well, there was the time our saxophonist turned up with a T-shirt that said, ‘I need the BBC,’ and he pulled it off and the one beneath said, ‘like a hole in the fuckin’ head’. Another time we got banned because one member whose brother was in prison pulled out a card that said: ‘Hello, prisoner number B46244’ or whatever. It was: “Cut! CUT!” Deadly silence. And the producer, Michael Hurll, pointed at your main man and said, ‘You’re an embarrassment to yourself, an embarrassment to the BBC’, and I’m sure he said, ‘You’re an embarrassment to the Queen’, at the end.”


 And then there was the time, 10 minutes before the show went on air, that they deliberately stopped the lift they were sharing with a group of dancers by jumping up and down. “There were 10 of us in there,” Kix says. “They had big fur coats on and, if you opened the fur coat, there was all the tackle on underneath. There was a lot of rubbing going on, a lot of jumping up and down. I was full of beans. I was in a lift with a load of furry things, and I just couldn’t help myself. The fire service had to rescue us.”


 Suggs snorts so much at the memory that his beer goes down the wrong way. “Don’t choke on that, Suggs,” Kix says. “It’s coming out of your nose.”


 Any excuse they had to dress up, they did. “The costumes got more bizarre and extreme,” Suggs says, “and one day our saxophonist turned up as an exploding traffic warden. Hehehehe! Hoohoohoo!”


 “One time we got our hands on authentic coppers’ uniforms,” Kix says. “Now, can you imagine the fun we had out on the streets in them, truncheons and everything? When we discovered the Clash were rehearsing around the corner … ‘Nobody move! It’s the police!’ Two of them run in the toilet. Just the sound of doors slamming and toilets flushing. They never spoke to us for five years. It must have been good gear, eh? The fun we had.”


 Why did they split up? “Medical reasons,” Suggs says. “We were sick of each other. We got pissed off with each other all the time. I mean Chris and Kix nearly killed each other.” Guitarist Chrissy Boy Foreman attacked Kix with a knife and fork. Another time, Chrissy Boy came at him with two bottles. “If it had been Jack Daniels bottles, I wouldn’t have minded, but he’s come in with two Perrier bottles. I thought: ‘Chris, what you going to do with those?’ Then we ended up hugging a couple of hours later. As you do.”


 “Yeah, the odd blow has been thrown,” Suggs says, “but not many, considering.”


 After the band split up in 1986, they fell on hard times. “We all got a bit potless,” Suggs says. But you became a successful television presenter, I say. Yes, for a while, he explains, but then he blew it. “I won three awards at the Royal Television Society, I got on the stage and said: ‘You can stick television up your arse.’ Needless to say, I was only joking, but I never worked again. It’s true – never got another job again. They don’t forget that stuff.”


 In the 90s, Madness reformed but, creatively, it was a sterile period. “We were tempted into the black hole of 80s nostalgia,” Suggs says.


 “It was like dancing on the spot,” Kix says. “Doing the same thing over and over.” It solved their money problems, but little else. They talk about artists who go on for ever, reheating the same old classics. “They call it Rod Stewart syndrome,” Suggs says, “If you’re just sitting on artificial grass next to your swimming pool in LA, there’s not much to fuckin’ write about, is there?”


 Madness did not have Los Angeles homes, but they had their own homegrown version of Rod Stewart syndrome. They had stopped observing life. If they were to produce something worthwhile, they realised they had to take a fresh look at the world. The result was the 2009 concept album The Liberty of Norton Folgate, which is as rooted in historical London as Peter Ackroyd at his finest.


 After a disappointing followup album, the band are back to their observational best with Can’t Touch Us Now. As soon as you hear the songs, you want to know more about the characters who inspired them. Who’s Mr Apples? “If I said Keith Vaz, we wouldn’t be a million miles away, but it isn’t him. It’s an old, old story – the judge with the suspenders on and all that,” Suggs says. “I only mention Vaz because it must be very exhausting spending your whole day at a committee talking about the rights and wrongs of prostitution and your whole night doing the research.”


 The gorgeous Pam the Hawk was written about Soho’s most successful tramp, Suggs says. “She was a friend of my mum’s. She used to earn about £200 a day, but it all went on the bookies and fruit machines. She just had this incredible knack of getting money off people. She used to give you that toothless smile and she’d go to give you a hug, and you’d give her a pound not to get a fuckin’ hug, you know what I mean?”


 The most poignant song, Blackbird, is a tribute to Amy Winehouse. “Three or four days before she died, I saw her walking down Dean Street with a guitar over her shoulder. She said: ‘All right, nutty boy?’ as she walked past,” Suggs says. “It made me laugh because I’m 55 fucking years old, but it’s such a Winehouse thing to say. ‘All right, nutty boy?’ It really got me. What a sad thing.”


 And, for once, the banter stops. Suggs stares across the street and you can almost see the memories revisiting. This place, this town, this city, has provided such inspiration down the decades. He talks about some of the amazing residents he has met from Arlington House, a local hostel for the homeless. “The fella in an undertaker’s outfit, the fella dressed as a sailor, full of stories. The main thing is to be able to sit here like this and chat and watch. If you’re on a bus just travelling around the world, you don’t get that. This is where you get the inspiration.”


 And, with that, the boys empty their glasses, dump their rollies and set off down the streets of Camden Town to continue their 40-year odyssey. 





 

Album 506.
Kate Bush.........................The Dreaming   (1982)











The Dreaming is Bush’s fourth studio album. The album peaked at no 3. on the UK chart and did not sell as well as Bush’s previous albums. The album also had less positive initial critical reception, with praise coming in the decades after the release of the album.

I quite liked Haircut 100's singles when the were issued, and eventually bought the CD Pelican West in Australia 2003: came home with a pile of CDs as they were so cheap there compared to the UK.

Haircut 100 were a really cheery sounding band, easy to enjoy....... probably too twee for some right enough.

Album 506.
Kate Bush.........................The Dreaming   (1982)












Every time I think about or hear Kate Bush it takes me straight back a pub I used to drink in in London, it most have been the early eighties as "Babooshka" was in the charts, there was this Eastern European woman in hearly thirties although it was quite difficult to tell as I think her age must have equalled her weight.


She really was a big girl, "not a pound hanging the right way," she unfortunately had a thing for brightly coloured spandex and tight fitting, figure hugging clothes, it really done her no favours at all, it looked at times as if she had 3 or 4 bellies, she was the type of girl you would have to "roll in flour to find the damp patch" in fact one local said he "asked her to fart," so he could have a clue in which general direction he should take on his bold mission.


The locals had nicknamed her "Babushka" many years before the song came out, but when it did it was played a lot on the juke box, as she used to dance and spin around (she was surprisingly nimble and light on her feet for someone as big as she was) and all the pub used to join in the chorus and around lousing out time, they all used to dance with her, she was always good for a laugh, and I think she knew the locals were laughing with her rather than at her, as everyone loved her.



So that's what I think about when I hear Kate Bush, so to the album, I didn't like it at all, not one track would I willingly want to hear again, I think it's her voice in it's many manifestations that I can't abide, for me it's screeching and howling, many artists like to mix it up on their albums, but I find she doesn't just do like most others, track to track, no she does it verse to verse, I found myself almost liking a song then off she'd go on a tangent, sometimes it sounded as if she was "speaking in tongues." This is just my take, many others might like her,but I couldn't listen to a whole album of hers if this is indicative of her work.


This album wont be going into my collection (but thanks for the memories)



Now this I can listen to;





https://youtu.be/PJbjAwvRWLs

I don't think the youtube link is working?

It's Alan Partridge on comic relief singing Kate Bush songs, pretty funny in my humbles.




Bits & Bobs;


Born in Southeast London, Kate grew up in a family immersed in music, art and literature. She learned to play violin at age 11 but didn't like it; she began to set her poems to her own chord formulations.


 
She started playing the piano a lot by age 12 to accompany her brother Paddy's fiddle playing and to generally let out her frustrations. By age 13 she had written many songs, some of which would later appear on her first 2 records.


 
At age 14 Ricky Hopper,a family friend with connections to the music business, took her tape of 30 songs to all major record companies, with no success (her music was deemed to be too morbid and uncommercial). Kate seriously considered a career in psychiatry or social work, while Hopper took the tape to an old friend from Cambridge University, David Gilmour of Pink Floyd. Gilmour was impressed, and by age 15 Kate was recording demos in Gilmour's home studio. Again there is no interest from the record companies. Refusing to give up, Gilmour put up the money for a 3 song demo done to full professional standards. This did the trick and EMI signed her a short while later. In an unusual move, EMI paid Kate to take a series of lessons to improve her already inventive songwriting as well as singing and dancing. Finally in 1978 "Wuthering Heights" was released and went straight to #1 in the UK. This made her an overnight sensation and sent her subsequent album, The Kick Inside, to #3, selling over 1 million copies in the UK.


 When "Wuthering Heights" rose to #1 in 1978, Kate Bush became the first female to top the UK charts with a self-composed song.


 
Kate Bush became the first female artist to have eight albums in the UK Top 40 simultaneously in the week following the start of her 2014 comeback live shows in London.




Kate Bush was the first woman to have a UK Number One with a self-written song; also, her 1980 album ‘Never For Ever’ made her the first British solo female artist to top the UK album charts, and the first female artist ever to enter the album chart at Number One. Given that all this was attained when reaching the summit of the charts was the musical equivalent of climbing Everest, that’s a quite staggering achievement.




Kate’s work has found favour in some far-flung corners of the music industry. For instance, Andre 3000 adores the music of Kate Bush. “Kate Bush’s music opened my mind up,” the dandyish Outkast member once gushed. “She was so bugged-out, man, but I felt her. She’s so fuckin’ dope, so underrated and so off the radar.” John Lydon is similarly enraptured by the Bexleyheath-born songstress. “Kate Bush is a true original,” the former Sex Pistol once said. “It’s not nice that she’s been imitated [by artists like] Torrid Aimless, sorry, Tori Amos.” Ouch!  Indeed, Lydon went as far as to write a song for Kate in the form of a little number entitled ‘Bird In Hand’. The lyrics concerned - but of course! - the illegal exportation of parrots from South America. “I don’t think she understood it,” he said back in 2007. “I think she thought it was a reference to her, which it certainly wasn’t!”




In 1979 Kate carried out The Tour Of Life, a twenty-eight-date trek around the UK. It might as well have been called The Only Tour Of Her Life, as Kate has not toured since. 
In a stunningly premature move, the NME featured Kate Bush in a ‘Where Are They Now?’ article in August 1985. By the end of the year, her album ‘Hounds Of Love’ - generally regarded as her masterpiece - had reached Number One in the UK album charts. 
Kate once politely declined a request by Erasure to produce one of their albums. “We got to meet her and everything but she didn’t feel that that was her area,” Vince Clarke admitted. “It would have been great if she could have done it but that’s just the way it goes.” Is Clash alone in thinking that this doomed collaboration had the potential for amazingness?



She shares a birthday with Emily Brontë. Kate’s debut single, ‘Wuthering Heights’, is, of course, based on Brontë’s novel of the same name. Uncanny, isn’t it?




There was a twelve-year gap between Kate’s 1993 album ‘The Red Shoes’ and her next full-length release, ‘Aerial’. Kate’s epic silence generated a feverish level of expectancy - it even inspired a novel, John Mendelssohn’s Waiting For Kate Bush, which concerned the inhabitants of a boarding house in which a group of obsessive Kate fans whiled away the time while awaiting their heroine’s return to public view. One of its characters is a Bush obsessive who sent the singer two thousand unanswered e-mails. 



Kate’s prolonged absence from the fold gave rise to a number of rumours. Perhaps the sweetest of these - literally as well as figuratively - was a story about a visit of some EMI executives to Kate’s country retreat. It’s claimed that the singer boldly announced, “Here’s what I’ve been working on,” before producing some cakes from her oven. In a 2005 interview, however, Kate denied this ever happened. “I don’t know where that came from. I thought that was quite funny actually. It presents me as this homely creature, which is all right, isn’t it?” 



It seems that Kate has never had a problem with seeming homely. In 1980 Bush appeared on Delia Smith’s cookery show. Footage of this appearance is available on YouTube. It is very 1980. Kate talks about being a vegetarian (“One day I had a stew and there was a bit of meat in the stew and it was so raw that I just identified immediately that this was an animal and I just thought, ‘No, I’m not into this’”) and shows off some of her favourite dishes.


One of Kate’s featured dishes is a Waldorf Salad. “I notice you’ve left the skins on the apples and I like that,” says Delia. “Yes, there’s so much natural goodness in the skins,” notes Kate, sagely. Kate’s comments on nuts are similarly insightful: “There are things that I think people miss out on because they think there’s a very select area where you use nuts but I think you can use them in anything.” “I agree,” said Delia. 



Although EMI treated the young Kate Bush sensitively (the teenage Kate spent the first two years of her contract receiving funded dance classes in preparation for the limelight), they didn’t fail to capitalise on her good looks during early promotional campaigns. One particularly striking photo featured Bush in a tight pink vest. It’s a fair bet that many teenage boys (and some girls, too), er, ‘enjoyed’ the photo at various points during the late Seventies.


At the 2001 Q Awards - at which Kate was awarded the Classic Songwriter award - one male attendee was apparently led to state, “There’s not a man over forty here who can look at Kate Bush in the eye!” 



“I’ve just come!” Those were the words uttered excitedly by Kate when accepting her Q Award.



A review;



'This house is full of m-m-my mess'



Kate Bush may not be the first artist to leap to mind when thinking in terms of the Unsung. As a unique and pioneering solo female talent Bush has become well-established as a widely valued eccentric in mainstream, popular music. However, of all her albums ‘The Dreaming’ is the least loved by critics and public alike; generally written off in overviews of her work as an impenetrable mess of experimentation and self-indulgence. This received wisdom needs debunking. ‘The Dreaming’ is an important work which spans the divide between her earlier piano and vocal dominated albums and the denser, electronic and ethnic eclecticism of the albums which would follow. Unlike the unity of each of the vinyl sides of the following ‘Hounds Of Love’ album, this album is made up of individual tales confined to their own tracks. ‘Pull Out the Pin’ sounds like a massively condensed precursor to ‘The Ninth Wave’ which would expand to fill the second side of ‘The Hounds Of Love’; ‘There Goes A Tenner’ tells the tale of a botched bank heist, which in lesser hands would have filled 20 minutes of a concept album. This is a ten-sided album with hardly a breath between each side.




'This house is full of m-m-mistakes'


Yes, this album has contributions from Rolf Harris and Percy Edwards. So what? They’re perfect in this context. Why have so many people got hung up on the fact these people appear on the record? Perhaps music journalists over-awed by the sheer ambition of the album could do little but gawp and laugh at that which they could not assimilate. But Kate knows she’s not going to produce anything of artistic value without taking risks, which includes risking ridicule, and she certainly does that on this album. Often songs teeter on the verge of collapsing under the weight of the experimentation she explores, but to my ears she succeeds in mixing a palette which is unique (and notably became massively influential subsequently), and applies it with great concentration and density, but magically just avoids over-crowding and overloading the songs impasto.




'This house is full of m-m-madness'



Kate has often been quoted calling this recording her ‘mad album’, generally as some kind of journalistic justification for writing it off as a weird aberration. Why? Art embraces the insane all the time to push the limits of the audience. Without this dimension art would become just more bland pedestrian balm, and there’s always been more than enough of that around, indeed at times there is so much of it (such as in 1982 when this album was released) that it’s enough to drive anyone who thinks vaguely radically to the edge of insanity in order to make people simply feel SOMEthing. John Balance of Coil, no stranger to madness himself, once said: “I've got notebooks, this was about the time of The Dreaming, I'd write ideas for songs down and then when I heard The Dreaming they'd all be on the album. I think that possibly some kind of parallel psychic space is being carved up there.”* Or as Kate puts it in the backwards masked part at the end of ‘Leave It Open’: “We let the weirdness in.”




On this album Kate’s voices are more manifold than ever before or since. Perhaps this is one of the reasons people find this album hard to penetrate. ‘The Dreaming’ includes most of Kate’s best acting on record. Within each song Kate uses several multi-layered vocal techniques (the voice truly as instrument), sometimes heavily electronically treated, to express different emotional or narrative perspectives, which permit little access to who Kate Bush actually is and create a moment-form effect that’s positively schizophrenic: ‘That girl in the mirror / Between you and me / She don’t stand a chance of / Getting anywhere at all.’




'This house is full of, full of, full of, full of fight'



‘The Dreaming’ is the sound of Kate striking out. Fighting for her own artistic integrity in a sea of pop banalities. The opening track ‘Sat In Your Lap’ steps into the ring with flailing rhythm section punches, establishing Kate’s intention with its Faustian pact lyricism, and uncompromisingly strange instrumentation. She is greedy to push boundaries and gain enlightenment and knowledge by stepping over a threshold of normality into an unfamiliar landscape. Kate uses Fairlight sampling, sound effects galore, spoken voices, traditional and ethnic musics, backwards masking, unusual time-signatures and changes, and all manner of unlikely instrumentation. The more conventional instrumentation is often processed massively. Just when the listener thinks they are in more familiar Bush territory they can be left hanging in mid air (the choirboy sections of ‘All The Love’, the chamber orchestrated bridge in ‘Houdini’) or suddenly swept up by an Irish jig (Night Of The Swallow). If there is one over-riding lyrical impression it is of entrapment, incarceration, restriction and the accompanying yearning to escape and taste independence and freedom. The album cover and its allusion to the song ‘Houdini’ make this explicit. This is the source of the fight and passion in the album, culminating in the final song ‘Get Out Of My House’ which has to be one of the most passionate and intense songs in Bush’s catalogue. This is the sonic approximation of a furious psychic battle, with allusions to sorcery and exorcism. It sounds like she is destroying her voice as she sings most of the lyrics with a barking and spitting delivery, and repeatedly screams the title, then she leads a chorus of braying donkey impersonations by way of a closing gesture. This album may make some listeners laugh as they take its ambition as a gall to their sensibilities, but all great art polarises opinion anyway. And Kate Bush really meant it. Really.



"Sat In Your Lap"

This song is about the kind of people who want to have knowledge but can't be bothered to do the things they should in order to get it. It implies that the more you know, the more ignorant you realize you are; when you get over one wall, you will find an even bigger one.

 

The Dreaming was Bush's first album as a solo producer, allowing her to experiment musically in areas that were new to her


 
The video for this song was intentionally made to be comical rather than serious. It contained images indicating lack of knowledge such as dunces and jesters.



"There Goes A Tenner"



This song is about some small-time thieves who find themselves suddenly involved in a large robbery. When the time comes to actually do it they start to really freak out and paranoia takes over.



"Pull Out The Pin"

This track was inspired by a TV documentary Bush saw about the Vietnam war, which viewed the conflict from a Viet Cong perspective. She recalled to Keyboard (July 1985): "There was this fantastic TV documentary about a cameraman who was on the front lines. He was a brilliant cameraman and he was so well-trained a technician that he kept filming things no matter how he was feeling about it at the time. Some of the stuff he was shooting was really disturbing. Some of these Vietnamese guys would just come in and they were sort of dying in mid-air. And he'd just keep on filming."


 
Bush's viewing of the documentary stimulated an act of sonic visualization in the studio. "We sat in front of the speakers trying to focus on the picture - a green forest, humid and pulsating with life," she recalled. "We are looking at the Americans from the Vietnamese point of view and almost like a camera we start in wide shot."



"Right in the distance you can see the trees moving, smoke and sounds drifting our way,... sounds like a radio," Bush continued. "Closer in with the camera and you can catch glimpses of their pink skin. We can smell them for miles with their sickly cologne, American tobacco and their stale sweat."


 
The song features backing vocals from Bush's mentor, Pink Floyd's Dave Gilmour.



"Suspended In Gaffa"


This song deals with being given a glimpse of God. It's something we dearly want, but unless we work for it, we will never see it again and even then may not be worthy of it.


 
Gaffa is gaffa tape, a thick industrial tape used in the music business for taping down and tidying up large numbers of leads (wiring, etc.) particularly useful in concert situations. The song is trying to simulate being trapped in a kind of a web; everything is in slow motion ("it all goes slo-mo") and the person feels like they're tied up and can't move.



"Leave It Open"

"Leave It Open" finds Kate Bush singing about how human beings are like receptive vessels, opening and closing ourselves down at different times. She explained:


"Like cups, we are filled up and emptied with feelings, emotions - vessels breathing in, breathing out. This song is about being open and shut to stimuli at the right times. Often we have closed minds and open mouths when perhaps we should have open minds and shut mouths."


 
The song closes with a line Bush sings backwards: "We let the weirdness in."


 
"Leave It Open" explodes at the climax with thunderous gated drums. Kate Bush told engineer Nick Launay that she wanted the drums to sound like cannons firing at them from across a valley.



"We got corrugated iron from a building site and put it around the kit," Launay remembered to Mojo magazine. "We were making loops and just experimenting madly. I think the word 'Wow' was used a lot. It was like being in a toy shop."



"The Dreaming"

Bush wrote this about the situation between the white Australians and the aborigines who were being wiped out by man's greed for uranium. White men were digging up aboriginal sacred grounds to get to the plutonium needed to build weapons that could one day destroy everything.


 
The title comes from a religious period of time in the aboriginal culture known as Dreamtime, a time when animals and humans take the same form. Dreamtime is also known as The Dreaming.


 
Traditional aboriginal instruments were used on this song. The didgeridoo was played by Australian popular entertainer Rolf Harris. The Australian popular entertainer linked up with Bush once again for her 2005 album Arial when he played the didgeridoo again as well as contributing vocals to the tracks "An Architect's Dream" and "The Painters Link"


 
The Dreaming was Bush's first completely solo produced album.


 
The Dreaming album found Kate Bush showcasing a huge range of vocal approaches such as the exaggerated Australian accent on its title track. "I'm able to oversee the whole thing in a way that I can treat myself almost like an actor on a stage," she told Mojo magazine. "It's not just being a singer. The voice is just part of trying to create an atmosphere or a little story or a picture, and it's very much (about) the emotional content."


 
English bird impersonator Percy Edwards provided sheep noises for the track.



"Houdini"



This song is written from the perspective of Harry Houdini's lover. Following the death of Houdini, a group including his lover tried to make contact with Houdini in the afterlife. Houdini promised his lover that he would make contact with her and that she wold know it is him by telling her a code before his death.



 
 

Where's the tiger cub?

Tek wrote:

Where's the tiger cub?

Dick Zimmerman was the photographer responsible for this picture of Michael Jackson looking sharp. Zimmerman brought a lot of suits for Jackson to pick, but after about an hour of weeding through the wardrobe, he couldn’t find anything that caught him. The photographer started to panic, and then MJ noticed his white suit and said “That’s the look I like, do we have anything like that?” On the bad side, Dick’s was the only one. On the good side, the suit fit like it was tailored for Michael.



And in The LP's gatefold  sleeve – and in the CD it's the booklets middle page – shows the cover picture in full, revealing Michael is holding a tiger near his leg (which oddly fits with the leopard print handkerchief).

 

As Zimmerman detailed:

We had decided prior to the session that Michael would have a tiger cub in the photograph so we had a selection for him to choose from. He loved a six week old cub but was very squeamish about letting it get too close to his face because of possible scratches. Throughout the session I had to get Michael to forget about getting scratched, and to focus his attention on me and my direction.


One of the snapshots, with Michael smiling as he embraced the cub, is the cover of the 2001 special edition of Thriller.

Album 509.
The Birthday Party.......................................Junkyard   (1982)












Circumstances surrounding the recording of Junkyard were chaotic, to say the least. Tracy Pew was jailed for three months for theft and drunk driving, drummer Phil Calvert was slowly being ousted, and copious amounts of alcohol and narcotics fueled the band's psychotic sleaze blues. The chaos is mirrored in the raw and powerful music, which often sounds as though each member is playing a different song from the others.


Will try to catch up later tonight and tomorrow morning.