Category: Teardrop Explodes

Most of the time, the versions of songs released as singles are edited down from the album versions, usually to make them more radio-friendly, either in terms of production and/or running time.  Not in this instance……

mp3: The Teardrop Explodes – Serious Danger

At 4:23 in length, it’s fully 50 seconds longer than the album version.

Now, if Serious Danger is a song you’re not familiar with, then don’t worry….you probably won’t be alone.

It was written and recorded in September 1982 for what was intended to be the band’s third album.  This was a few months after the version of The Teardrop Explodes which had recorded and toured Wilder had imploded, and were now down to a trio comprising Julian Cope, Gary Dwyer and David Balfe.

Tensions in the studio were high, driven the fact that Cope and Balfe were at loggerheads about how the record should sound, the former wanting to write ballads and quirky pop song while the latter was determined to record synth-based music.

Julian Cope, who many folk regarded as being The Teardrop Explodes, quit the sessions.  Mercury Records tried to salvage things by issuing an EP, You Disappear From View, in February 1983, and to all intent and purposes, that was that.

However, after Julian had some success as a solo artist, the record label, in April 1990, decided to issue Everybody Wants To Shag….The Teardrop Explodes.  It was marketed as a Teardrop Explodes album, and while technically that night be the case, it is very much the work of David Balfe with the occasional vocal contribution from Julian Cope and some drum work from Gary Dwyer.  Serious Danger was chosen as a lead-off single….and it really is quite unlike any previous 45 by the band.

The two extra songs on the CD came from the first two Teardrop Explodes albums.

mp3: The Teardrop Explodes – Sleeping Gas (from Kilimanjaro)
mp3: The Teardrop Explodes – Seven Views Of Jerusalem (from Wilder)

It really was a strange release.  An early 80s synth-album coming out at a time when baggy was at its height.  It’s no surprise the single and album sunk without trace, albeit I reckon Serious Danger has some merit……but that’s me listening to it at some distance and placing it in the early 80s – I really hated it back in 1990!

JC

Kilimanjaro(reissue)-The Teardrop Explodes (1981)

Yup.  I’m happy to admit that the record label got it right when it decided that the debut album from The Teardrop Explodes should be reissued with the inclusion of the big hit single, even if they did choose to house it in an appalling sleeve.

Kilimanjaro was originally released in October 1980.  It entered the chart at #35 in its first week, before it tumbled out of the Top 75 over the next three weeks.  This wasn’t too difficult to understand as the band were very much a cult act, known primarily for their time with Liverpool-based Zoo Records prior to signing with Mercury.  Their first single for the major label, When I Dream, had been released just prior to the album but failed to make the Top 40.

In January 1981, the band released a new single, Reward, which, unusually at the time, wasn’t on the album.   Reward proved to be a smash hit, going all the way to #6.  Its success did have a positive impact on the sales of Kilimanjaro, as the album re-entered the charts at #36 in the same week that Reward peaked as a single.  But the fact it wasn’t to be found on the album was likely a factor in it again quickly dropping out of the Top 75.

The record label returned to the debut for the follow-up single, with the re-release of the remixed version of Treason (It’s Just A Story), the earlier version of which had been the final single ever released on Zoo Records.  It was also a Top 20 hit.

It was around this time that Mercury hit upon the idea of doing a different pressing of Kilimanjaro.   Reward was added to Side A in between what had been the fourth and fifth tracks.  Some tracks were remixed, while a further two minutes were added to the album’s final track, When I Dream, taking it all the way to a psychedelically fantastic seven minutes plus.

*Big thanks to Fraser for correcting things in the comments section.   The extra two minutes were only added years later with a CD reissue….that’s the version I have on the hard drive, and so made the schoolboy error!! 

The biggest change, of course, came with the sleeve. The picture of the band being replaced by a photo of a herd of zebras in front of Mount Kilimanjaro.   It certainly had enough people picking it up and thinking it was a brand-new album, as the next thing was that it was back in the charts, and all the way up to #24.

Thinking back on it, the success of Treason probably coincided with a period when the album was a bit more difficult to find in the shops, with no further pressings being made available to replace any sold stock, with everything on hold till the re-release had been pressed up and distributed.

No matter the reasons and the timing, it’s fair to say that the addition of Reward alone made the re-release a more rounded and essential purchase.  The purists might not like it, but so what?

mp3: The Teardrop Explodes – Reward

Kilimanjaro is an excellent album, and that’s why I’ve found a place for in this rundown.  It’s worth remembering that this was the work of a very young group of musicians – Julian Cope was coming up for his 23rd birthday when it was first released – and there’s a lot more pop and melody on show than you might come to expect if your point of entry was the modern day Cope.

All told, there were six tracks on it released as singles, whether by Zoo or Mercury.  The ones that had flopped could easily have been hits a second time around, but given that the band had already recorded another album’s worth of material in 1981, it was easy enough to move on.

It really did seem that the Teardrop Explodes had the pop world at their feet when the new single Passionate Friend was released in August 1981. Little did most fans know that things were unravelling at a scary pace, thanks to Julian’s ever-increasing devotion to LSD.

JC

Today’s song is a request from Mark French.

mp3: The Teardrop Explodes – Reward

Aside from the fact that it’s a shout for a great piece of music, it also allows me to demonstrate that I don’t need to have a copy of a single to come up with a 320kpbs rip.  Yes, I did once own a copy of Reward by The Teardrop Explodes, but it was one of hundreds of 7″ singles that were left behind in an old flat in Edinburgh.  Regular readers from the olden days will be all too familiar with the sad tale, and it’s just too painful to recall it one more time for those who don’t know.  Let’s just say, it’s cost me a fair bit of money trying to put things right since 1986.

The vinyl rip instead comes from my copy of the album Kilimanjaro, itself the re-released version from 1981 with the zebras on the cover rather than the original from October 1980 which has a portrait of the band.  The reason for this being that the original release of Kilimanjaro didn’t include Reward which was initially released as a stand-alone single in January 1981, and going on to be the biggest hit single by the band, or indeed across the subsequent solo career of Julian Cope, by reaching #6.

The Guardian newspaper, in March 2015, had a feature on Reward in which Julian Cope and keyboardist Dave Balfe explained how they came up with and went about making the song.  It turns out it was written in the main by guitarist Alan Gill, with him coming up initially with the bassline. Cope wanted it to sound like a northern soul classic and their first stab at it came via an effort for a BBC radio session but when they later got into the actual recording studio, the frontman decided to remove the drum intro so that the first and last thing you heard were trumpets, which, to be fair, was a stroke of genius as this is the instrument which really drives the song forward at pace. Balfe, in confirming that the band had problems coming up initially with a satisfactory recording and mix, heaps praise on the frontman for the end result, describing it as “…a mad awesome record unlike anything else in pop. We sounded like Vikings on acid fronted by a lunatic.”

Here’s the version the band recorded for the BBC – it was for the Mike Read show on 16 October 1980, which went out in the slot immediately before that of John Peel:-

mp3: The Teardrop Explodes – Reward (BBC session version)

Anyone who followed The Teardrop Explodes closely will know that Reward was very much a one-off with them not recording anything similar ever again.  Indeed, much more typical of their output was the b-side of the 45, which I’ve lifted from its inclusion on the CD Everybody Wants to Shag…The Teardrop Explodes, their third and final album which was recorded in 1982 but not given a release until 1990, for the simple reason that Cope basically sacked everyone in the middle of the sessions.  Let’s just say a high intake of drugs was a factor, as indeed they were when this song was recorded:-

mp3: The Teardrop Explodes – Strange House In The Snow

I’m guessing the pop kids who loved the single didn’t play it more than once, that’s assuming they got to its end on the first spin they gave it.

As always with this blog, I’m very much open to guest contributions and/or suggestions for inclusion in this weekly series. Feel free to get in touch by email : thevinylvillain@hotmail.co.uk

JC

I’ve said it before, but I think it bears repeating.

One of my fondest live experiences was a gig played by Queen at Ingliston in Edinburgh in 1982.

Don’t rush to judge me on the basis of that sentence as I went along purely to see the support act which was The Teardrop Explodes. The booking agent either had a sick sense of humour or hated Queen fans, or both.

Julian Cope took to the stage to a barrage of abuse, the intensity of which I’ve rarely witnessed, but he was ready for it and up for the fight. He continually taunted the crowd and the band (which was more or less session musicians as The Teardrop Explodes had more or less imploded by this point in time) treated everyone to some real obscurities. My favourite moment was when St Julian said “Here’s the one of mine that I’m sure you all know and love’ and as fans roared in expectation of hearing Reward, he launched into an acoustic and quiet version of Use Me, the b-side to Treason, and sung it in French!

It had been just three years earlier that The Teardrop Explodes came onto the scene, one of a number of Liverpool-based acts who were on Zoo Records, a venture formed and fronted by Bill Drummond who also seemed to have a role in each of the acts on the label, either as a performer or manager.

The debut consisted of a three-track 7” single:-

mp3 : The Teardrop Explodes – Sleeping Gas
mp3 : The Teardrop Explodes – Camera Camera
mp3 : The Teardrop Explodes – Kirkby Workers Dream Fades

It was a fine way with which to announce yourself and it would receive the biggest compliment imaginable in that Tony Wilson, who generally took an immediate and pathological dislike to anything that emerged out of Liverpool, gave it high praise. There was also some favourable coverage in the music papers with a number of journalists predicting that the band, and label mates Echo & The Bunnymen, stood on the cusp of greatness with long and successful careers inevitable.

Like many other acts who were attached to small labels at that particular time, the production values are basic and far from polished, but there’s certainly a noticeable spark about the music while there’s enough intrigue in the lyrics, certainly on the a-side, to make the most causal listener sit up and take notice.

Zoo Records eventually wound up and The Teardrop Explodes landed a contract with Phonogram Records, resulting in two very fine albums in Kilimanjaro (October 1980) and Wilder (December 1981), with three singles also hitting the Top 30. Indeed, the debut is one that has aged magnificently and is up there with the finest of all albums from the decade in which it was released. A re-recorded and more polished version of that early Zoo single was included:-

mp3 : The Teardrop Explodes – Sleeping Gas (album version)

I’ll finish off with a lift from a piece that appeared in The Guardian back in 2010 when a 30th Anniversary edition of Kilimanjaro was reviewed:-

The 30th anniversary reissue recently spurred one heritage-rock magazine to ask the band’s former frontman Julian Cope if he would ever return to writing pop music. It seems a fair enough query given Kilimanjaro’s success: it spawned a top 10 hit in Reward, spent 35 weeks on the charts and displayed such commercial promise that both U2 and Duran Duran apparently considered the Teardrop Explodes their only real competition. You might also feel compelled to ask in light of Cope’s latter- day musical output. That variously includes an hour-long homage to the late Princess of Wales called She-Diana; a live recording of his “proto-metal” band Brain Donor; and Spades & Hoes & Plows, a self-styled “masterpiece of agrarian doom-clod-plod” that features Cope accompanying singer David Wrench on “Mellotron and 26-inch marching bass drum”, and culminates in an 18-minute instrumental inspired by a series of road-toll protests in 19th-century Wales. Alas, Helyntion Beca (The Rebecca Riots) seems to have been overlooked by the programmers of the Radio 1 playlist, a fate that also befell such other recent Cope numbers as All the Blowing-Themselves-Up Motherfuckers….(Will Realise the Minute They Die That They Were Suckers).

Actually, Cope told the magazine, he’d just written a pop song, inspired by the mid-60s baroque style of the Left Banke, a band not so wildly removed from the kind of influences that powered Kilimanjaro – the blasting brass arrangements of Forever Changes-era Love, the Seeds’ reedy garage rock, the sunshine pop of the Turtles. “It’s called,” he added, “The Cunts Can Fuck Off.”

He’d obviously been listening to early Jesus and Mary Chain

JC

Julian Cope was enjoying being a pop star. Reward and Treason had taken him into the charts, onto Top of the Pops and into the pages of the likes of Smash Hits magazine where teenage girls were coo-ing over his good looks.

Only he knew in advance that the next again single was going to be even more poppy, lighter and catchier than anything else he’d ever written with its killer-chorus and umpteen ba-ba-ba-ba-ba sing-a-long moments, so he put a killer track onto its b-side as a reminder that he remained more than capable of delivering material that was ahead of the curve:-

mp3 : The Teardrop Explodes – Christ versus Warhol

Radiohead would rip off this tune for Karma Police a few year later…….go on, admit the openings are identical.

It was a stroke of genius to put this on the b-side rather than parent album Wilder as it prevented any fundamentalists getting hot under the collar and demanding it be withdrawn. Oh and have a listen just before the two-minute mark for what could pass as Jarvis Cocker‘s recording debut….

Here’s the fabulous a-side. Criminal it stalled at #25:-

mp3 : The Teardrop Explodes – Passionate Friend

Tune in tomorrow for a guest ICA on another of our maverick geniuses.

JC

It was just last September that I took a look back at the single Tiny Children, the third to be lifted the 1981 LP Wilder from The Teardrop Explodes.

I offered the opinion that it deserved a much better fate than merely hitting #44 in the charts given that it was a gorgeous lullaby, delivered with a real degree of fragility by Julian Cope whose vocal is quite lovely, even if he does at times appear to be at the edge of his range.

Ctel, the brains and talents behind the ridiculously good Acid Ted blog, is one of my dearest and oldest cybernet friends and he obviously took note of that posting as he dropped me an email the other week with a link to a remix of the song. A remix that I’m sure you’ll agree is every bit as wonderful as the original:-

mp3 : The Teardrop Explodes – Tiny Children (parjo01 re-edit)

Enjoy.

Julian Cope might be a bit bonkers but the two hit LPs recorded with The Teardrop Explodes at the beginning of the 80s contain perfect pop, timeless tunes and moments of magic.

Tiny Children was the third single lifted from Wilder and really deserved a much better fate than merely hitting #44 in the charts. It’s a gorgeous lullaby, delivered with a real degree of fragility by Julian whose vocal is quite lovely, even if he does at times appear to be at the edge of his range.

mp3 : The Teardrop Explodes – Tiny Children

By complete contrast, and to help illustrate that this particular JC is off his rocker, here’s the very bizzare b-side:-

mp3 : The Teardrop Explodes – Rachael Built A Steamboat

Enjoy.

One of my fondest memories is going to see a Queen gig at Ingliston in Edinburgh in 1982. But before anyone reports me to the bad-taste cops, I need to say that I went along purely to see the support act – The Teardrop Explodes.

Whoever came up with that line-up certainly had a fantastic sense of humour. Julian Cope came on to a barrage of abuse and taunted the crowd like I’ve never seen before or since. The band (which was more or less session musicians by this point) played a stormer. Julian would say things like…’Here’s the one of mine that I’m sure you all know and love’ before launching into an obscure b-side….which he sung in French!  Magnifique.

Sadly, I only have the english language version….but you’ll see from the pace and mood of the record that this was not what the rock fans had come to heae….

mp3 : The Teardrop Explodes – Use Me

The Teardrop Explodes were only able to release two LPs at their peak, both of which have dated incredibly well while their one smash single remains instantly recognisable and enjoyable more than 30 years on.  I think it is fair to say that interest in the band has remained reasonably high long after their demise, largely due to the quality of that material and also for the fact that Julian Cope remains such a curious yet charismatic individual whether as a musician or writer including  two incredibly readable volumes of autobiography as well as more obtuse and difficult books on  cult German and Japanese music .

In 2000, he was asked if he ever envisaged his band reforming. In reply, Julian said : “Would you ever return to having your mother wipe your asshole?”

I think we can safely assume he meant no.

mp3 : The Teardrop Explodes – Reward
mp3 : The Teardrop Explodes – The Culture Bunker
mp3 : The Teardrop Explodes – Tiny Children

Enjoy