Category: Marc Riley

Comsat Angels, Fad Gadget, Flesh For Lulu, Marc Riley, New Order, Nightingales, Serious Drinking

WHEN THE CLOCKS STRUCK THIRTEEN (May Pt 2)

For the second month in a row, there were plenty of songs that featured in the chart edition of this series just a couple of weeks back.  Last month, the list of 45s that weren’t commercial hits was quite small – just six in total.   Will things be any different with the look back at May 1984?

Spoiler alert.  Not much……

mp3 : The Comsat Angels – You Move Me

A song I haven’t thought about in over 40 years.  It’s not one that I’m all that fond of, but The Comsat Angels were a band that one of the student union regulars really liked and used to pester the DJs to play. Summarising things from wiki, they formed in 1979 and released six albums between then and 1986, later reforming, initially under different names and then finally calling it a day in 1995, before briefly re-forming in 2009-1o. You Move Me was their tenth single and would later be included on their fifth album, 7 Day Weekend, released in 1985.

mp3: Fad Gadget – One Man’s Meat

For anyone looking for background, I would ask you to have a look at ICA 231, lovingly compiled by The Affectionate Punch back in November 2019, but in summary, Fad Gadget was, initially, the stage name of the late Frank Tovey (8 September 1956 – 3 April 2002), one of the pioneers of electronica here in the UK. He wasn’t one who ever chased commercial success at any point in his career, but he was name checked by almost everyone who was anyone in the genre over the ensuing decades.  There were four studio albums and eleven singles released between 1979 and 1984 under the name of Fad Gadget, and One Man’s Meat was the last of the 45s.

mp3: Flesh For Lulu – Subterraneans

I’ve mentioned previously that 1984 was a bit of a stellar year for goth music.  Flesh For Lulu had formed in London in 1982, and not too long afterwards were signed by Polydor Records.  They were dropped after the debut album and early singles failed to chart, and they ended up on Beggars Banquet for much of the rest of the decade.  Despite a dedicated fan base and a few champions in the music press, they never enjoyed any commercial breakthrough, disbanding in the early 90s.

mp3: New Order – Murder

A 12″ single on import featuring a previously unreleased song and an instrumental take on hit single Thieves Like Us?  Why, thank you Factory Records, as us obsessives will buy everything to which New Order attach their name (well, at least back in 1984 we did).   This one came out on Factory Benelux.  It’s four minutes of relentless noise in which Stephen Morris really gives the drums a hammering.  Not easy, nay, make that impossible to dance to!

mp3: The Nightingales – The Crunch

Hands up and confession time.  It would be well into the 21st century before I got my hands on a copy of The Crunch, a 12″ EP released in May 1984 by The Nightingales, a band that has been described by one critic as ‘the misfits’ misfits’.  My knowledge of the band was sketchy until watching the excellent documentary King Rocker, which was aired on Sky Arts back in 2021.  There’s a real reminder of the Josef K singles in the way the guitars are played on this one.

mp3: Marc Riley & The Creepers – Pollystiffs

As mentioned a few months ago as part of this series, Marc Riley having been sacked from The Fall in 1982, formed his own band and began writing and recording. This was their fifth single in what had been a productive twelve months, and would be followed shortly afterwards by the debut album, Gross Out. Another one that I can’t recall hearing back in the day…..the days/nights of listening obsessively to John Peel had been replaced by going out and/or spending time with a new girlfriend.

mp3: Serious Drinking – Country Girl Becomes Drugs and Sex Punk

Candidate for one of the best song titles of all time from a post-punk band, with a penchant for humorous lyrics and much loved by John Peel.  Serious Drinking emerged from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, and two delivered two well-received albums in 1983 and 1984.  They kind of set a template for I Ludicrous and to a lesser extent, Half Man Half Biscuit, and this song was memorably featured in Dirk’s on-going series just a few weeks ago.

Having looked ahead to June 1984, I can promise a much larger set of tunes next time out.

 

JC

10000 Maniacs, Biff Bang Pow!, Ian Dury & The Students, Marc Riley, Revolving Paint Dream

WHEN THE CLOCKS STRUCK THIRTEEN (February Pt 2)

It’s now time to look at some of the 45s released in February 1984 that didn’t make enough impact with the record buying public to leave a dent in the singles charts but have proven to be of enough cultural significance to be recalled here in Villain Towers.  By cultural significance, I mean I either bought a copy or danced to it to at the student disco….or perhaps actually discovered it many months/years later and kicked myself for being late to the party.  Or it might well be that I think its inclusion in this piece will be of interest to someone out there who drops by this blog on the odd occasion. (and yes, that is a word for word repeat of how I opened up the January part of this series….I’ll likely stick to it for the remainder of the year).

I’ll open with one that I don’t recall hearing back in 1984….indeed it would take until 1987 and the release of the band’s third album before I became fully aware of them.

mp3: 10,000 Maniacs – My Mother The War

The band had come together in Jamestown, New York 1981, with a then 17-year-old Natalie Merchant on lead vocals.  An early EP was followed by the album Secrets of The I Ching in late 1983.  One of its most popular tracks, My Mother The War, was licensed by a small UK label, Reflex Records, and became the band’s first release outside of the USA.

mp3: Marc Riley with The Creepers – Cure By Choice

Having left The Fall in 1982, Marc Riley formed his own band and began writing and recording. A Peel Session was recorded in November 1983, and within three months, had been issued as a 12″ EP on Riley’s own label, In Tape.  The lead song, Cure By Choice, bears more than a passing resemblance to some of the material written and recorded by The Fall, which can’t be too much of a surprise.

mp3: Revolving Paint Dream – Flowers Are In The Sky
mp3: Biff Bang Pow! – 50 Years Of Fun

Two 45s released on the newly formed Creation Records.  Indeed, they have the catalogue numbers of CRE 002 and CRE 003.  Footnotes in what became quite the story over the years.

Now to something which had me scouring the internet to little effect, as it was the name of an act I’d never heard of!

mp3: Ian Dury and The Music Students – Very Personal

These details are lifted from a website devoted to Ian Dury:-

In 1981 Ian Dury and the Blockheads disbanded and Ian left Stiff Records and signed instead to Polydor, who released the album Lord Upminster. This included the controversial single Spasticus (Autisticus). For this record, Dury was re-united with Chaz Jankel, and they recorded in the Bahamas with the legendary rhythm section of Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare. A second Polydor album, 4000 Weeks’ Holiday was released in 1984, and it was toured with a new band, Ian Dury and the Music Students.

There’s a wiki page devoted to 4000 Weeks’ Holiday, and it lists the personnel who played on the album – Ian Dury (vocals), Michael McEvoy (bass, keyboards), Merlin Rhys-Jones (guitar), Tag Lamche (drums, percussion), and Jamie Talbot (saxophones, clarinet).  It also states:-

If accounts by Dury himself and Music Student member Merlin Rhys-Jones (who would continue to work with Dury and co-write songs with him until his death) from Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll: The Life of Ian Dury are correct, it would appear that it was Polydor Records who suggested and insisted on Dury working with young musicians.

Contradictorily, Ian Dury & The Blockheads: Song By Song purports that Polydor had wanted The Blockheads to play on the album, with the group rejecting the idea after learning they wouldn’t be paid due to Dury spending most of his advance on his previous solo effort Lord Upminster. Song By Song’s account is corroborated by Norman Watt-Roy (bassist for the Blockheads).

Either way, the album didn’t sell well while Very Personal, the only single to be lifted from it, failed to chart.

 

JC

Fall, Marc Riley, Wedding Present

SONGS FROM A SPAT

This posting has been in the pipeline for a while and I ended up pushing it back a couple of weeks as it makes for a neat postscript to Steve’s guest post on The Graveyard Shift.

I think it is fair to say that Marc Riley‘s departure from The Fall, and his subsequent success as a performer and broadcaster, got under the skin of Mark E Smith.

These are the words of Riley, in an interview given to an on-line publication back in 2013:-

And I think part and parcel of it is that if anyone left The Fall he wanted them to sink without trace, as if to say, ‘Without me they’re nothing.’ His contempt for musicians is well known….

So what rankled Mark more and more was that I just wouldn’t go away, even to the extent that one day he was driving to the train station and there was a massive billboard with Mark Radcliffe and I on it… it probably made him want to drive his car straight into the canal, because there’s this bloke from his past who just won’t go away. But I’m not a thorn in his side, he’s got a lot going on in his life, and he’s a very clever bloke, but he does say things for effect. But me and him had ding dongs in the press, and it was just so childish it was untrue, and we wrote songs about each other. I wrote ‘Jumper Clown’ and he wrote ‘Hey Marc Riley’ and ‘C.R.E.E.P.’, and so on. It was daft, really.

Jumper Clown was the second 45 to be released by Marc Riley after he left The Fall. It came out in 1983 and the tune, or a version of it, had originally been part of the setlists of live gigs by his old band in 1979. It was an untitled instrumental and the band never got round to recording a studio version. His version was recorded with a group of mates who would later become known as The Creepers, with the title very much aimed at Smith’s consistently disheveled appearance (this was all prior to Brix appearing on the scene and smartening him up)

mp3: Marc Riley – Jumper Clown

Hey! Marc Riley was another song that The Fall would incorporate into their live sets in 1984/85 but again, it wouldn’t be one that would ever seemingly have been recorded in the studio. It would take until 2007 before anything other than bootleg copies were available, thanks to a live version, recorded at Oskars’ Cornhusker, Azusa, California on 23 May 1985, was included in a Box Set.

Four years later, an omnibus edition of This Nation’s Saving Grace which also included rough mixes, outtakes and other newly discovered recordings from the era, offered up two versions of a song whose title had been shortened

mp3: The Fall – Ma Riley (rough mix)
mp3: The Fall – Ma Riley

It has since been revealed that the studio version, which was produced by John Leckie, had been considered as a possible b-side to Cruiser’s Creek.

The Wedding Present offered up a kind of surf/TWP hybrid of The Creepers song as a b-side to It’s A Gas, released in 1994

mp3: The Wedding Present – Jumper Clown

JC