THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN

Once again, this is the part of the series where I consult one of my reference books and find some new 45s which didn’t sell in enough numbers in March 1979 to bother the chart compilers.

I’m starting things off with The Distractions.  The Great Indie Discography, written back in 1999 and updated in 2003 by Martin C. Strong (from now on in referred to as ‘The Big Red Indie-Bible’) tells us this:-

“Consisting of founder-members Mike Finney (vocals) and Steve Perrin- Brown (guitar), together with Adrian Wright (guitar), Pip Nicholls (bass) and Alec Sidebottom (drums), this Manchester-based outfit had a hectic touring schedule supporting the likes of Magazine, Buzzcocks and just about every Mancunian New Wave act around at the time.”

They signed to TJM Records, a label that had been launched by Tony Davidson, the owner of TJ Davidson Rehearsal Studios in Little Peter Street, Manchester, the location from whom which many a band launched a career, particularly Joy Division.

The debut release was the You’re Not Going Out Dressed Like That EP, from which this was the lead track:-

mp3: The Distractions – It Doesn’t Bother Me

The group would release another single before the year was out, this time on Factory Records.  I’ll highlight that later in the year.

Staying with the letter ‘D’

mp3 : Doll by Doll – The Palace Of Love

Doll by Doll was formed by Kirkcaldy-born Jackie Leven, who, having started out as a folk musician, was another to be smitten by the advent of punk/new wave.  The band, which also had Jo Shaw, Robin Spreafico and David McIntosh as members, signed to Automatic Records, an off-shoot of Warners.  Whoever pulled together the wiki page got this right:-

“They came to prominence during the new wave period but were largely ignored by the music press of the time – their emotional, psychedelic-tinged music was judged out of step with other bands of the time”.

There were a few performers/bands who despised the new wave scene, particularly in New York.  This led to what was termed ‘No Wave’, and I’ll again turn to wiki:-

No wave was an avant-garde music genre and visual art scene which emerged in the late 1970s in Downtown New York City. The term was a pun based on the rejection of commercial new wave music. Reacting against punk rock’s recycling of rock and roll clichés, no wave musicians instead experimented with noise, dissonance, and atonality, as well as non-rock genres like free jazz, funk, and disco. The scene often reflected an abrasive, confrontational, and nihilistic world view.

One of the leading proponents of the no wave scene was Lydia Lunch.  Her band, Teenage Jesus & The Jerks, released a single in March 1979:-

mp3: Teenage Jesus & The Jerks – Baby Doll

I’ve a feeling most of you will be pleased it’s all over and done with in just over 90 seconds.

And now for something completely different:-

mp3: Tubeway Army – Down In The Park

They had started out as a guitar-based new wave band, Mean Street, but the dawn of 1978 saw a change of name to Tubeway Army, albeit the new wave element was still to the fore (they supported The Skids at gigs in the summer of ’78).  By the end of the year, a debut album had been released, with the lead singer changing his name from Gary Webb to Gary Numan, and looking to incorporate synths into the group.  The album sold modestly, but there was enough interest at Beggars Banquet to fund a follow-up for planned release in mid-1979, and Down In The Park was seen as being the advance single.  It didn’t sell very well, but things were about to change….as will be seen later in the series.

mp3: The Pop Group – She Is Beyond Good and Evil

I’m not someone who has ever been fully enamoured by The Pop Group, which is why they haven’t previously featured on the blog, but there’s no denying that they are so often cited as being a huge influence on the way music would shape and form in subsequent decades.  The debut single was released in March 1979.

It was also the month in which the final 45 from the original line-up of this lot was released before the frontman went solo:-

mp3: Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers – Lydia

Having started off things off in Manchester, I think it’s appropriate to finish with the lead track from another EP released on the TJM label in March 79.

mp3: Slaughter and The Dogs – It’s Alright

Hmmmm…….on this evidence, it’s easy to see why this lot never really got much attention beyond that provided by a local fan base.

JC

Here comes an ICA from a short-lived band, with just two albums and seven UK singles to select from.   Despite this, it was still a bit of an ask to narrow it down to just ten songs.

First thing to sort out….the name of the band.   The first album and early singles were credited to The Colour Field.    Come 1987, with the release of the lead single from what proved to be the second and final album, they were known as The Colourfield.  Later compilation albums, whether encompassing Terry Hall‘s wider career or being solely focussed on this particular band, refer to The Colourfield.   As I’m now going to do from now on.

The demise of Fun Boy Three led to Terry Hall pulling together The Colourfield in 1984. The other two members were Toby Lyons on keyboards/guitar and Karl Shale on bass.   Toby had been part of The Swinging Cats*, a ska-influenced group from Coventry who had released one single on 2 Tone Records back in 1980, while Karl, also from Coventry, had played with a couple of new wave influenced bands who never quite made it.

Chrysalis Records, having been happy enough with the commercial success of Fun Boy Three, put a deal on the table, and as such, every Colourfield release in the UK would be via the label.

SIDE A

1. The Colour Field (single, January 1984)

It makes sense to start proceedings with the debut single, released in January 1984. Terry Hall promised that his new band would be taking a totally different direction to what had come before.  Some of those who had championed him since he had burst onto the scene weren’t impressed.  One journalist in a UK music paper, on reviewing the debut single, went as far as this:-

‘This lot have absolutely nothing going for them. No sense of humour. No glamour. No good melodies. No danceable rhythms. No excitement. No controversy. No emotion. Nothing whatsoever. They are, in short, ruddy awful’

Utter bullshit.   The problem was that such reviews and other less than fulsome praise, combined with the single not getting onto the A-list at Radio 1, meant it wasn’t all that widely heard and so ended up missing out on being a big hit, stalling at #43.

2. My Wild Flame (b-side, January 1985)

In terms of the chronology of the band, there would be an even bigger flop as the second single Take, released in July 1984, barely scraped into the Top 75.   The record company executives may well have been examining the fine print of the contract as 1985 rolled around, with the debut album scheduled for release in the spring/early summer.  In some ways, a reset button was pressed, and a big push was made on the third single, released in January 1985.  Thinking Of You was a hit, getting to #12.    I’ll get round to that later in this ICA….in the meantime, I’m offering up the poptastic and jaunty b-side for your enjoyment.  And yes, it is more or less a re-write of the debut single!!!

3. Things Could Be Beautiful  (single, January 1986)

The hit single had helped the debut album, Virgins and Philistines, reach #12.   It only hung around the charts for seven weeks, primarily as neither of the next two singles lifted from it made any dents.  The group went into the studio towards the end of 1985, with an additional member, Gary Dwyer (ex-Teardrop Explodes), behind the drum kit.  A very jaunty and upbeat 45 was recorded and released, assisted in no small measure by the production skills of Ian Broudie.    Sadly, it flopped, leading to Terry Hall spending a few months reassessing things. It also led to the record label deciding to have a bigger say on things.

4. Hammond Song (from Virgins and Philistines, May 1985)

A cover version.  The original dates from 1979 and was the work of The Roches, a trio of sisters from New York whose folk-like tunes leaned heavily on their sibling harmonies.   The Colourfield’s take on things sort of keeps these, although in a way akin to Kirsty MacColl‘s way of doing things, as it sees Terry harmonising with himself.  A song in which acoustic guitars strum gently in the background and provides something that all hangs together in a rather lovely way.

5. Thinking Of You (single, January 1985)

The one big hit for The Colourfield.  The third single, and one with a prominent co-vocal from Katrina Phillips.   A bitter-sweet love song which, in many ways, provided the template for The Beautiful South.   As I said in a previous post back in 2014 looking back at the debut album, I reckon its fair to assume the main reason no-one took the band seriously was that Terry Hall had forged a reputation as a representative of disaffected youth and having been pigeonholed in such a fashion, not too many were keen to allow him to carve a different and more lasting niche.  Thinking Of You might have been more a Radio 2 than Radio 1 sort of song, but it was still well worth a listen.

SIDE B

1. Miss Texas 1967 (from Deception, April 1987)

The second album was recorded in New York, with an American veteran producer, Richard Gottehrer, behind the desk.  The band was now reduced to just Terry Hall and Toby Shale, backed by session musicians.  The overall result is a bit of a mess, with the sound being very different from the first album and the Ian Broudie single.

Despite the mostly awful production, there are a few worthwhile moments on Deception, not least this lovely number which has a really intriguing title.  Intriguing?  Well, the actual winner of Miss Texas 1967 was 20-year-old Molly Grubb from Fort Worth, but the TV soap-opera Dallas would reference the contest as part of its scripts, with the winner being Sue Ellen Shepherd, a beauty queen who later married J.R. Ewing, the main heir to the family’s oil business (and an all-round bad guy!!).

2. Monkey In Winter (b-side, May 1987)

The original version of this can be found on Deception, an album which sold very poorly, spending just one week in the Top 100, reaching #95 in April 1987.   The following month, a single from the album was released.  She had been written in the mid-60s by Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, one of many songs the duo had composed for The Monkees.   The Colourfield version failed even more dismally than the album, but tucked away on the b-side is a remake of Monkey In Winter, with the remix duties being taken care of by Gil Norton, whose work led to a much more sympathetic rendition of the tune.   But the key to everything was Terry deciding that the lead vocal would be better delivered by someone else, and he came up with the idea of having Sinead O’Connor come into the studio.  It might not sound like anything else The Colourfield ever made, but it’s very much attributed to them.

3. Armchair Theatre (from Virgins and Philistines, May 1985)

Remember how the critics had laid into Terry Hall for failing to be controversial?   He kind of thumbs his nose at them with this one.

I’m sitting on the fence again
Drawing straws and pulling strings
Demonstrations pass me by
This must be the age of something

And this was after he had written and recorded the next song on the ICA

4. Cruel Circus (from Virgins and Philistines, May 1985)

Khayem included this on his career-encompassing Terry Hall ICA (#277, February 2021), and in his words, “a biting commentary on animal cruelty, Terry’s lyrics and vocal delivery have lost none of their power and relevance in the subsequent three decades.”  1985 was the year of Meat Is Murder, and I often think that Terry’s contribution to the debate, which focussed on laboratory experiments and fox-hunting, sort of got lost a bit when it should have been the subject of many an article across the broadsheet media.

5. Sorry (b-side, January 1984)

And so we find ourselves going full circle, with the b-side to the debut single, and a track which was also used, more than 15 months later, to end the debut album.  If, like me, you’re a bit of a sucker for the bitterly honest and straight-from-the-heart break-up songs (the sorts that Elvis Costello and David Gedge have often specialised in over the years) then I hope you’ll agree that this is  up there with the best of them.

BONUS EP

Told you earlier that I couldn’t keep it down to 10 tracks.   So, here’s the limited edition 4-track EP, available only with the initial copies of this ICA.

(a) mp3: The Colourfield – Castles In The Air
(b) mp3: The Colourfield – The Windmills Of Your Mind
(c) mp3: The Colourfield – Goodbye Sun Valley
(d) mp3: The Colourfield – Your Love Was Smashing

(a) Another flop single, the follow-up to Thinking Of You.  Should’ve been a hit but stalled at #51.

(b) A b-side, to the second single, Take.  A cover of the song best known as the theme tune to the 1968 film, The Thomas Crown Affair.

(c) The closing track on Deception.  The session musicians earn their corn on this one with almost enough different instruments for its own ICA a la JTFL.

(d) Yet another b-side, this one being found on Castles In The Air.   I do think Terry Hall took a great amount of perverse pleasure in having some of his best songs of this era being quite obscure in terms of where they were released.

JC

* I’ve had this piece prepared for some time, just waiting on a gap in the schedule to slot it in.   Over the weekend, I received a guest posting which, by sheer coincidence, makes reference to The Swinging Cats.  Please tune in tomorrow when all will be revealed.

A guest posting by Fraser Pettigrew

Many are the pieces of vinyl that have passed through our hands that were bought, listened to, and then disposed of. Either they were traded in to generate funds for new purchases, or loaned, never to be seen again. Some we don’t miss, for others we harbour slight regrets, and some we mourn deeply, regretting to the depths of our souls the idiocy that caused us to ever contemplate parting with them. This is my confessional list, the ones that got away…

Ok, let’s start with the pieces over which we have no regrets, where we quickly recognised that a mistake had been made or where time eroded whatever mild entertainment the disc might once have provided. No regrets, however a sad experience follows that some of you may empathise with.

The follow-up to Generation X’s peerless first LP was eagerly anticipated by my school friend and I at the beginning of 1979. Thus, clutching four quid each in our sweaty fists, we sprinted out of school at 3.30pm on release day, Friday 26 January, and bussed into town straight to the Virgin shop on Frederick Street in Edinburgh, whence we emerged shortly afterwards each with our own brand-new copy of Valley Of The Dolls.

Monday morning at 9am, we re-encountered each other outside the school and exchanged a look that wordlessly conveyed what dozens of music journalists would fill many column inches expressing: Valley Of The Dolls was shite and our £3.99 had been utterly wasted. My copy went to Greyfriars Market 2^nd hand trade-in long before the year was out.

Even The Lurkers’ first two albums lasted longer in my esteem than Valley Of The Dolls, but eventually the guilty pleasure I derived from the Status Quo of punk rock wore down and they had to go. Similarly, the first Simple Minds album Life In A Day was recycled even though I still maintain an equally guilty pleasure in the rest of their early output up to New Gold Dream.

Which makes it rather baffling that I got rid of my copy of Real to Real Cacophony at some point, as well as Empires and Dance. The latter is more understandable as my first copy was pressed on defective vinyl with a sort of crusty pustule in the middle of This Fear of Gods that only burst after a couple of months playing, by which time the receipt was long gone. Thankfully, I have been able to re-buy decent vinyl copies of both, though probably for five times the original price.

The sacrifice of items from one’s collection was a necessary evil in days when budget was low, and it would be interesting to remember what it was that I bought with the proceeds of falling out of love with those early Simple Minds albums, or the likes of XTC’s Go2 (complete with bonus 12” dub remix EP Go+), or Glaxo Babies’ Nine Months to the Disco, or Vibing Up The Senile Man, the second album by Alternative TV.

All of those records I wish I still had, even though I know I wouldn’t be playing them much. By 1979 my taste for the avant-garde was sufficiently advanced to make me want to buy them in the first place, but it must be admitted that the ATV and Glaxo Babies releases were interesting but hardly classic. Another in this line was Andy Partridge’s solo extension of the Go+ concept, Take Away/The Lure of Salvage, a collection of XTC tracks unrecognisably deconstructed in the editing suite. I recently came across a copy of it here in New Zealand, many years after I’d sold my original, and while it’s nice to have it back I am reminded why I let it go in the first place.

My tolerance for music at the outer limits only goes so far. I once snapped up a double album by American saxophonist Marion Brown on the strength of his luminous and lyrical contribution to Harold Budd’s Pavilion of Dreams, one of Brian Eno’s early Obscure Records releases. Imagine my disappointment when my bargain £2 purchase delivered four sides of unlistenable free jazz torment. My stylus passed through the grooves once only, if that, and then it was gone again.

As the years go by, it’s impossible for me to deny that I now find much of The Stranglers’ output to be embarrassingly stupid and vulgar. How much of this is justified and how much is a failure to appreciate subtle irony I can’t say, but I think I’ve got a pretty good nose for irony, so I call stooopid. Consequently I’m only a little annoyed that I parted with No More Heroes and Black and White, despite some really top moments on both.

I used to really like The Stranglers. They were one of my ‘big three’ new wave bands along with The Jam and The Clash who were flying the punk flag in the saccharine mire of the charts in 1977 (the Pistols were in a class of their own). I liked them so much that when Black and White came out in May 1978 just when I was out of the country on a school exchange trip, I made my older brother (who loathed punk) go and buy it for me to make sure I got the free white vinyl 7” with it.

Their cover of Walk On By on that single is a decent, respectable version of a great song, but the flip side, a song called ‘Tits’, sums up the other face of the band. Lad humour only lasts as long as you’re a lad, and eventually you have to grow up. I think I sold No More Heroes, but Black and White, funnily enough, may still reside in my brother’s attic. He can keep it. The single I sold separately.

The one Stranglers item I DO regret losing is an American release pink vinyl EP, containing four of their very best tracks: Something Better Change, Straighten Out, (Get a) Grip, and Hanging Around. It’s not worth a great deal now, but I doubt I got anything for it when I traded it in.

But now we get to the bad stuff. A short list of records I have willingly sold, at which I can only hang my head in shame. Deep breath, here goes: Give ‘Em Enough Rope by The Clash, Remain in Light by Talking Heads, Cut by The Slits, Penthouse and Pavement by Heaven 17. Yes, seriously, I possessed first pressings of all of those stone cold classic albums, AND I SOLD THEM! WHAT A FUCKING ARSE!!

The Clash were one of the first bands I ever saw live, at an epic gig supported by The Slits (described in my very first guest post for JC). It was the promo tour for Give’ Em Enough Rope, which I bought and loved at the time. But some time later I decided it was dispensable for some reason. I blame my friend, the one in the Valley of the Dolls episode above. I was young, naïve, and susceptible to his influence, and somehow I picked up a vibe that The Clash ceased to be indispensable after the first album.

To be fair, The Clash did generate a fair bit of debate around their dispensability or otherwise. One moment The Most Important Band in the World (© New Musical Express 1978), the next authors of an eclectic rag-bag of Americana despite being once ‘so bored of the USA’. I knew someone who bought and sold Sandinista! no fewer than three times in the confusion. I re-bought Give ‘Em Enough Rope some years later, an identical first pressing to my original, at a decent price.

With The Slits, I was always a little less enthusiastic about the Dennis Bovell studio incarnation compared to the gloriously ramshackle abrasiveness of the group I saw on stage and heard in the John Peel sessions. I had the Strange Fruit mini-album of those sessions and felt that I could live without the ‘official’ album, so some lucky 2^nd hand shop reaped the benefit of my imbecility. When I got the opportunity to re-buy it later, it was in a shitty re-press with I Heard it Through the Grapevine shoehorned onto the end and artwork that was obviously just scanned from a printed copy of the original sleeve. Better than nothing, but I still prefer the Peel sessions.

I don’t know what I was on when I sold Remain In Light. Some mind-altering substance that severely impairs aesthetic judgement, clearly. I mean, everything Talking Heads did AFTER that is certainly dispensable (though I still have it all and never play it!) but Remain In Light is the watershed, the point BEFORE it all drops off, so I really can’t offer a decent excuse. Once again, I struck lucky when I found an almost perfect 2^nd hand copy to restore my collection with.

And finally, Penthouse and Pavement. What can I say? All of us go through phases in our tastes, we are momentarily consumed with an obsession for Balkan folk music, or zydeco, or free jazz (well, up to a point), and conversely we drift away from certain former favourites. And in that drift lies the danger that we think we’re never going to drift back, so we spring-clean, and then years later we do drift back, especially when we realise it’s not just nostalgia. We have erred. Indeed, we have sinned! And we repent, and seek forgiveness, and must pay penance. Much penance. Much more penance than the pennies we paid for something in the first place. But there it was, a pristine UK pressing of P&P in Slow Boat Records here in Wellington. $35. Probably at least six times its original price. Forgive me father, I won’t do it again, promise.

Fraser

JC adds……..

Fraser never made any suggestions as to which tunes should accompany his brilliant post.   What follows is down to me. But all the songs included are referred to above.

mp3: Various – Fraser’s Ones That Got Away

There’s a running time of 40:43.

Tracklist

Generation X – King Rocker
Alternative TV – Facing Up To The Facts
XTC – Are You Receiving Me?
Glaxo Babies  – Shake (The Foundations)
The Slits – Love und Romance
Simple Minds – Life In A Day
The Lurkers – Shadow
The Stranglers – Something Better Change
Mr Partridge – Commerciality
Talking Heads – Crosseyed and Painless
The Clash – Stay Free
Heaven 17 – Penthouse and Pavement