Album 507.
Orange Juice............................Rip It Up   (1982)












This album was one of those I really wanted to like a lot better than I did. I really enjoyed their singles and thought the band were pretty cool looking dudes, I also liked EC's vocals but remember I had only ever heard them in 3/4 minute bursts, hearing a whole album of his voice kinda grated after a while to be honest,also the incessant Chic stylee guitar work on most tracks was a bit much for his listener.


I did enjoy "Rip It Up," "I Can't Help Myself," and "Breakfast Time" which his voice totally suited to a T, but I can't ever see me listening to more than one or two "Orange Juice" records in a row, so this album wont be going into my vinyl collection .





Bits & Bobs;


From their very first single onwards, Orange Juice developed a sound which was utterly and uniquely their own. This was despite the fact that, throughout their existence, the band always wore their influences on their sleeve. Their interests in music were extremely eclectic, ranging from a shared enthusiasm for the music of the Velvet Underground and Jonathan Richman to an admiration for the then far less fashionable group, the Monkees. In this respect, the contemporary band they most resembled were the great Australian group, the Go-Betweens who, like them, attempted to combine what might be termed an ‘indie’ sensibility with a wide range of other influences, including classic 1960s pop and rock music. Unlike the Go-Betweens, however, Orange Juice were also strongly influenced by their enthusiasm for Motown and soul music in general and for funk and disco (particularly Chic). Indeed, to a large extent, their originality lay in their determination to combine and juxtapose those influences in new and interesting ways. From their earliest recordings onwards, it was clear that Orange Juice were one of the more appealing bands to emerge in the wake of the musical explosion that had been triggered by the Sex Pistols.


 The formation of Orange Juice and the creation of their very distinctive style were also the product of that peculiar blend of happenstance and coincidence which seems to lie behind the formation of every great band. The first step in that process came through the coming together of four very talented and musically like-minded individuals from the relatively affluent Glasgow suburb of Bearsden. All four – Edwyn Collins, on vocals and guitar, James Kirk on guitar, David McClymont on bass and Steven Daly on drums – were also witty, literate, opinionated and fizzing with ideas about the type of music that the band should make. Their enthusiasm and zest for many different types of music were also to be key elements in the development of the Orange Juice sound. This air of youthful optimism also distinguished the band from many of their more sombre contemporaries.


 The final piece in this particular jigsaw came from the rather unlikely Svengali figure of Alan Horne. He was known at the time as something of a provocateur and as someone with extremely strong musical opinions. He was to bring these opinions – and his characteristically aggressive style of promoting them – to bear throughout his time as manager of Orange Juice. Horne also strongly influenced the way in which the band looked and the design of its record covers. He first met them in 1978, when they were still known as the Nu-Sonics, and immediately in Simon Reynolds’ words, “detected star quality in Collins”.


 Like his new protégés, Horne was also a keen fan of soul music (particularly Tamla Motown) but he also had a very detailed knowledge of 1960s pop music. Like them also, he was not particularly keen on what he saw as the ‘doominess’ of a good deal of the music made by the band’s contemporaries. Their shared spikiness and fondness for arguing meant that Collins and Horne quickly became perfect foils for one another. To quote Grace Maxwell, who knew the band from early on (and later became Edwyn’s wife), at that time both men were “overflowing … with vitality”, secure “in the invincibility of youth and the knowledge that they were in the moment”.


 


 The arrival of Horne on the scene also set the stage for the creation of Postcard Records, a label whose close to legendary status is in inverse proportion to the length of its existence (especially in its initial incarnation). In its early stages, the label served primarily as a vehicle for releasing Orange Juice’s singles. At the same time, he was determined that Postcard should have a range of quality artists in its stable. During its brief existence, he did manage to attract other bands of a very high calibre and these included Aztec Camera, Josef K and the Go-Betweens. Nevertheless, in its early days, Postcard and Orange Juice were inextricably linked together and the fortunes of one very much depended on those of the other.


 On a broader level, Postcard also helped to set the template for later independent labels in England. In this respect, Alan Horne’s determination to aim for chart success outside of the confines of the traditional musical establishment served as a key influence on the thinking of later independent labels such as Creation Records for example. From the very beginning, Horne’s ambitions for Postcard were very high indeed (as displayed by his later adaptation of the Motown logo for its ‘Sound of Young Scotland’ motto) even If he ran the label on a shoestring basis for most of its existence.


The problem for Postcard lay in the fact that while its sales levels were quite good for a small independent label, ultimately it did not have the capacity to push its acts into the pop charts. This had been both Horne and Collins’ major ambition and by 1981 both men (the former, naturally enough, more reluctantly) had moved towards the idea that Orange Juice probably needed to sign to a major label if they were to achieve that objective. The eventual upshot was that the band signed with Polydor records, a move which combined with the earlier departure of Aztec Camera, led to the rapid collapse of the Postcard label.


The move to Polydor also had the unfortunate effect of exacerbating some of the musical and personal tensions between the members of the band. Eventually, this led to the departure of both Kirk and Daly. To replace them, Collins brought in Malcolm Ross from the recently split-up Josef K on guitar and Zeke Manyika on drums. From that point on, the band became essentially a vehicle for Collins’ songs rather than the far more equal mixture of talents that it had been previously. In retrospect, it was also at this point that the group lost some of that magical freshness which had characterised them in the beginning. Indeed, Grace Maxwell has argued that if she had “been their manager then”, she would have “tried very hard to prevent the original members from falling apart”. She also adds that she viewed them all as “brilliant people, dazzling originals”.


Despite this, the new line-up did go on to achieve the group’s greatest chart success with the classic single, Rip It Up, the title track of the band’s second Polydor album. It was a remarkably catchy song which epitomised the new slick soul-funk sound which was the hallmark of the group in its later period. At the beginning, the song seemed to be a conventional enough ‘lost love’ song, but it then veered into a condemnation of the contemporary music scene. It was this aspect of the song which inspired Simon Reynolds to use the lyric of its chorus as the title of his excellent account of post-punk music from 1978 to 1984. The song also gives a nod to the Buzzcocks, both through its reference to their song Boredom and by its quote from the famous (or infamous) guitar solo on it. By reaching No.8 on the British charts, it also seemed to mark the emergence of Orange Juice as a commercial force in their own right.


Louise Louise, was a song which the band had originally recorded during their time on Postcard. However, I prefer this later version in which the group combine influences from the Velvet Underground’s poppier side (as displayed in songs like Sunday Morning) and ones drawn from their admiration for 1960s folk-rock bands like the Lovin’ Spoonful and the Byrds. The result is a finely judged juxtaposition of styles which makes this one of their finest slow songs. By contrast, I Can’t Help Myself from the same album ranks very high among their best pop-soul performances.


Throughout Orange Juice’s existence, perhaps their greatest strength was the ability to balance opposites – romanticism/cynicism, originality/imitation, irony/sincerity, optimism/realism and so on. The question that remained, was whether in his solo career Edwyn Collins could maintain this tension of the opposites. The answer to that question, however, is another story.



 Orange Juice: “If anything became too smooth, Edwyn Collins liked to fuck it up”

Edwyn Collins was 15 when he joined his first band, a bunch of Dundee heavy rockers called Onyx, as their banjo ukulele player. The schoolboy Collins had, in fact, come up with the band’s name. “They said, ‘We want something that’s very hard and rock.’ Well, here’s a very hard rock: onyx.”




“They kicked me out, because they didn’t need a banjo ukulele player. I still can’t understand it,” says Collins. “I got the Burns guitar when I was 16. I got it for £20. I didn’t really want to be a pop star. I was striving for something interesting. I practised daily for months and years, chord shapes and such like. None of that pop star rubbish.”




Within a few short years, however, Collins had met up with a crowd of like-minded Glaswegian musicians, formed a band who more or less defined the sound of indie music, stumbled elegantly through cultdom and ended up, briefly, as a pop star, of all things. Today, Collins and his wife/manager Grace Maxwell are sitting in his north London studio trying to remember how it felt when Orange Juice finally had a hit.




It is 27 years since the sinewy pop of “Rip It Up” illuminated the Top 10 and made unlikely pop stars of Orange Juice. Collins’ recollection, however, is hampered by two things. There is the difficulty with speech: as a side-effect of the two brain haemorrhages which almost killed him in 2005, he sometimes has difficulty with communication. A more benign side effect, though, is his impatience with nostalgia, preferring to focus on the future. So, to Collins’ evident amusement, it falls to Grace to tell the story of Orange Juice’s brief flirtation with the charts.




“You were wearing clothes that were much more suited to a Smash Hits band,” she says. “People were taking pictures of you and it looked like somebody had scrubbed your face with a Brillo pad. I remember the tour around that time, you going out onstage, and suddenly there’s packs of little girls screaming ‘Edwyn! Edwyn!’ Now, where every other bugger can cope with that, Edwyn comes out, and he goes, ‘Well, you can cut that out right away.’”



In 1976, Edwyn Collins fetched up at Bearsden Academy in Glasgow. The days of Onyx long behind him, he replied to an ad in the fanzine Ripped & Torn: “New York group forming in Bearsden.” It had been placed by The Nu-Sonics, a bedroom band featuring Steven Daly (the original vocalist, who switched to drums), and guitarist James Kirk. Collins soon became the frontman, and brought along a college friend, David McClymont. “Edwyn looked like a fish out of water,” remembers McClymont, now living in Australia and working for Lonely Planet guides. “He was wearing straight grey flannel trousers, black Oxford shoes, a tartan shirt and an anorak with a hood. He was tall and lanky, and he really stood out. When you’d walk down the street with Edwyn in Glasgow, people would stare. It was like they were looking at someone from Mars.”




“There was nothing trendy about what we were doing in Glasgow,” explains Collins. “It was quite a menacing place, which I hated. Back in Sauchiehall Street I used to be scared, especially in the Nu-Sonics days. Because I looked different.”




By summer, 1979, The Nu-Sonics had morphed into Orange Juice. “I remember when I was 18 walking along the beach at Brora in Sutherland,” says Collins, “thinking it’s time to develop, that’s not good enough, it’s crap. I was 17 when I wrote [1980 single] ‘Blue Boy’. It’s crude, the chorus is crude, but I was thinking, ‘I’m 17, I need to get better than this…’”




By then, too, Collins had become friends with Alan Horne, the former singer with Glasgow punk band Oscar Wild, and a would-be Svengali who styled himself after Andy Warhol. Horne and Collins co-founded Postcard Records, operating out of Horne’s flat in West Princes St. Beginning in February 1980 with Orange Juice’s debut single, “Falling And Laughing”, Postcard’s initial run of a dozen 7” singles – each one produced on a shoestring budget and packaged in a hand-folded sleeve – provided the model for indie labels from Creation onwards. Crucially, Postcard gave a platform to local post-punk bands – “The Sound Of Young Scotland” – whose rattly, lo-fi charms would later be embraced by The Smiths, Primal Scream and the C86 bands on to Belle And Sebastian and Franz Ferdinand.




“The Postcard flat was an exciting place to be,” says Ken McCluskey, then vocalist with Orange Juice’s Glasgow contemporaries, The Bluebells. “With people making posters and folding record sleeves and listening to Chic or Stax and Northern Soul records on repeat. If Horne was Andy Warhol to Edwyn’s Lou Reed, Postcard was the Factory.”




Orange Juice’s four singles for Postcard – “Falling And Laughing”, “Blue Boy”, “Simply Thrilled Honey” and “Poor Old Soul” – had little in common with either punk’s macho swagger or the earnestness of post-punk: Collins was as big a fan of George McRae’s “Rock Your Baby” as he was of The Byrds and The Lovin’ Spoonful. According to Steven Daly – now a contributing editor to Vanity Fair in the States – similarities between the guitar on The Velvet Underground’s Live ’69 album and the rhythmic chopping of Chic proved equally influential. “We weren’t being arch,” says Daly. “It was just love of music that didn’t recognise any boundaries.”




Just as important, though, were Collins’ lyrics and the manner in which he delivered them. Mining conspicuously English tropes and mannerisms, Collins’ songs were often tales of unrequited love where the resigned narrator might find himself sighing, “I’ll never be man enough for you,” delivered in a bashful, slightly camp manner. Indeed, when judged by the efforts of their imitators, Orange Juice were often described as fey. Actually, they were deliberately confrontational.




“In 1981, we went on tour with The Undertones,” says Collins. “There was a load of skinheads, and the minute we’d come onstage they’d shout ‘Poofs!’ And we’d shout back: ‘Hare Krishna.’ Rather than go into denial, we’d camp it up, just to annoy people. Of course, later, once we were preaching to the converted, it was time to change course.”




Given little encouragement in Glasgow by a music establishment that favoured big-lunged blues singers like Frankie Miller, Orange Juice looked south for an audience.




“Alan would borrow his dad’s Austin Maxi and we’d drive to London,” says Collins. “We’d knock on the door of Cosmopolitan or NME and do the hard sell. When ‘Falling And Laughing’ came out, we went to the BBC, and Alan demanded to see John Peel. There had just been the Liverpool thing with the Bunnymen, and the Manc thing centred round Factory, and Alan said to Peel: ‘That’s all over. Get with the times, move further north to Scotland to hear the future’. He could be very convincing, but Peel later said ‘a horrible truculent youth’ had badgered his way into Peel Acres”.




Alan Horne may have been an effective standard-bearer for Postcard, but he’s now viewed ambivalently by the group. The good-natured Collins refuses to talk to Horne because of some unspoken slight. “There’d never have been an Alan Horne if there hadn’t been an Edwyn Collins,” explains David McClymont. “And Alan was aware of that. He was riding on the shoulders of Edwyn’s talent.”




For all the plaudits, Orange Juice’s Postcard singles never sold more than 2,000 copies. This was not, perhaps, the Glasgow Stax that Horne and Collins had envisaged: Horne spent the profits from “Falling And Laughing” on fish’n’chips and knickerbocker glories. “A thorn in our side was the way people would unremittingly refer to us as ‘perfect pop’,” says Steven Daly. “We were aware that you couldn’t be pop unless you were actually popular.”




“Edwyn was quite immature and could act on a whim. As could they all. Alan was terribly impetuous,” notes Grace Maxwell.




“We just thought, ‘Oh shit, Alan’s making it up as he goes along,” says Daly. “This week he’s in love with Aztec Camera or The Bluebells.”




Exasperated by Horne, Orange Juice left Postcard in October 1981 for Polydor. They shelved a set of demos (released as Ostrich Churchyard in ’92) and re-recorded much of the work in cleaned-up fashion as their debut, You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever, released February 1982. The LP had considerable charm – James Kirk’s “Felicity”, and Collins’ “In A Nutshell” were gems of playful lyricism that managed to exude both vulnerability and toughness at the same time – but Adam Kidron’s production lacked the chaotic energy of the Postcard 45s. Daly, though, suggests Kidron used it as a showreel for his talents, adding horns and strings, while neglecting the core group.




“The most pernicious sign of that was the Al Green song, ‘L.O.V.E. Love’ [the first single taken from the album],” Daly explains. “Kidron talked Edwyn into that. I didn’t even think it was one of Al Green’s good records, and I certainly didn’t think we could add anything.”




“I was happy with the sound of the record,” counters Collins. “Al Green likes that version. It’s not in tune, though.”




Soon after the album’s release, Collins recruited guitarist Malcolm Ross from former Postcard labelmates, Josef K. “The thing about Orange Juice, the relationships were very dysfunctional,” remembers Ross. “I can remember Steven [Daly] and Alan [Horne] rolling about, physically fighting.” His arrival coincided with Collins’ growing frustrations with James Kirk. Although writing material for the band, Kirk had an obstinate streak, which Collins considered to be “unprofessional”.




“Going from being this little band putting a single out and hoping someone will vaguely understand what you’re getting at, to playing to 2,000 people is a big change,” explains Daly. “It brought out in James a certain perversity. It sounds petty, but it was things like not shaving. He might have worn a Barbour jacket onstage.”




Grace: “James had no notion of how brilliant he was, or how strong a character he was in the group. If people cite him as the one that made Orange Juice particularly interesting, I would agree with them every time.”




Frustrated by the in-fighting between Collins and Kirk, Ross and McClymont decided to leave, offering Collins the option of joining them. He did, first sacking James Kirk, then Steven Daly. “They wanted to get rid of James,” says Daly. “And I said: ‘You can’t do that, he is Orange Juice’. James was a very sensitive guy, and the band was most of what he had. I just thought it would be very damaging to cut him adrift. So Edwyn called back later and said: ‘OK, you can go as well.’”




“It must have been very hard for Edwyn,” adds Ross. “But he made his choice. I know he’s regretted it lots of times. He was at school with Steven and James. It looks like I’m the guy who came in and broke up the group, and I suppose I did. But he could have just said: ‘No, I want to keep the original Orange Juice going.’”





“We wanted to get popular,” continues Daly. “And Edwyn wanted to get popular faster than anyone, because he ripped it up and started again and made a novelty hit. He traded in all our equity for a funny bassline.”

With a new, Zimbabwean-born drummer Zeke Manyika in place, Orange Juice set about recording their second album. With some of the band’s quirks gone the way of Kirk, producer Martin Hayles allowed Collins to bring his love of disco to the fore, resulting in a slicker and funkier sound. Tensions, though, remained.




“I’d say to Edwyn, ‘Do you really think we have to have a Fender Rhodes piano on every song?’” recalls Ross. “He would say, ‘Well, we’ve got a snare drum on every song.’”




Rip It Up was released in November ’82, and received the first bad reviews Orange Juice had ever received. “It was too much of a jump for fans who liked the shambolic underground sound of the early records,” says Manyika.




“We were rehearsing for the tour on the day, and Edwyn was sitting on the floor reading the reviews,” recalls Ross. “He said, ‘Do you realise how bad this is?’ Josef K had had a few scathing reviews, so I said, ‘Well, what can we do about it?’ Also, the reviews were saying: ‘It’s a bit bland, having a Fender Rhodes on every track.’”




The brazenly poppy “I Can’t Help Myself” had seemed like a certain hit, but while that failed, the nagging rhythms of the title track took Orange Juice to the mass audience they imagined they deserved. “Rip It Up” peaked at No 8 in February 1983, with the band managing one commendably irreverent Top Of The Pops performance, where McClymont decided to make things more interesting by molesting Jim ‘Foetus’ Thirlwell, who was on a podium miming the record’s sax solo.




“David started headbutting Foetus,” says Collins. “I could hardly sing for laughing.”



“We insisted that we didn’t want the dancing girls doing the ripping-up paper dance,” recalls McClymont. “As the day went on and we had more to drink we got more insistent. Having Jim around also meant there was a supply of speed, so by the time we appeared I was very highly strung. The performance is a blur, but I remember that as soon as I saw the dancing girls ripping up paper, I lost it. When Edwyn and I were pulled up before the label bosses the next day – both of us trying not to burst out laughing at the ludicrousness of it all – they were all doom and gloom saying the single would fall out of the charts because of my abominable behaviour. The following week it went up three or four places.”




“We were in trouble with the BBC, the record company was pissed off, and they were saying we’d never be on Top Of The Pops again,” laughs Ross. “Self destruct!”




“We had to do this Sunday morning performance for another TV show,” says McClymont. “I got drunk early, and I was goosestepping around the stage, wearing a black trench coat, and Edwyn laughed so much he wet himself. All the girls in front of the stage were going: ‘He’s wet himself!’ And he had! Not many pop stars do that.”




The follow-up to “Rip It Up”, “Flesh Of My Flesh”, fell just short of the Top 40 and, as 1983 progressed, Orange Juice continued trying to derail their mainstream popularity. “There was a huge paranoia about selling out in bands like Orange Juice,” says Collins.




Accordingly, he called in reggae producer Dennis Bovell for their next recordings, which became the Texas Fever mini-LP (February 1984). The sound itself was carefree, almost as if having a hit and then laughing about it had loosened Collins’ creativity. The funk and disco influences were balanced with a wiry, left-field rock sound – but there was pop, too. Collins’ “A Place In My Heart” was a great soul ballad, everything the wobbly cover of “L.O.V.E. Love” aspired to be. Creatively, the group seemed to be working, but it was still divided, with Manyika on Collins’ side, and Ross and McClymont on the other.




“I needed to get on with things,” says Collins. “To develop the guitar, and all that. I needed to experiment and try different ideas. It was a rough sound, and no-one was doing that.”




But Collins, it seemed, was growing out of the group. “There are similarities between Edwyn and Paul Weller,” notes Manyika. “If you look at what Weller is doing now and what he had to go through to get there. There’s no shortcuts. You have to go through these things to find out what your strengths are.”




The final LP, The Orange Juice [November 1984], also produced by Bovell, essentially marked the start of Collins’ solo career. The relaxed relationship between the two men finally resolved the tension between Collins’ quirkiness and his pop sensibility, with Bovell adding dub flourishes to the classic Collins lyric, “I Guess I’m Just A Little Too Sensitive”. There was also another hit-that-wasn’t, in the archly playful “What Presence?!”. It marked, too, a new confidence in Collins’ singing. “Edwyn has as distinctive a voice as any instantly recognisable singer, like Rod Stewart or John Lennon,” says Bovell. “I understood how he wanted to sound, and was patient enough to allow him to relax to get his full range to work for him.”




“I liked The Orange Juice, the last one,” says Collins. “‘What Presence?!’ is great. ‘Salmon Fishing In New York’ was great, also. It’s more or less a solo album – Zeke was there for three days. Sometimes Dennis played everything. Of course, it was all over by that time.”



Certainly, as fast as he appeared to be shedding band members, Collins was also fighting a losing battle against Polydor, increasingly dissatisfied with the band’s apparent inability to provide the label with another “Rip It Up”-sized hit.




“When I started managing him, Edwyn was loathed inside Polydor,” recalls Grace Maxwell. “Loathed. Edwyn saw through everything. By this time, you had a huge amount of contempt for the label system. It was really funny – everything they said, every cliché, Edwyn would spin it round and chuck it back at them.”




The end, when it came, was something of an anti-climax. “It never actually ended,” explains Manyika. “It just fizzled out. Edwyn and I went for a beer, and we said – ‘Shall we split the band?’ It was like we were doing something really naughty.”




Orange Juice’s final gig took place at Brixton Academy on January 19, 1985. Under the banner Coal Not Dole, it was part of a benefit for striking miners, with Everything But The Girl and Orange Juice’s former Postcard labelmates Aztec Camera also on the bill. What should have been an evening of solidarity for the miners swiftly descended into farce, as the various managers argued about who should headline. “To stop the aggravation,” remembers Manyika, “we went on first.”




Collins chose this as his chance to announce the end of the band live onstage, marking Orange Juice’s passing with a rendition of “Rock And Roll (I Gave You The Best Years Of My Life)”. As was the way with Orange Juice, it was sincere, ironic, funny and, finally, sad.




“I don’t think Edwyn wanted to be a pop star,” says Manyika. “He just wanted confirmation. He got disappointed, of course: we had a lot of singles that went to the edge of the Top 40. But he had a strong punk ethic, where if everything became too smooth, he liked to fuck it up.”




On November 22, 2008, Edwyn Collins, David McClymont, Steven Daly and James Kirk (the latter now a chiropodist) spent a day together in Glasgow. They visited the West Princes Street tenement that had been home to Postcard Records, where there was some talk of a blue plaque being erected outside the building. Later, they appeared onstage together for the first time since July 1981, receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Tartan Clef Music Awards, a charity event celebrating achievements in Scottish music.




“It’s amazing what Edwyn has achieved since his illness. That’s why we all thought it was important to get together again,” McClymont explained. They remained, though, a little too awkward to be part of the black-tie establishment, here alongside the mainstream likes of Texas’ Sharleen Spiteri, Hue & Cry and Eddi Reader – artists, ironically, whose careers were informed in some way or other by the upsurge of Scottish music that Orange Juice inspired.




“Was it sentimental or emotional?” wonders Collins. “No, no. Because I don’t look back, in regret or nostalgia. What’s the point? It was nice to see them. But I look forward… to oblivion!”





"Rip It Up"


Formed in 1976 as the Nu-Sonics (named after a cheap brand of guitar), this Glasgow band were galvanized into Orange Juice by impresario Alan Horne at the end of the decade. In the early 1980s they were part of the scene that their original label, Postcard, celebrated as "The Sound of Young Scotland" along with fellow bands Josef K and Aztec Camera.




Orange Juice are best known for this song, which reached #8 on the UK Singles Chart in February 1983, the group's only UK Top 40 hit. Frontman Edwyn Collins went on to experience some solo success, particularly with his 1994 transatlantic hit "A Girl Like You."


 
The song signaled a departure from the sound of the band's earlier post-punk singles, revealing a white-boy funk influence with Chic influenced guitars and a synthesizer. It was the first UK chart hit to feature the Rowland TB – 303 synth, which eventually became synonymous with the Acid House scene.


 
The backing vocals were provided by Paul Quinn, a classmate of Collins between the ages of 11 and 15. Quinn went on to front Bourgie Bourgie, a Scottish band who had a #48 UK hit with "Breaking Point" in 1984. He also collaborated with Edwyn Collins on a version of The Velvet Underground's "Pale Blue Eyes," which reached #72 in the UK the same year.


 
The lyric, "you know the scene and it's very humdrum. And my favorite songs entitled boredom," is a dig at the state of early 1980s Pop, but also a reference to the Buzzcocks, whose debut EP Spiral Scratch was a huge influence on Orange Juice's DIY ethos. A snatch of the guitar riff from the EP's track "Boredom" briefly chimes in after that line.


 
An NME review at the time said of the Rip it Up album: "Orange Juice are a minor group trying hard to be bigger and more significant than a really ought to be." The negative appraisal upset Edwin Collins who recalled in 2013: "When Rip It Up got slagged off by the NME, I would refuse to go on the tour bus because I was depressed! You can laugh about it now, but back then it was life and death."


 
Rip it Up's saxophone parts were provided by British jazz performer Dick Morrisey, who also featured on material by Paul McCartney, Gary Numan, Peter Gabriel and Vangelis. (He played the haunting saxophone solo on the Vangelis composition "Love Theme" for the 1982 film Blade Runner).
 

 

arabchanter wrote:

Album 507.
Orange Juice............................Rip It Up   (1982)








 

See this bit : “I got the Burns guitar when I was 16. I got it for £20." I'm working out it was 1975 Edwyn Collins got that guitar. I bought one around then too, for a wee bit more, and had to sell it for £100 in the early 'eighties.

Then they became trendy, and my model, an original from the early 'sixties, was going for upwards of £800 last time I looked. 

I'm mentioning this a) out of frustration and b) just to show I still read your stuff a/c!

You are right about the album, it's too much of the same. But the singles, especially Rip it Up, were, to me really original sounds. It stands the test of time.

Sorry about no posts since Tuesday, but my PC died on me Wednesday morning and haven't had a chance to replace it.


Off to get a new one now, so hopefully catch up later today.

Album 508.
Michael Jackson.................................Thriller   (1982)
















This has been a bit of a difficult album for me to listen to. when I was invited to Neverland I never expected it to be such a hands on holiday, I also didn't realise that MJ stood for My Jizz, but let's put that behind us and see if we can distinguish between the musical side and the somewhat murkier side (allegedly)


I've spoken to a few friends about this conundrum, and advice has ranged from, "fuckin' kiddy fiddler" to "he was trying to live the chidhood he never had, by being with kids and trying to act their age, nothing more " or "if you're going to slate him because of his private life, you'll have to not like a lot of classical, opera, and a hell of lot of genres of music/comedy/literature if you take in to account their preferences.


I personally think Gary Glitter was a great performer, I seen him several times and didn't have a clue about his tendencies in fact I never had a clue he had a "syrup" but boy could he put on a show! Now here's the thing, did any of these Cambodian children have a "scooby" about who he was or his fame, or was it a monetary thing that brought them together? Now ask the same question about Jackson, fame or money?


Anyway this should be about the music, so I'll try to divorce myself from the sideshows.


"Thriller" for me was a good album, very much of it's time but still very good, you can slate Jackson as much as you want but bottom line the boy (with Quincy Jones's help) knew how to make good "dance, stick in your head, toe tappin' records." I think only a couple of tracks weren't successful singles, which kinda says it all really, although he was a mega star, I can always remember my old mum saying "eh canny stick him" and I'd say wha? and she'd say "that Michael Jackson laddie, there's a want aboot him" and she wasn't a bad judge as it turns oot.


A good opening with "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin,'" "The Girl Is Mine" to be honest I always thought was pretty shite, "Thriller" fir me was the pick of the bunch, always on abidees halloween playlist and the probably the best video of that era, "Billie Jean," "Beat It," and "PYT (Pretty Young Thing)" are all decent songs but not the music I was really into then or now.


This album will not be going into my record collection.





Bits & Bobs;



Have already written about  this artist in post #1702 (if interested)






The New York Times.
MICHAEL JACKSON'S THRILLER': SUPERB JOB

By JOHN ROCKWELL  DEC. 19, 1982 



 Since he caught the public's fancy as a bouncing, spinning, piping, 11-year-old mini-superstar in 1970, Michael Jackson has been a fullfledged celebrity, living a celebrity's life. That's worth remembering, because it means that today, one must guard against the assumption that he is a mature, fully formed artist and human being. He is certainly a seasoned veteran: His whole life has been shaped by entertainment, and he is a practiced - sometimes too practiced - performer, recording star and film actor. But he remains a young man, and with luck he will continue to mature.


 One begins a review of Mr. Jackson's new LP, ''Thriller'' (Epic QE 38112), with this curious cautionary note because it is certainly possible to point out flaws in Mr. Jackson's seeming perfection. Yes, he sometimes allows Quincy Jones to depersonalize his individuality with his superbly crafted yet slightly anonymous production. Worse, he sometimes hides his emotionality behind smoothly indistinctive pop songs and formulaic arrangements, defenses so suavely perfect that they suggest layers of impenetrable, gauzy veils.


 But these are quibbles. ''Thriller'' is a wonderful pop record, the latest statement by one of the great singers in popular music today. But it is more than that. It is as hopeful a sign as we have had yet that the destructive barriers that spring up regularly between white and black music - and between whites and blacks - in this culture may be breached once again. Most important of all, it is another signpost on the road to Michael Jackson's own artistic fulfillment.


 Even though the family group from which he emerged, formerly the Jackson Five and presently the Jacksons, still shows signs of some sort of life, Mr. Jackson has long since established himself on his own. As an actor, he accomplished that with a charming performance in the film version of ''The Wiz.'' On records, his big breakthrough as a solo artist came with his last LP, ''Off the Wall,'' in 1979. It stayed high on the charts for nine months, spun off several topselling singles and sold millions of records and cassettes.


 There were solid reasons for such success. Chief among them is Mr. Jackson's ethereal tenor. His deployment of that voice, which he mixes subtly with all manner of falsetto effects, is the greatest example of this sort of erotic keening since the heyday of Smokey Robinson. Ever since the craze for the castrato in the 17th century, high male voices, with their paradoxical blend of asexuality and sensuousness, ecstasy and pain, have been the most prized of all vocal types, and Mr. Jackson epitomizes such singing for our time better than anyone, in any musical genre.


 A second reason for his success is his personality. One may legitmately wonder how Mr. Jackson, locked inside a celebrity's cage since childhood, could possibly understand the everday dilemmas of life. But most such dilemmas are universal, and artistic empathy is hardly the prerogative of poor folksingers. Mr. Jackson seems, on the basis of his interviews, to have a genuinely childlike and emotionally open attitude toward life. Sometimes his fame seems to insulate him, but it also elevates him to fantasy status for his fans.


 A third source of his success lies in his creative relationship with Mr. Jones, his producer. Quincy Jones's work seems curiously variable. As a hyperactive record producer, he can slip into formulas inappropriate for the artist at hand, as in his efforts on Donna Summer's last album. But with Mr. Jackson, his refined synthesis of the latest trends in soul, funk, rock and pop works very supportively.
  It is that synthesis that offers a broader cultural hope. Black music lurks at the heart of nearly all American pop, but it is an old, old story that blacks tend to be slighted by white audiences, a few established older superstars partly excepted. Black performers' mass success waxes and wanes, and in recent years it has been waning. The dangers of isolation -more particularly, of whites being cut off from the roots of what they perceive as their own music - have only been reinforced by radio, with its ''demographic'' playlists that reinforce a musically insensitive and morally indefensible segregration.


 Mr. Jackson's appeal is so wide, however, that white publications and radig stations that normally avoid ''black music'' seem willing to pretend he isn't black after all. On one level, that's admirable, in that color distinctions are often best avoided altogether. But Mr. Jackson is black, and while he sings a duet here with Paul McCartney, enlists Eddie Van Halen for a guitar solo and observes no color exclusivity in his choice of backup musicians, he still works honorably within the context of contemporary black popular music at its fervent, eclectic best. If this album is anywhere near as successful as ''Off the Wall,'' it may remind white audiences of what they are missing elsewhere.


 ''Thriller'' follows the same rough pattern of ''Off the Wall'' in its predominantly brisk first side and a second side with a greater preponderance of ballads. There is no one show-stopping lament here on the order of ''She's Out of My Life,'' from ''Off the Wall.'' But there is a subtler mixture of fast and slow - fast songs with caressing vocals, medium-tempo songs and slow songs with a catchy undercurrent - and one or two songs in which Mr. Jackson can deploy the full sensuality of his singing.


 Perhaps the most striking of those songs is called ''Human Nature,'' which occupies the same spot on the disk - third song on the second side -that was alotted to ''She's Out of My Life.'' This is a haunting, brooding ballad by Steve Porcaro and John Bettis with an irresistible chorus, and it should be an enormous hit.


 But there are other hits here, too, lots of them. Best of all, with a pervasive confidence infusing the album as a whole, ''Thriller'' suggests that Mr. Jackson's evolution as an artist is far from finished. He is, after all, only 24 years old.


 JACKSON WAS INSPIRED BY THE NUTCRACKER SUITE. 


While he already had the popular solo album Off the Wall to his credit (also produced by Quincy Jones), Michael Jackson had a dream of making the biggest-selling album ever. He wanted Thriller to resemble Tchaikovsky’s suite, where “every song is a killer.”

 HE TOLD HIS MUSICIANS TO THINK LIKE MICHELANGELO


Keyboardist David Paich of Toto was one of the musicians hired for Thriller. He remembered Jackson telling the instrumentalists in the Westlake Recording studio in Los Angeles, California to think of “Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel—do whatever you need to do here. Sky's the limit."




 THE ALBUM'S TITLE WAS ALMOST MIDNIGHT MAN.


Quincy Jones asked arranger/songwriter Rod Temperton to come up with an album title. He wrote down 200 to 300 possible titles in his hotel room before deciding on Midnight Man. The next morning he woke up and the word “Thriller” popped into his head. "Something in my head just said, this is the title," Temperton said. "You could visualize it on the top of the Billboard charts. You could see the merchandising for this one word, how it jumped off the page as 'Thriller.'"




THE SONG "THRILLER" WAS ORIGINALLY TITLED "STARLIGHT."



Temperton wrote the music and lyrics, with the chorus: “We got to make it while we can / You need the starlight / Some starlight sun / I need you by my side/ you give me starlight / Starlight / tonight.” Jones liked the melody, but asked Temperton to come back with something more like Edgar Allan Poe. The album title Thriller was already on the table, so matching it to the song was relatively easy.

 VINCENT PRICE MADE LESS THAN $1000 FOR HIS WORK ON THE TITLE TRACK.


Jones’ then-wife Peggy Lipton knew Price. The horror movie legend managed to record his part in two takes. Once the album got big, Price expressed frustration over his meager paycheck and said that Jackson had stopped taking his calls.




 JACKSON WAS SUED FOR "WANNA BE STARTIN’ SOMETHIN'.


"Cameroon musician Manu Dibango recorded“Soul Makossa” in 1972. The song, sung in the Cameroonian language of Duala, elongated the phrase “mamako mamasa” as “ma ma ko/ma ma sa/ma ko ma ko sa.” Jackson changed it to “ma ma se/ma ma sa/ma ma ku sa,” but the similarity was obvious. A compensation arrangement was hammered out in an out-of-court settlement.




 "BILLIE JEAN" WAS ABOUT ONE SPECIFIC GIRL.


Quincy Jones claimed that Jackson told him “Billie Jean” was based on a girl who climbed over his wall one morning and accused him of being the father of one of her twins. Jones wanted the singer to change the title to “Not My Lover” to avoid possible confusion with the song being about tennis player Billie Jean King.




 "BILLIE JEAN" ALMOST KILLED MICHAEL.


In his autobiography, Jackson wrote about the time he was driving his Rolls-Royce down the Ventura Freeway during a recording session break. He was thinking about the song so much that he didn’t notice the bottom of his car was on fire. A kid on a motorcycle warned him in time.




JACKSON ADMITTED TO DARYL HALL THAT HE RIPPED OFF HALL & OATES.


As Hall remembers it, Jackson approached him during the “We Are the World” recording and admitted to cribbing the bass line from “I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do)” for “Billie Jean.”



 “BILLIE JEAN” WAS MIXED 91 TIMES



Quincy Jones then requested, "'Let's go back and listen to mix number two,'" recording engineer Bruce Swedien said. "And we did, and it blew us all away! I had overmixed that song right into the pooper, so the mix that went onto the record was mix number two."




 "THE GIRL IS MINE" CAME FROM A REQUEST FROM QUINCY JONES.


Jackson revealed during testimony that successfully fought a plagiarism allegation that the producer directed him to write a song about two men fighting over a girl. He later woke up in the middle of the night and sang the song into a tape recorder. Jones also later requested he add the rap verse.




 "BEAT IT" WAS INSPIRED BY "MY SHARONA."


Jones told The Telegraph he wanted a “black version” of The Knack song.




 EDDIE VAN HALEN PLAYED THE GUITAR SOLO ON "BEAT IT."


He did it while the rest of his band, Van Halen, was out of town, not thinking anybody in the group would ever know.



 "HUMAN NATURE" WAS DISCOVERED BECAUSE TOTO DIDN’T GO CASSETTE SHOPPING.


David Paich worked on demos for Jones to potentially use for Thriller, sending him cassettes virtually every day with songs. One day, his then-roommate and Toto bandmate Steve Porcaro was tasked with recording Paich’s demos onto a cassette. Porcaro reused one of his own tapes because they were out of blank cassettes. Jones didn’t like the two songs of Paich’s when he heard them, but he loved the next song that came on—Porcaro’s early version of “Human Nature.”



 THE TITLE "P.Y.T. (PRETTY YOUNG THING)" CAME FROM PEGGY LIPTON’S LINGERIE.


Jones noticed his wife’s lingerie said “pretty young things” on them, and tasked his songwriters to come up with lyrics for the title, “Pretty Young Thing: Tender Loving Care.” Singer/songwriter James Ingram came up with the winning version.



THERE WERE SOME STRANGE RECORDING TECHNIQUES.


Bruce Swedien recalled recording some background vocals in the Westlake shower stall. The “Don’t think twice!” lines in the second verse of “Billie Jean” was Jackson singing through a five-foot-long carboard tube.



 CBS RECORDS AND MTV CLASHED OVER THE "BILLIE JEAN" VIDEO.


In March 1983, Billboard Magazine noticed a sizeable delay between the video’s delivery to the fledgling cable network and its first airing. MTV claimed they only played rock artists, but were accused by some—including publicly by Rick James—of being racist. CBS Records president Walter Yetnikoff threatened to pull all videos made by the label's artists off the network if they didn’t play “Billie Jean.” At first, the video ran two to three times a day for one month, before being put into heavy rotation for the next three months.



BLOODS AND CRIPS MADE CAMEOS IN THE "BEAT IT" VIDEO.


The video cost $150,000 to produce, and was directed by Bob Giraldi, even though “Billie Jean” director Steve Barron was initially set to direct it. Jackson and Barron intended to set the video on a slave ship, with Jackson as the slave master.



 THE "THRILLER" MUSIC VIDEO COST $500,000.


The Showtime cable network footed $300,000 of the budget for the rights to first air the music video and the “making of” feature, with MTV paying the rest to broadcast it after Showtime. Jackson asked John Landis to direct the video after seeing his work on the movie An American Werewolf in London. "I want to turn into a monster," Jackson told Landis. "Can I do that?" Landis wrote the disclaimer that appears in the beginning of the video because Jehovah’s Witnesses (a group which Jackson belonged to at the time) told the artist that “Thriller” endorsed Satanism.



THE "THRILLER" VIDEO PLAYED IN A MOVIE THEATRE SO THAT IT COULD QUALIFY FOR AN OSCAR


 For one week in a movie theatre in Westwood, California, Thriller served as the opening feature before showings of Fantasia (which didn't sit well with a lot of parents).



MANY FANS THOUGHT THE UPC BARCODE ON "THRILLER" WAS MICHAEL JACKSON’S HOME PHONE NUMBER.


The rumour spread so much that a hair studio in Bellevue, Washington received up to 50 phone calls per day. A woman in Youngstown, Ohio who also had the phone number said that while the kids that called were nice, some of the adults were “pretty rude and ignorant.”




"Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'"


 
Jackson wrote this song, which can be interpreted as an angry attack on the tabloid press and others who hounded him. A struggle with fame and being misunderstood were common themes for Jackson, and in this song he lashes out at those who take advantage of him: "They eat off of you, you're a vegetable."


 
At the end of this song, the chorus is "Ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma coo sas." The line is borrowed from Cameroon native Manu Dibango's 1972 song "Funky Soul Makasso." Jackson did not have permission to appropriate the song, and reached an out-of-court settlement with Dibango over the use.


 
Bruce Swedien, who was an engineer on the Thriller sessions, claimed this song is about "Michael's brothers' wives and how they were always creating trouble."


 
This was the fourth of seven US Top 10 hits from the Thriller album. It is by far the top selling album of all time worldwide.


 
"Billie Jean" is mentioned in the lyrics, "Billie Jean is always talkin' when nobody else is talkin'. Tellin' lies and rubbin' shoulders, so they called her mouth a motor." This briefly tells the story of the groupie that claimed Jackson was the father of her child and was the subject of the song, which was also on the Thriller album.


 
Various drum machines were used on this track. It's likely that the main rhythm comes from a LM-1 drum machine, which was the first programable machine that used real drum samples. Engineer Bruce Swedien recalls using a Univox. Greg Phillinganes, Michael Boddicker and Bill Wolfer are all credited on synthesizer on this track, and Jackson is one of three people credited for "bathroom stomping board," which gives you an idea of how many sounds were combined to create the backing track. Live musicians include:


 Rihanna sampled the "mama-ko, mama-sa, mama-ma-ko-sa" chant from this on her 2007 international hit single "Don't Stop the Music."


 
At Jackson's 2001 tribute special, Whitney Houston, Usher, and Mya performed this to start the show, which was made into a two-hour TV special.


 
Julia, Maxine and Oren Waters sang backing vocals on this track. Along with their other sibling Luther, they performed as The Waters and backed hundreds of artists, including Herble Hancock, Bon Jovi and Rod Stewart.




"Thriller"


This is a rare pop song with a horror theme. Halloween novelty songs like "Monster Mash" had been around for a while, but this was the first hit song with year-round appeal containing lyrics about creatures of the night who terrify their victim. At the time, Michael Jackson was one of the least frightening people on Earth, so the video had to sell it. John Landis, who worked on the 1981 movie An American Werewolf In London, was brought in to direct. Landis had Jackson turn into a Werewolf in the video.


 
Vincent Price, an actor known for his work on horror films, did the narration at the end of the song, including the evil laugh. Price's rap includes the line "Must stand and face the hounds of hell." This was inspired by the most popular Sherlock Holmes novel to date, The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in which Sir Henry Baskerville's family is supposedly cursed by a bloodthirsty, demonic hound. Price's personal friends, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee (who appeared in several horror films with him), starred in a loose 1959 film adaptation of it. It was the first Sherlock Holmes film shot in colour.




Price recorded the central spoken section in this song on his second take, after it had been written by Rod Temperton in the taxi on the way to the studio for the recording session.



 The music video is considered the most famous music video of all time, at least by the Library of Congress, which added it to its National Film Registry in 2009, the first music video in their registry.



The video was a cultural milestone, introducing elaborate choreography, costumes and dialogue into the format. It also introduced the concept of the long-form music video, where a mini-movie was made for a song, then edited down for the short version. The long version of "Thriller" runs nearly 14 minutes, but had remarkable longevity, easily racking up over 100 million views when it showed up on YouTube. MTV usually ran the short version, which ran a little under five minutes but still contained about a minute of non-song content in a storyline that omits most of the movie the couple is watching at the beginning.



With its famous graveyard dance, the video popularized group dance scenes in pop videos, a trend Pat Benatar pushed forward earlier in 1983 with her "Love Is A Battlefield" video.



The "Thriller" video owes a debt to Alice Cooper, who in 1975 created a movie based on the stage show for his Welcome To My Nightmare tour. Cooper's production was based on an entire album, but it also used a horror theme and was narrated by Vincent Price.


 
A British songwriter named Rod Temperton wrote this song. He was the main songwriter in his band Heatwave, which he formed with two Americans. After Heatwave's song "Boogie Nights" took off in 1977, Jones asked Temperton to write songs for Jackson, resulting in "Rock With You" and "Off The Wall," which became the title track to Jackson's 1979 album. When it came time for Jackson's next album, Temperton again delivered the title track, this time the song "Thriller."



Temperton also wrote two other songs on Thriller: "The Lady in My Life" and "Baby Be Mine." Those were the only songs on the album that weren't released as singles.


 
Most homes had VCRs in 1983 and sales of videos were big business. Along with the Jane Fonda workout tapes, you could buy a VHS or Beta copy of Michael Jackson's Thriller, which included the full video and also "The Making of Michael Jackson's Thriller," a behind the scenes documentary. This tape became the best selling music video at the time, and was later certified by Guinness World Records as the top selling music video of all time, moving nine million units. Part of its appeal was the price, a mere $24.95 at a time when movies on tape cost much more.



The video distribution deal was through a company called Vestron, which approached John Landis about selling the film directly to consumers, a move that turned out to be very profitable. The timing helped, as the video was released a few weeks before Christmas.

 

The video won for Best Performance Video, Best Choreography, and Viewers Choice at the first MTV Video Music Awards in 1984. The show was hosted by Dan Aykroyd and Bette Midler.


 
Thriller is by far the best selling album in the world. In the United States, it was overtaken by The Eagles Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975, but reclaimed the title after Jackson's death.


 
This was the last of seven US Top 10 hits from the Thriller album. The first single from the album, "The Girl Is Mine," reached its peak chart position of #2 on January 8, 1983. The song "Thriller" was released over a year later, on January 23, 1984, peaking at #4 on March 3. This lifespan of chart singles from one album was unprecedented, but so was the video for "Thriller." The clip was so effective that after six singles and a year of release, it boosted yet another track from the album into the Top 10. It also brought the album back to #1 on December 24, 1983 - it lost the top spot on September 17 to Synchronicity by The Police. Thriller held the peak position until April 21, 1984, over a year after it first went to #1 on February 26, 1983.


 
Jackson, who was a Jehovah's Witness at the time, insisted on a disclaimer at the beginning of the video reading: "Due to my strong personal convictions, I wish to stress that this film in no way endorses a belief in the occult." He asked for the disclaimer after taking criticism from Witness leaders who objected to the zombies and other creatures that violated their beliefs.



The whole Jackson clan was raised as Jehovah's Witnesses, but unlike Scientology, celebrities do not get excessive special treatment, and followers were asked not to idolize Jackson, as adulation should be given only to God. After further conflict, Jackson cut ties with the Jehovah's Witnesses in 1987.


 
The video cost about $500,000 to make, and Jackson's record company had no intention of paying for it, as the album was on the downswing and they had already financed videos for two of its songs. According to John Landis, Jackson really wanted to turn into a monster, so he offered to pay for the clip himself. Landis took on the project because he saw it as a way to revive the short film genre, which he loved.



Jackson didn't have to pay for the video out of pocket because they made deals with Showtime and MTV to cover the costs. Showtime got to air a one-hour special with the "making of" documentary and the 14-minute film before it was broadcast anywhere else. When MTV heard about this, their executive Bob Pittman decided that losing a Michael Jackson video to Showtime was unacceptable, and paid $250,000 for the exclusive broadcast rights once Showtime's window ended. MTV was founded on the principle of not paying for videos, so Pittman got around this by paying for the documentary, even though the money was really used to pay for the film.


 
By the time the video was released on December 2, 1983, the album had been out for a year but the sixth single, "P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)," was still climbing the chart. Not only that, Jackson's Paul McCartney duet "Say Say Say" (issued on McCartney's album) was at #2, about to begin a six-week run at #1. The "Thriller" single was released on January 23, 1984, two weeks after "P.Y.T." dropped out of the chart. It debuted at #20 on February 11 and stayed until May 12, giving the album an 18-month run of hit singles. To compare, Fleetwood Mac's Rumours album had chart singles for 12 months (all of 1977), which seemed to be the limit. Jackson was able to overcome listener fatigue and extend his reign thanks to the video and some astute timing.


 
Vincent Price, while a guest on the Johnny Carson's Tonight Show, laughingly stated that when he did the narration for "Thriller" (at the request of Michael Jackson who was a big fan of Price) he had a choice between taking a percentage of the album sales or $20,000. Price was well along in his career, so he took the $20,000. He was good-natured about it when Carson told him he could have made millions off of the royalties due to the vast number of copies sold even at that time. Price laughed heartily and said: "How well I know!"


 
Before the 14-minute short film of Thriller aired on Showtime or MTV, it was screened at the Metro Crest Theater in Los Angeles. This screening took place on November 14, 1983 and drew a gathering of stars, including Diana Ross and Eddie Murphy.


 
In 2008, Thriller 25, a special 25th anniversary edition of Thriller, was released. The re-recorded album debuted at #2 on the Top Comprehensive Albums chart, where catalog titles mix with current best-sellers. This made it the highest-charting catalog album in the history of the Top Comprehensive Albums survey. Despite selling 166,000 copies in its debut week, it was not eligible for the main album chart as Billboard considered it to be a catalog or oldies album, and Billboard publishes a special chart just for catalog albums.


 
The version of the song in the video is different from the one on the album, which you need to account for if you're planning to stage a "Thriller" dance. On the album, the song begins with a series of spooky sound effects that don't lend themselves to dancing.



Editing the song for the video was a challenge because producer Quincy Jones wouldn't release the master tapes. In the book I Want My MTV, John Landis explains how they got around this restriction. "The song was five minutes long, and I needed it to be 12 minutes for the video," he said. "So Michael and I went to the recording studio at three in the morning. We walked past the guard - 'Hi, Michael.' 'Hi' - put the tracks in a big suitcase and walked out with them. Then we drove across Hollywood, duped them, and put them back."


 
When Rod Temperton started writing this song, he called it "Starlight" or "Starlight Love" - one of his early demos its titled "Starlight Sun." Quincy Jones wanted a better title, so Temperton wracked his brain until he settled on "Midnight Man." Then he got a better idea.



"I woke up, and I just said this word," he told The Sunday Telegraph in 2007. "Something in my head just said, this is the title. You could visualize it on the top of the Billboard charts. You could see the merchandising for this one word, how it jumped off the page as 'Thriller.'"


 
In the UK this has become a Halloween chart perennial, starting in 2007 when it reached #57. In 2008, it reached #35 after 1,227 people gathered in Notttingham on Halloween to perform the dance dressed as zombies. It has returned to the chart every year since.



Following Jackson's death in the summer of 2009, "Thriller" made an additional UK chart appearance, climbing to #12.


 
Rod Temperton recalled that when he wrote this song he envisaged "this talking section at the end and didn't know really what we were going to do with it. But one thing I 'd thought about was to have a famous voice in the horror genre to do the vocal. Quincy (Jones, producer)'s wife knew Vincent Price, so Quincy said to me, 'How about if we got Vincent Price?'" (Source Q magazine August 2009).


 
In the week of Jackson's death, sales of his records soared. In the US, this song was the late singer's best-selling track at 167,000 copies, while the top-selling album was Number Ones at 108,000.


 
In an interview from the 1980s, published by the News of The World, Jackson revealed that he was considering scrapping the Thriller album before being inspired by watching children play. He said: "Thriller sounded so crap. The mixes sucked. When we listened to the whole album, there were tears... I just cried like a baby. I stormed out of the room and said, 'We're not releasing this'." Jackson added: "One of the maintenance crew in the studio had a bicycle and so I took it and rode up to the schoolyard. I just watched the children play. When I came back I was ready to rule the world. I went into the studio and I turned them songs out."


 
The Thriller dance has become the world's most famous choreography, fueled by a number of stunts and viral videos. Those who grew up with the song know at least some of the moves and often get a rush of nostalgia from them. It also crosses cultural boundaries, giving it global appeal.




The trend picked up steam with the 2004 movie 13 Going On 30, where Jennifer Garner turns a stodgy party into a joyous occasion by starting a Thriller dance. In 2006, Guinness introduced the "Largest Thriller Dance" category, set by a group of 62 people in Toronto. This group organized under the name "Thrill The World" and staged more record breaking attempts over the next several years, establishing a tradition where the dance is done in conjunction with Halloween with the dancers dressed as zombies.




In 2007, a group of about 1500prisoners in the Philippines did a surprisingly good routine to the song, resulting in a video that quickly gathered millions of views. This is one of the few non-Zombie Thriller dances to get much attention - they were wearing their orange prison jumpsuits.



The 2008 Nottingham, England gathering of 1,227 zombie dancers established a new mark, but in 2009 that record was shattered by a gathering in Mexico City when 13,597 ghoulish dancers took to the streets. This took place on August 29, on what would have been Jackson's 51st birthday.


 
The UPC code on the album cover contained seven digits that were rumored to be Jackson's telephone number. People with that number in many different area codes got swamped with annoying calls.


 
The female lead in the video is Ola Ray, who was Playboy's Miss June of 1980.


 
In 2008, this was used in a commercial for Sobe beverages that premiered on the Super Bowl. It showed their lizard mascots dancing to the song with model Naomi Campbell. It wasn't the first time Campbell danced on film to a Michael Jackson song: she appeared in his video for "In The Closet."


 
There isn't much crossover between Michael Jackson and Alice Cooper, but they have Vincent Price in common. The shock rocker used Price on the introduction to his 1975 song "The Black Widow," which was a key part of Cooper's subsequent Welcome To My Nightmare tour. A highly theatrical production, the stage show was made into a movie that year, with Price performing his introduction. In many ways, Welcome To My Nightmare was an antecedent to "Thriller."


 
Special makeup effects were created by Rick Baker (who plays the zombie whose arm falls off in the graveyard sequence). Baker was the first Academy Award winner in the Best Make-Up category for his work in An American Werewolf in London (1981).


 
Michael Jackson provided the wolf sounds himself after a failed attempt from a disinterested canine. Bruce Swedien, the album's engineer, had the bright idea of recruiting his 200-pound Great Dane for the howls. He brought the dog into a barn at night to listen to the coyotes, hoping it would prompt an eerie response, but the pooch refused to comply.


 
For the creaking door effects, Swedien rented a few sound effects doors from Universal Studios in Hollywood and spent a day recording the miked hinges. It's possible the accompanying footsteps came from Jackson.


 
Because of a disagreement over royalties, Vincent Price's rap was not included in the 7" single version of the recording.



 
A black-and-red calfskin jacket worn by Jackson in the song's video was bought by Milton Verret, a Texas commodities trader at an auction in California for $1.8 million in June 2011. Jackson wore the jacket in the scene where a group of zombies rise from their graves and break into a dance routine.



 
 

Last edited by arabchanter (15/4/2019 12:54 am)

Tek wrote:

 
When listening to music it is important to try and separate the man or woman (though nearly always the man) from the music. 
 

Aye, but Gary Glitter never got in the book.....................
 

PatReilly wrote:

Tek wrote:

 
When listening to music it is important to try and separate the man or woman (though nearly always the man) from the music. 
 

Aye, but Gary Glitter never got in the book.....................
 

Letter of complaint and disappointment duly sent to author. 
 

Album 511.
Bruce Springsteen..............................Nebraska   (1982)










This album is maybe Springsteen’s most critically underrated. It consists of very dark songs questioning society, and ends with “reason to believe”, a somewhat hopeful song that reflects on humanity’s determination to go on. The placement of the song leaves the dark album with a note of hope, in one of the most impressive song placements of all time.


 Even though Springsteen did not record the album in the same style of famous American rockabilly/country/blues singer Johnny Cash, he tried to find inspiration for the style and the themes of the album by listening repeatedly to the singles and the albums Cash published for his first label, the Sun Records. Those records featured songs talking about the poors, the beaten down, the prisoners. Johnny Cash himself reacted enthusiastically to this album, seeing shades of his younger self in this new, dark version of Springsteen, and in fact, he recorded two covers from Nebraska: Johnny 99 and Highway Patrolman.



I've taken the family down south for a few days break, I'm trying to use my daughters laptop without a plug in mouse (forgot to bring it) and I canny get on wi' that cuntin' square thing, It's far too sensitive for my liking, just have to look at it and it starts doing it's own thing.


Anyways will try and do "The Birthday Party" the night, but can see my comments being quite short unless the wee square hoodgeemadoodge takes pity on me.   .
 

I like Nick Cave these days, and thought 'The Birthday Party' was a great name, but Junk Yard doesn't have many (any?) memorable moments.

It's an odd thing too: most musicians I like it'd be the early stuff which I'd most favour, eventually conceding after their latest release that they should have chucked it years ago.

Album 510.
Venom......................Black Metal   (1982)





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Been away for a wee break with the family but back now so lets see what this Venom are all about?


Another new band and genre for me, I can't say I've ever listened to any of their stuff before and I wasn't holding out any hope for an enjoyable 40ish minutes of this mob, but found it quite decent to be honest.


I was expecting massive guitar solos and wanky high pitched screaming and endless noodling, but obviously the lead chanter's balls had dropped as he had this kinda growly voice which even when he put in what seems to be the obligatory scream it was a far cry from the Zeppelinesque "I canny wait to get these jeans aff, my ba's are killin' me" big Jessie squeal. I think it was the constant driving rhythm and the occultist lyrics that made this an interesting listen, it was almost had the intensity of punk with an air of goth served on an alter of black magic and ably backed up by the chilling, but I should think for this type of music "made to measure" voice of the lead singer.


All in all this album surprised me, I liked most of it but certainly not "At War with Satan (preview)" which seemed to be a bit of a monologue, the title track "Black Metal" for me was probably the pick of the bunch, but "Don't Burn the Witch" and "Teacher's Pet" were also good in fact most of the tracks I could deffo listen to again.


This album will only be getting downloaded for now, but who knows in the future?

Black Metal wont be going into my vinyl collection.  (just yet)






Bits & Bobs;


The true story of Venom, the most influential NWOBHM band of them all    So who were the most important band to emerge from the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal? Iron Maiden? Def Leppard? Nope. It was Venom, Geordie Devil-worshippers who invented a brand-new genre 

Dateline: June 5, 2003. This news just in: Drummer Lars Ulrich is furious at news that the US military is using Metallica songs to ‘break down’ Iraqi captives in Baghdad. 

A little under a year later, and with post-war Iraq in a state of anarchy, some might consider Ulrich’s remarks to be something of a soundbite by themselves. The more cynical may even believe that instead of standing for ‘weapons of mass destruction’ the term WMD could also refer to ‘worries about Metallica downloadability’. But I’d prefer to think that Ulrich, in an open-hearted, post-therapy way, was simply being sentimental. Reading between the lines of his comments, he was probably just trying to be helpful and revive some interest in his old mates’ back catalogue. Because Metallica’s relationship with Venom – the notorious Geordie three-piece who first invited us to sample their own, uniquely dangerous brand of Angel Dust back at the turn of the 80s – goes back a long way.
  

 It was after a show with Venom in New York that then Metallica guitarist Dave Mustaine (later of Megadeth) had a huge bust-up with guitarist/vocalist James Hetfield. Mustaine was left bloodied and bruised, and was told he was within a Metalli-metre of losing his job. It turned out to be a very real threat, in fact, because Mustaine managed only one more gig with the band (supporting The Rods) before being sent packing with First Aid kit in hand, and Exodus’s Kirk Hammett was ushered in as his replacement with almost indecent haste. 


 Later, Mustaine recalled: “Generally, James was a gentle person when we were together but he liked very violent music. We would drive at 60 miles an hour up and down the Pacific Coast Highway in the fog, drunk and listening to Venom.” 
 Moreover, Venom gave Metallica their first big break in Europe 20 years ago, when the band invited Lars & co over from California to support them on tour. The dates kicked off in February 1984 in Zurich, Switzerland, and covered Germany, France and Belgium before finishing up at a fledgling thrash-metal festival in Holland. 

 So was that tour with Metallica as momentous as it sounds? It’s about time Venom leader Cronos was given the chance to have his say.
  
 “Did Metallica support Venom on numerous occasions?” spits the bassist/vocalist, who these days increasingly uses his real name, Conrad Lant. “Someone should remind them of that; they appear to have forgotten. I read an article with Arse Ulrich the other day where he said the start of their career was on a Motörhead tour. Cor blimey, fancy that, eh? You see what the dangers of fame can do – erase your memory and make you wear girls’ make-up.”
  
 Laughing (better make that cackling), Cronos continues: “I remember having a good time with them, actually. We didn’t want a ‘rock band’ to support us. And I’d been sent a cassette [Metallica’s Metal Up Yer Ass demos] and some dodgy video footage of them in San Francisco, and I thought they were quite Venomous; they were wearing Venom shirts on stage if I remember rightly. This was when Mustaine was still with them. So we asked them to support us on our first mission to the States in 1983, then again on our seven-date European tour a year later. The last gig we did together was when they supported us at the Loreley Festival in Germany in 1985.” 

 Cronos went to see Metallica years later when they played Whitley Bay Ice Rink. “I got chased by security when they saw me light up a massive reefer,” he growls, “but I escaped and got into the snake-pit. I had a laugh jumping around in a mosh dance with the fans, then I got Hetfield’s attention and mouthed the words: ‘Get off, you’re shit.’ It took him about two seconds to realise it was me.
  
 As Lars Ulrich once said: “[The first Venom album] Welcome To Hell was a classic! Black metal, speed metal, death metal, whatever you want to call it, Venom started it all with that one record!” 
  Alternatively, as Jon Bon Jovi would have it: “This is the sort of shit that gives heavy metal a bad name.” 
 That’s Venom for you: a legend in their own demise. 
 It all began with Elvis Presley. As it often does. “I started listening to music at quite an early age,” Cronos snarls. “Elvis was my hero. Then I moved on to David Bowie, T.Rex, Status Quo and Led Zeppelin. But my serious, hardcore life-changing experience came with the Sex Pistols.” 

  The punk era in the mid-70s, it appears, was exactly what Cronos craved. “People like me needed to rebel,” he grumbles. “We needed to stick a middle finger up to the establishment and say: ‘Fuck you. We have our own ideas, our own rules.’ I told people that Johnny Rotten was my dad, even though he would only have been about six when I was born. And I used to tell people that I was the drummer in The Clash, even though I couldn’t play drums. But I was a member of the Sham [69] Army, hence the Doc Martens I always wear, and we used to roam the streets getting into drunken fights for the hell of it. Ah, them were the days!” 
  Cronos played in a band with school friends, “but we just made a racket, same as now really,” he snaps. “I just thought it was such fun that you could kind of make it up as you went along, and considering I’d been acting in plays from a very young age, learning and memorising the whole script, which is great fun and hard work, I was totally relaxed on a stage in front of an audience. But with acting you have to read other people’s lines, so playing music was like a spontaneous outburst. We just jammed on any riffs we could come up with and shouted out the words on the spur of the moment. Those were good times.”  After he left school, Cronos got a job at Impulse Studios in nearby Wallsend. Impulse would later become the epicentre for a series of vital NWOBHM recordings on the Neat Records label. (The first of those releases was catalogue number Neat 03: the Tygers Of Pan Tang single Don’t Touch Me There). Bands such as Raven, White Spirit, Fist, Avenger and, of course, Venom would follow.    “I applied for a job on a training scheme for an audio-visual engineer, and I went for an interview at Impulse. This was in 1979, and there was no Neat at this point,” Cronos lacerates. “I trained as an assistant engineer and tape operator, which was a good laugh. The senior engineer used to walk in the studio and skin up a joint or 20 and we’d get battered before the band of the day came in; this was very normal then. Most of the bands arrived with crates of beer or bags of coke. There were even orgies when some of the musicians brought slags in from Whitley Bay who they’d met the night before. The managing director turned a blind eye to everything and just sat downstairs with his Special Brew and Café Crème cigars.” 

 In the meantime, Cronos continued to play in bands; he was guitarist in an outfit called Album Graecum (“We read in a book that it’s Greek or Latin for ‘dried dogs’ shit’”) that later metamorphosed into DwarfStar.  “One day I chatted up a girl who worked in the local burger bar and she asked me around to her house,” Cronos bellows. “Jeff [Dunn, later to become Venom guitarist Mantas] was there with a girlfriend and we got chatting. He said he was in Guillotine, a Judas Priest covers band – he was the double of [Priest guitarist] KK Downing in those days; he even had a Flying V. I told him about DwarfStar and how we did dark, demonic stuff with pentagrams et cetera – like Black Sabbath but much more evil – and about my masterplan to create a mega-satanic band.”  Dunn’s eyes lit up: “I wanna do stuff like that!” he exclaimed.   Cronos soon met up with Dunn’s band and thought, “with a few changes they would be more suited for what I had in mind. There were some underlying problems with DwarfStar anyway, so I left them and joined up with Jeff’s lot; the band had actually renamed themselves Venom by this time. I met the drummer, Tony [Bray, soon to adopt the pseudonym Abaddon], at the first rehearsal; he was buddies with the singer, Clive Archer.”  Cronos was initially the second guitarist in a five-piece Venom. “But within a short while the bassist [Alan Winston] left just before a small gig we had planned, so I got a loan of a bass from a friend at the studio and plugged it into my stack, effects pedals and all, and the unholy bulldozer bass was born!”   At this point the Venom members decided to change their names to match their burgeoning Devil-may-care approach. “As we were rehearsing some new songs and going through stage-gear ideas at rehearsals, I mentioned that as some of the Sex Pistols had pseudo names we should do the same,” Cronos screams. “It just made sense to call ourselves something more hardcore than Conrad, Jeffrey, Clive and Anthony. Clive’s stage name was Christus or something like that.”   In a 1982 interview with Garry Bushell, Cronos elaborated: “They’re more than stage names, they’re states of mind. It’s sort of like a possession. We actually feel possessed before a gig. We start getting really angry and mad. We have to have a fight before we can go on stage… it’s the only way we can play.”   One day Clive ‘Christus’ Archer failed to turn up to a Venom rehearsal. He was apparently disgruntled because his back garden had been destroyed – it had been used as testing ground for Venom’s pyrotechnics. Cronos wasn’t disappointed: “Clive was painting his face like some bands do nowadays,” he guffaws. “I used to have to watch him while he stood still waiting for his make-up to dry, ha-ha!”   In Archer’s absence Cronos “sang some tracks just so we could get on with rehearsals, and it worked really well,” he roars. “It was after this that Jeff wrote the song Live Like An Angel (Die Like A Devil) and said he wanted me to sing on it. We did a rough recording of the track, and the decision was made to get rid of Clive. This was when we turned into a three-piece.”  But for all Cronos’s blusterings, no one in the north-east was taking Venom seriously at the time. As Jess Cox, ex-singer with the Tygers Of Pan Tang, recalls: “I remember Venom’s first show in Wallsend just across from Impulse Studios – it was for one of their mum’s birthdays. There were only 10 or so people in this old council hall, and the band had long metal pipes full of gunpowder on the sides of the stage. One fell over and exploded, nearly taking out all of their families in the process!”   Cox also remembers when Cronos, Mantas (at this time working as a petrol-pump attendant) and Abaddon (a labourer) came into Impulse for some early studio sessions.   “We had a laugh because it was so terrible,” Cox says. “It was just a racket with someone grunting over the top. If the truth be known, pretty much all of the bands in our local area didn’t understand the fascination with Venom. The band were truly dreadful; or maybe this was the whole idea and I missed the point?”   Cronos responds: “Mrs Small Cox is a lying turd”.   Soon enough, a Venom demo landed on my desk while I was working on Sounds music weekly. Dispatched to me by Cronos himself, for some reason I knew immediately I was on to something rather special – even if the package was rather slimy to the touch and whatever was inside it crackled like broken chicken bones. Donning a pair of surgical gloves, I extracted a three-song cassette: Angel Dust, Raise The Dead and Red Light Fever. I remember playing the tracks on the office stereo one time, and within seconds all of my fellow journos had vacated their desks and fled the building – not so much in protest; they were white-faced and panic-stricken, and genuinely seemed in fear of their lives. So I was sat alone and bewildered when I was assaulted by a terrible racket that went something like this:  “Blaaargh-blaaargh! Urk-schluurp-urk-schluurp! Wooargh! Glurg-glurg-gag-gag! Kak-kak-kak! Phludd! Spat-spat-rooargh! Phludd! Groouurf! Yeowll! Wooargh! Gortch-gortch! Yeowll! Budda-budda! Achh-acch! Yeurgh! Kuch-kerrouch-kuch! Ghungh-ghungh! Wooargh! Hargh-hargh-spew! Ug-ughh! And one last wooargh! for good measure!”    I had never heard anything like it. It was like being a living, breathing, tormented character in an Exorcist movie. Only Venom didn’t just make Linda Blair’s head revolve like some child-friendly funfair roundabout; instead the band ripped her cranium from her shoulders, brandished it triumphantly above their heads and then smashed it down through splintered floorboards, to be reduced to grey ashes in the incandescent kingdom below.   Cronos convulses at the memory: “You put the three tracks from our tape on your Sounds playlist, then you wrote a comment on the end of a White Spirit single review where you basically told Neat to release a Venom disc. Yeah, you definitely helped, Geoff. I don’t think Dave [Wood, head honcho at Neat Records] would have even considered Venom without your intervention. He always needed to be told what to release, as he didn’t understand this music at all.”   Venom debuted on Neat in 1980 with the In League With Satan single, and followed it with the Welcome To Hell album in December ’81. No one could believe their ears. The band’s music was just so heavy, evil and truly black.   I felt I had to compete with lyrics that boasted of ‘killing new-born babies’ and ‘tearing infants’ flesh’, so my five-star rave review of Welcome To Hell was satisfyingly over the top: ‘It’s the sound of sinners screaming in eternal damnation, hellfire licking at their blackened limbs,’ I wrote. ‘It’s the sound of a succubus mating orgasmically with a mortal man… it’s possibly the heaviest record ever allowed in the shops for public consumption.’   But beneath all their God-bothering splutterings, Venom’s actual music was uniquely monstrous. As I said, no band had ever sounded like this before.  “I would never, ever have wanted to be in a band like Iron Maiden or Saxon, and I didn’t want to be commercial or sound like anyone else,” Cronos gnaws. “We wanted to create music that scared people. And we succeeded.”   Even Black Sabbath were too lightweight for Cronos: “Sabbath had these lyrics like: ‘Oh no, please God help me.’ They were asking to be saved from Satan, whereas we were saying the opposite: Satan is my friend, I drink with him, I have fun with him and I want him to be by my side. We wanted to invent something like a nightmare, something truly hideous.”   The reason why Venom remain such an important band is because they invented and defined at least one, and probably several, all-new musical styles. They certainly created thrash metal, the genre that spawned bands such as Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax, Exodus, Death, Possessed and many more in the US. Venom also gave birth (in typical Rosemary’s Baby-style) to a host of imitators in the UK and, particularly, in continental Europe: Celtic Frost, Mercyful Fate, Bathory, Destruction, no end of groups on the Earache label and from the German industrial city of Bochum, Cradle Of Filth… the list just goes on and on.   With the NWOBHM celebrating its 25th anniversary [at time of writing in 2005], it’s pertinent to point out that none of Venom’s more mainstream contemporaries – no matter how many gold and platinum albums they might have hanging on their walls these days; no matter how much they might think of themselves as having once been trailblazers – was remotely as influential. That’s an irrefutable fact. (Although in Venom’s case the acronym NWOBHM most likely stood for New Wave Of Brutally Horrible Metal.)   “I got pissed off when I saw a heavy metal chart in a music magazine that had Michael Jackson in it [Jacko’s 1983 hit Beat It, featuring Eddie Van Halen on guitar],” Cronos oozes. “That’s when I said that Venom were not heavy metal, we were much more than that. I had been playing around with various ideas, so in an interview I said we were black metal, power metal, thrash metal, speed metal, death metal, anything but heavy metal. And these terms seemed to stick.   “Venom albums contain songs from all of these categories,” he yelps, “although after we started out, bands started to emerge that would only use one. Some bands played songs like Witching Hour or Bloodlust and called themselves speed metal; some groups played songs like Buried Alive and called themselves death metal, et cetera. I could go on about this, but I think you get the picture.   “All of the acts that dabbled in the musical black arts before Venom arrived on the scene always seemed to take a sort of Hammer horror approach, or they sang about being tormented by a wizard or whatever,” Cronos disgorges. “No one wanted to actually be the Devil. So that’s my job now – I am Satan!”   This seems an appropriate point at which to bring up the subject of demented church-burning Scandinavians; those worshippers of the Horned One from the bleak and frozen northern territories of Europe. Imbeciles such as Count Grishnackh of the one-man band Burzum used Venom’s music as a template but took it to murderous extremes – yes folks, Varg Vikernes actually killed people.   “Venom were a catalyst for a whole bunch of stuff; we kick-started loads of new trends in various directions,” Cronos shrieks. “The most extreme thing to come out of England before Venom was the punk era, and nothing has topped those extremes since. Everyone now sticks to a safe image, and it’s more about marketing than doing what you believe in. Look at The Darkness, for example… although no, let’s not. The Scandinavian scene probably wouldn’t have happened if they hadn’t crossed the line and committed those crimes to get the exposure.   “I recently read about Marilyn Manson’s shit, with kids killing themselves, and the reviewer said: ‘If it wasn’t for bands like Venom then none of this dark music would be around and our kids would be safe.’ But didn’t they say the same about Elvis? Music only works if it’s an extreme. The Rolling Stones were once an extreme, but then after a while the extreme becomes the norm and a new level of extreme needs to be found. I’d murder everyone on Pop Idol, even the judges. What’s the matter with them? None of those acts are any good, kill ’em all!”   Following Welcome To Hell, further Venom albums arrived with indecent haste: 1982’s magnificently harrowing Black Metal and 1984’s semi-conceptual offering At War With Satan saw the band making great strides forward, especially in mainland Europe where they built up a formidable following. But Venom were virtually shunned in the UK; tour dates kept on being announced and then scrapped, tarnishing the band’s already questionable reputation.   Cronos barks: “We had a lot of venues in Britain pull the plug at the eleventh hour. We had sent them the first video [Witching Hour and Bloodlust] as an example of our show, and we sent them pyro specs and everything, but they mustn’t have watched them, as at the last minute some venues said we couldn’t use pyro. This has plagued us all the way through our career.”   In fact Venom had ambitions to emulate Kiss’s stage show but they never had the money to do so successfully. Thus, while the US stadium-strutters could afford state-of-the-art military hardware, Venom had to make do with rusty Kalashnikovs, recycled land mines, body armour made out of Christmas turkey foil, and cannons last used against the Spanish Armada.   “I’ve considered dropping the pyro to get back to the way we were with the early albums – raw and ferocious,” Cronos spits. “We never had much pyro at first, even the first video only had a small theatrical flash at the start and end; plenty of smoke though. I think the legend of Venom’s pyro show is a myth. People say we had a million effects in each song at the Hammersmith Odeon [Venom finally headlined that London venue on the At War With Satan tour]. But it’s like Chinese whispers. Check the video out; there’s not that much, really.   “I’d like some sort of stage show, of course, but in light of all the terrorist shit it’s going to be even more impossible to cart a boatload of pyro around the world, isn’t it? I’m seriously considering nixing the bombs. It would make life a lot easier, plus we could play a lot more of the venues.”   Classic Rock’s Dante Bonutto, for one, has fond memories of Venom’s Hammersmith performance: “They attempted to create Hell itself below their drum kit – Abaddon was perched on the tallest drum riser I’ve ever seen, his head was practically touching the venue’s ceiling – but all they succeeded in doing was to set fire to the curtains at the back!”   But, as Abaddon insisted at the time: “This band is fucking brain-melting. At Hammersmith we were recorded at 147 decibels before they switched the PA on!” Or, as the moustachio’d Mantas responded: “We don’t do gigs, we do shows. It’s massive. If you stand at the front you’re gonna get your head blown off.” In many ways Venom’s gory (sic; or should that be sick?) years revolved around their first three albums. Possessed, released in 1985, failed to match the satanic majesty of the previous releases and the band began to stray into bog-standard heavy-metal cliché territory with tracks such as We’re Gonna Burn This Place To The Ground and Too Loud (For The Crowd).   A planned US tour was thrown into confusion as Mantas caught chicken pox, and local north-east guitarists Les Cheetham (from Avenger) and Dave Irwin (from Fist) were brought in to replace him. Mantas decided to leave Venom in 1986 (when the band released the Nightmare EP and the Eine Kleine Nachtmusik live album), only to resurface shortly afterward with an AOR-oriented solo album! Less Venom, more Vandenberg, you might say. Or as Kerrang!’s Derek Oliver commented at the time: ‘Mantas’s guitar break is quite the best thing since the recent Jeff Beck album.’   At the time, Cronos claims, Jeff ‘Mantas’ Dunn was in all manner of confusion over his hellish alter ego: “He seemed at odds with himself, he didn’t seem to know what he wanted. He said he left Venom because of pressures from his new girlfriend. He said he also felt under duress because of the activities of the rest of the band and crew, which were basically sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, which we thought was normal for us, young lads on the road enjoying ourselves.   “There’s been loads of comments apparently from Jeff about this period, but he says one thing to one person and then something else to another, so what can you really believe?” Cronos excoriates. “All I know is if he’d really had a problem with either myself or Tony then he wouldn’t have rejoined the band with us years later, after he’d just split with this girlfriend. So you make your own minds up.”   For 1987 album Calm Before The Storm, Mantas was replaced by two guitarists, Jimmy C (Jim Clare) and Mike H (Mike Hickey). But internal friction soon caused Cronos and Clare to break away, relocating to America and resurfacing as Cronos (the band).   “After Venom did the Calm Before The Storm album there were growing tensions between the manager, the drummer and the two new guys,” Cronos snorts. “I couldn’t be arsed with this shit and I didn’t think the new guys deserved it as they were doing a good job, so I sided with them. Then I decided I just needed a change – and a laugh. I was finding the arguments boring and everything was getting on my nerves. I wanted to let my hair down and just make music.   “The American guitarist [Hickey] had gone back to the States, and I was talking to him on the phone when he invited me and the other guitarist [Clare] over to his for a break. We took him up on the offer, and while out partying we met an American drummer [Chris Patterson]. We went to his house where he had a rehearsal studio in his basement, we got wasted, plugged the gear in, went through some tunes, and Cronos the band was formed in true rock’n’roll fashion.   “We recorded a few albums and videos, and we got to tour America and play the UK et cetera, so we had a good time,” Cronos reviles. “It was good for me to do this. I saw the other side of the industry; I even drove the tour bus and the truck to the gigs on occasion. What a riot that was, charging through the icy, foggy valleys of Wales in January, in a loaded truck full of equipment and you can’t see two feet in front of the vehicle. Very scary shit. Hell yeah!”   Venom regrouped without Cronos, but with Mantas and Abaddon, for 1989’s Prime Evil effort. The line-up was augmented by singer Tony Dolan (ex- Atomkraft) and rhythm guitarist Al Barnes.   Cronos dismisses the Dolan-era Venom with a shrug: “From the little I heard of the cover versions of my songs it didn’t sound like Venom to me, just another short-lived tribute band – lame and boring and who gives a fuck anyway. I get the royalty statements, and I can tell you that ‘they’ certainly didn’t make me rich.”   When Dolan eventually quit the band, he amazingly cited Venom’s links to Satanism as the main reason!   Apart from the new stuff with Dolan on vocals, much of the 90s releases by Venom seemed to be endless compilations, dubious live albums and re-recordings of past glories. Thus the band’s popularity slipped further.     The classic three-demon line-up of Cronos, Mantas and Abaddon eventually reunited in 1995 to headline a couple of European festivals. An all-new album, Cast In Stone, followed in 1997.   Cronos ejaculates: “I’d heard that the Tony Dolan line-up had split around 1993, so I contacted a guy called Mark Wharton [ex-Cathedral drummer] to form another Venom in 1994. We had a blast, and recorded some stuff with Mike Hickey. This was also while I was still with Cronos the band. But there were growing problems with the people at Neat Records so I decided not to do a deal for the album with them. I let them use some tracks on a compilation as a one-off, but the album remains as demos and unreleased.   “In 1995 I decided to contact the original members of Venom to see what their views were on re-forming the band, and they were surprisingly up for it,” he masticates. “We organised a gig at the Waldrock Festival in Holland to see how it would go. The drums were sloppy and the guitar was out of tune, so I figured this was the original Venom again then. We then set about looking for a deal, and Jeff and I started writing songs. But it didn’t take long for the bullshit to kick in and I knew it wouldn’t last; something would have to change or we’d be splitting again.”   The turning point came in the form of a letter Cronos received a few months later from drummer Tony ‘Abaddon’ Bray.   “Tony wrote to tell me that my ‘services were no longer required’ and he was going to continue with Jeff and some other people, blah-blah- blah. I couldn’t stop laughing for days,” Cronos skulks. “Then I phoned the German record company [SPV] to tell them the score and wish them good luck with whatever they decided. But they went ballistic and refused point-blank to have any line-up of Venom that didn’t have Cronos in the band.   “So basically I contacted Jeff and told him the score, and we went into rehearsals with my younger brother Antny [of DefConOne] on drums. We asked Antny if he would be interested in doing an album and he said he’d give it his best shot – he even changed his name to Antton! Then while we were recording the album in Germany the record company said they loved what Antny was doing on the songs and thought the album was Venom’s heaviest yet. We had to agree, and Jeff commented that Antny was the first drummer he’d worked with in 20 years who could play the Venom songs the way he wanted them to be played.” The result was the aptly named 2000 album Resurrection, and Venom were back on the track. But not for long.   Earlier this year, Cronos re-emerged after an unusually quiet period as one of the guest singers on Nirvana/Foo Fighters man Dave Grohl’s Probot album, contributing some characteristically guttural utterances to a track called Centuries Of Sin. Cronos’s enforced silence had been due to serious injuries sustained in a climbing accident in February 2002.   “I’d travelled to Wales to meet up with some old friends, ex-Marines, for a get-together,” he drools. “One of them said there were some great climbing spots near to where we were staying, so the next day we set off on a mission. It was halfway up that I dislodged some loose rock and lost my footing and fell. I landed on a ledge and then a whole heap of rock fell on top of me. The doctors said I’d damaged the muscles, tendons and bones in my neck. They said if I hadn’t had such thick neck muscles then the rock impact could’ve snapped my bones and I’d probably be in a wheelchair.”   A dice with death indeed. (When once asked what song he would like played at his funeral, Cronos responded: “In League With Satan, definitely!”)   “The doctors initially said this could take up to 12 months to heal,” Cronos grinds, “although in fact it has taken just over two years and I’ve had to attend physiotherapy sessions to regain mobility in my neck. I’ve now started going back to the gym and feel okay; so far, so good. I’m not getting any pains but I’m taking it easy; I’m not leaping around the rehearsal room like a baboon – yet.”   So Venom are far from dead and buried. “I’m now in the last stages of physiotherapy since my accident,” Cronos exhumes. “I’ve just started rehearsing again with Antny and putting the new ideas together for the next Venom album. This has been the most frustrating two years of my life. I’ve been playing music and working out in the gym since I was a teenager, so to have to opt out of both was really hard. At first I thought I was going nuts.   “I’ve tried contacting Jeff but I’ve had no replies. He’s apparently involved in another solo project of his. I spoke to him last year and he sent me some new riff ideas, but then I never heard back from him. I’ll not know what his plans are until he gets back to me. I have another guitarist I’m rehearsing with in the meantime [an unnamed ex-Venom member], so we’ll just have to wait and see what happens. But, hell yeah, I’ll be back!”   Personally, I can’t wait to see a fully fit Cronos wielding his unholy bulldozer bass once again – a weapon of mass destruction by itself. And thinking about that other supposed definition of WMD (‘worries about Metallica downloadability’) reminds me of another of Venom’s dubious attributes: the band were also pioneers of musical piracy. Because as one commentator put it succinctly around the time of the release of the band’s Welcome To Hell album:  ‘Home taping is killing music. And so are Venom.’    ‘Shok To The System   Cronos’s most outstanding Venom memory is of appearing at the Aardshok festival in Holland – even though the band didn’t actually get to play there on the day.   “We were meant to headline the festival,” he recalls, “but all our equipment was still en route back from America so we just turned up to say: ‘We’ll be back next year.’ Then we played the Bloodlust and Witching Hour videos on the huge screens and the crowd went nuts. Jeff [Mantas] started crying. We just couldn’t believe the response. It was awesome.”  And Cronos’s worst Venom memory?  “Having to put up with those other two miserable muthafuckers in the band!”    Cut ‘Em Down To Size   Venom - specifically Cronos - always had a strained relationship with the press. People almost seemed scared of the band’s bassist/vocalist.  “Yeah, well, they must have given me reason to make them feel like that,” Cronos gristles. “Unfortunately some press people seem to think they have a licence to take the piss. And that’s at their peril. I’d fight a rhino if it charged at me. That’s just the way I am.  “There was an incident at one of the British festivals [the 1985 Castle Donington Monsters Of Rock] that people keep bringing up. It was shit what happened, but I had no choice. I was signing autographs for some fans when this press guy came up and started hassling me about his god versus my demons or something. Then he jumped on my back, so I threw him in a puddle of mud. End of story. That’s all it was.”  Classic Rock’s Malcolm Dome (for it was he) remembers the incident somewhat differently: “That’s not quite the way it happened. Cronos jumped on my back, and we both collapsed in a heap in the mud, flailing around, going on about some nonsense concerning ‘evil’. I think there were witnesses who’d back up this part of the story. But it was just a load of drunken silliness.”  Cronos even pulled a knife on Classic Rock’s Dante Bonutto one time. Venom were angry because Raven, a rival Geordie band, had ‘hijacked’ some of Dante’s interview time on a visit to the north-east. “I was told that Cronos and his friends were trashing the studio in Wallsend in a fit of pique,” Dante recalls, “and that I’d better watch my step when I eventually met them.  “On entering the room where the band were holed up, it was clear that, yes indeed, a great deal of trashing had been done. The three of them [Cronos, Mantas and Abaddon] were sitting on the floor surrounded by what looked like driftwood – but which presumably had until recently been some form of furniture – with threatening scowls on their faces. All except Cronos, who in addition to the scowl was wielding a dirty great knife!”  But there was a happy ending, Dante says: “The collective Venom anger fuelled a really great interview.”

Quite fitting that album being last night's choice.

arabchanter wrote:

Sorry about the last post, I don't know what happened with the last bit as it's all squashed together , I tried to edit it but the edit box is empty .

Sorry once again, but I'm fucked if I'm gonna start again.

Don't know if you can help me to tidy it up a bit Tek?

It's making my eyes bleed looking at it to be honest, fuck knows what happened, I previewed and it looked alright so I hit submit, then it was all squashed up
 

arabchanter wrote:

arabchanter wrote:

Sorry about the last post, I don't know what happened with the last bit as it's all squashed together , I tried to edit it but the edit box is empty .

Sorry once again, but I'm fucked if I'm gonna start again.

Don't know if you can help me to tidy it up a bit Tek?

It's making my eyes bleed looking at it to be honest, fuck knows what happened, I previewed and it looked alright so I hit submit, then it was all squashed up
 

Tried to edit for you there Mr C.

But like you the edit box was empty of any script at all.

Really weird. Never seen that happen before on here.