BBC In Concert by The Teardrop Explodes

Of course, the choice was my own. But what if I failed?

The very first thing I did in my first year in university was head downtown with my friends to buy concert tickets. I had a two-speed Toyota Corolla that made a delightful humming sound when barrelling down the Don Valley Parkway like a sewing machine trying to achieve escape velocity. But it made me a popular guy among the people in residence, seeing as we were so far from the action at our remote commuter campus. We had all been to the student loan office earlier in the day, and I had cash to spare--my dad had doctored the student loan applications in such a way that I had received the maximum amount as a grant.

New Wave. No Wave. New Romantic. Post Punk. Mod. Ska. Rock a' Billy. They were all big in Toronto in 1981, and the record companies and promoters saw the city as the gateway to the North American market. So as we stared up at the chalkboard listing all the upcoming concerts at Records On Wheels, it was an embarrassment of riches. Echo & The Bunnymen. The Jam. The Stray Cats. New Order. Wah! Blurt. Nash The Slash. I bought tickets for 'em all that day, coming back to my dorm room with a deliciously thick slab of waxen cardboard.

By the time The Teardrop Explodes, one of my favourite bands of the period, showed up the following April to promote the recently released Wilder, I was a seasoned, even somewhat jaded, concert goer. Nothing was ever going to quite match the Siouxsie & the Banshees show I had seen back in November. Her Siouxsiness had actually spoken to me as I stood in line in front of the venue. She insulted me, true. But that made it all the better. How could Julian Cope top that?

They say that the decisions a man makes are the measure of his worth. And I was about to test my worth. The morning after The Teardrop Explodes were scheduled to play The Concert Hall, turned out to be the date for the final exam for one of my courses. I was in a bit of a bind. Having spent most of the year hanging out at clubs and listening to or talking about music, I really did need to spend that night studying if I wanted to pass. If I wanted to be a man.

But I went anyway. The Teardrop's had undergone some changes by this point. Alan Gill, the guitar player who had penned their breakthrough hit "Reward" while on hiatus from Dalek I, had left the band. His replacement, Troy Tate, added a pointillist sensibility to The Teardrop's sound, sending a colourful spray of notes across new tracks such as "Like Leila Khaled Said," while bassist Aflie Agius (on loan from Martha Ladly's The Scenery Club), provided a distinctly funky edge to the older songs like "Thief Of Baghdad."

In his outrageously brilliant autobiography, Head On, Cope records how the band consumed "a frenzied chemical picnic" in Detroit before daring to venture across the border. "By the early hours of the next morning we passed into Canada, our mouths forced into amphetamine smiles and our lips chewed and raw." Of the gig in Toronto the next night, he has less than fond memories. "I think we were shit. We did two sets that night, one was unremarkable and the other sucked big logs." I wouldn't disagree, but I didn't enjoy it any less as a result.

By the end of the year the band had dissolved into a lysergic pool of chaotic infighting and mad hallucinations, leaving behind their third album, Everyone Wants To Shag The Teardrop Explodes, sadly incomplete. Cope claimed he had a choice, too. "I could give up fame, or drugs. I chose to give up fame." It was a choice that has made for a mixed solo career, some of it exceptional, some of it not. But give him credit for refusing to concede to the hunger of fans for a reunion, the all too often sad postscript to the story of so many bands from the period.

Here are The Teardrop Explodes just before they headed out on the tour that threatened to derail my academic career, still fit, trim, and in fighting shape, and doing their best for the BBC. This 1981 live set was originally scheduled for an official release, even had a catalogue number, but was cancelled at the last minute, no doubt by Cope himself, who nursed ill feelings about his time as a pop star for far too long. It is a brilliant document of the band at the height of their fame, with both "Reward" and a reissue of "Treason" in the charts, and the world waiting expectantly for the follow up to Kilimanjaro. Check out the deliriously mad version of "Sleeping Gas," the languid, trippy, blissed out outro to "The Culture Bunker," and the wonderfully understated reading of "Suffocate." Hardcore fans will take special delight in "Screaming Secrets," a track which eventually saw the light of day on the Saint Julian album, here given the full Teardrop treatment.

And the exam? I think I must have passed. But truth be told, I remember the gig much better than anything from the course.

-- Crash The Driver

The Teardrop Explodes - BBC Live

01 Books
02 Thief of Baghdad
03 Sleeping Gas
04 Passionate Friend
05 Like Leila Khaled Said
06 Suffocate
07 Poppies In The Field
08 The Culture Bunker
09 Reward
10 Went Crazy
11 Screaming Secrets
12 When I Dream
13 The Great Dominions
14 Treason

UK CD Windsong [150] 1995

Days In Europa (Second Version) By Skids

The Skids were fronted by a pair of towering talents. With his chiseled jaw line and stentorian voice, Richard Jobson was a natural front man, commanding the stage with the authority of an army officer leading his troops into battle. And Stuart Adamson was every bit his equal, buttressing Jobson's voice with muscular guitar riffs and soaring lead lines that called to mind amassed bagpipes sounding across the highlands of their native Scotland.

The band formed in Dunfermline, a working class neighbourhood on the outskirts of Edinburgh, where a career in music offered one of the few alternatives to the mines where Jobson's father had toiled. Like so many others, Adamson had been inspired by the punk revolution. Together with his friend William Simpson (bass), he set out to find a singer who could both hold a tune and look the part. They found their man in Jobson, a local punk they had seen about town sporting a full-length black leather trench coat and black and white hair. Tom Kellichan (drums) completed the original line up shortly thereafter.

The Skids played their first gig in August, 1977. The songs were mostly Adamson's at first but Jobson soon proved an adept wordsmith, mixing a schoolboy fascination with the glories of war with a burgeoning respect for the work of the symboliste poets from Mallarme and Rimbaud, to Duras and Plath. The results could be obscure and enigmatic, but were still somehow strangely inspired, urging Adamson to ever more heroic melodies and chord progressions. Early singles "Sweet Suburbia," "The Saints Are Coming," and "Into The Valley" made the charts in 1978 and early 1979, the latter going top ten, in advance of the debut album.

The punk-inspired sound of Scared To Dance was dated by the time it appeared, but Adamson and Jobson had already moved on, developing a new interest in synthesizers, drum machines, and the polished textures of the new dance music being played at the London clubs that Jobson frequented while in the nation's capital. For Days In Europa, they brought in Rusty Egan, formerly of The Rich Kids, and now part owner of the Blitz Club, to play drums, and Bill Nelson, the guitar wizard who made his name with Be Bop Deluxe, to produce. Adamson's guitar style owed an enormous debt to Nelson's fluid, coruscating fret work, and having his hero in the recording booth served to bring out the best in this hugely talented player and songwriter (it is not for nothing that U2's The Edge has cited him as a key influence on his own playing). Jobson, too, stepped up his game, spinning such gossamer lines as, "I sacrificed the methods of my dreams / On the latter, these new poets, stole the scene / Oh, I'm sure they feel I can't betray / Egyptian girls can only say" ("Peaceful Times").

The album was preceded by two singles, "Masquerade," the first to reveal their sleek new sound, and "Working For The Yankee Dollar," but Days In Europa, for all its obvious achievement, never managed the commercial breakthrough for which both the band and label had hoped, making it only to #32 in the UK. Part of the blame was laid on the album cover, which depicted a woman crowning an Olympian with a garland, the Germanic lettering and muscular bodies recalling the fascist stylings of Leni Riefenstahl, while others pointed to Jobson's incomprehensible lyrics, partly buried in Nelson's guitar heavy mix. Virgin decided that the album needed both a new cover and a new mix. The new cover featured an elegant couple in evening dress, caught in an embrace (the original cover still visible as a painting in the background), while the new mix was provided by Bruce Fairburn, a Canadian producer who had made his name with popular West Coast rock acts like Prism and Trooper. Fairburn gave the album a kind of glossy lustre, bringing forward Jobson's booming voice. The running order was changed, too, dropping "Pros and Cons" on British copies for the earlier single, "Masquerade."

The second version of Days In Europa has always seemed to offend the band's loyal fans, who felt Fairburn had turned their post punk darlings into an American style rock band, and later reissues on cd have returned to Nelson's mix, but I've always preferred Fairburn's. Perhaps this is because this is the way the album was first released in North America, and hence the way I first came to adore this particular slab of wax. But even so, there is something to be said for the more balanced and coherent soundscape of the second version, with Egan's terrific hi-hats sparkling brightly in the top end of the spectrum, and Nelson's battery of sequenced synthesizers swirling from high to low.

The rip of the second version of Days In Europa posted here is sourced from a British copy. It is identical to that which was released in North America except that "The Olympian" has been retained from the original running order. Long time fans of the band are encouraged to reconsider the Fairburn mix, while new listeners should seek out The Captain Oi! cd reissue, which includes the original mix and a clutch of associated singles and b-sides. Egyptian girls don't last for long.

-- Crash The Driver

Skids - Days In Europa

01 Animation
02 Charade
03 'Dulce Et Decorum Est (Pro Patria Mori)'
04 The Olympian
05 Home Of The Saved
06 Working For The Yankee Dollar
07 Thanatos
08 Masquerade
09 A Day In Europa
10 Peaceful Times

UK LP Virgin [OVED 42] 1979

Arias & Symphonies by Spoons

I sleep in your nova heart
As things come apart

No-one had heard a Canadian record like Arias & Symphonies when it hit the airwaves in 1982. Here was a bona fide New Romantic record from a home-grown talent, sounding as though this relatively unknown band from Burlington, Ontario, were seasoned habitues of the Blitz club in London, England. It wasn't just good. It was great.

This was primarily down to the band landing John Punter, who had produced both Roxy Music and their stylistic successors Japan. It was on a trip to Canada with Japan in 1979 that he became acquainted with Spoons, as they both shared distributor Quality Records. At the beginning of 1982 he worked with them for three days on the "Nova Heart" / "Symmetry" 12". This went top ten on release in April and paved the way to a further collaboration in the form of a full-length album. These sessions were the first time Punter worked with a group outside the UK.

Arias & Symphonies, released in October, is full of the suburban concerns Spoons displayed on their quirky debut single "After the Institution" (1980) and first album Stick Figure Neighbourhood (1981). But the drums have been streamlined and machined, the synths sequenced and arpegiatted, the vocals sheened and the guitars layered. The cover photo, used with permission of the Austrian National Tourist Office, gives the album an air of European grandeur, especially with its elaborate typography and heraldic insignia. The band portraits on the reverse, shot by noted photographer Peter Nobel, further attest to the influence of Ultravox, with the band all kitted out in white and posing before neo-classical buildings.

But it was not simply Punter's polished production and arrangements that make this the very pinnacle of the Canadian New Romantic scene. The song-writing is first rate, melodic and compelling, with a variety of tempos and moods on display. What the songs have in common is a sort of play-acting, extrapolating to the absurd, whether it's about communications theory ("One In Ten Words"), quantum physics ("No Electrons"), pirates ("Walk The Plank") or the ever-dramatic life-or-death struggle known as, um, winter ("Smiling In Winter"). The title song is a sumptuous slice of pop in the grandiose style of "Vienna," with Deppe's vocals approaching the operatic as he laments the things that parents expect of their children.

Smack dab in the middle there's "Nova Heart," with its over-the-top verses and lovely chorus. And the middle eight is a thing of beauty: instruments leisurely encircle the precision drum machine (Derrick Ross, automated), building to a lead synth line from Rob Preuss (only 17, eye-shadow, longing looks) as good as any Billy Currie mustered. Sandy Horne (long hair, ballet shoes, swooning followers) lays down bass grooves and trills expertly in the background. Vox Angelica they used to call it. This one belongs up there with the first Duran Duran and Visage albums, Vienna and Spandau Ballet's "To Cut A Long Story Short."



What follows is our usual high-quality rip of the vinyl album. We've exactly preserved the inter-song timings and have erred on the side of under-processing the audio. No extra compression or noise reduction here, and the high VBR rate ensures you'll enjoy all the top end sizzle of those double time hi hats.

Listen to this rip and then go to the Spoons site and order the Limited Edition compilation. You'll get several later hit tunes you can sing along to in the kitchen, two selections from the debut album and that magnificent "Nova Heart" EP, with its fab b-side, "Symmetry." And just to complete the experience, don't forget the "Nova Heart" video as well.

Arias & Symphonies
01 Trade Winds / Smiling In Winter
02 One In Ten Words
03 No Electrons
04 No More Growing Up
05 Arias & Symphonies
06 Nova Heart
07 South American Vacation
08 A Girl In Two Pieces
09 Walk The Plank
10 Blow Away

Canada LP Ready Records [LR 27] 1982.10
USA LP A&M Records [LP-4920] 1982.10
Canada CD Universal Music [7697421972] 2000

Recorded at Sounds Interchange, Toronto & Air Studios, London.
Mixed at Air Studios, London.

Sandy Horne: Bass, Vocals
Derrick Ross: Drums, Percussion
Rob Preuss: Jupiter IV, SH-2000
Gordon Deppe: Guitar, Vocals

Produced and mixed by John Punter
Photography by P.L. Noble

The album was accompanied by two singles, "Arias & Symphonies" / "Trade Winds" [SR 271] which charted at #18 and "Smiling in Winter" / "South American Vacation" [SR 272] which only made it to #30. That second seven inch is obscure enough that discogs knows not of its existence. That's what you've got us for!

-- The Second Chameleon

Listen To The Radio (Atmospherics) By Tom Robinson

A dull amber glow, numbers dimly lit. Kilohertz and Megahertz. AM and FM. Volume and Tuning. Slowly sliding up and down the dial, a static white hiss, punctuated by sudden bursts of sound. The news or weather, a commercial for a local car dealer, the latest entry in the top forty. The signal drifts in and out of tune, searching for that sweet spot where Schoenberg accompanies Bachman Turner Overdrive. Waiting for the long dash that signals two o`clock. Exactly.

Radio remains the most enchanted of media. Like some spirit, the voice passes silent and invisible through the open air, to come crackling in the depths of our speakers, a mysterious visitor in the night, a guest in the morning. And the very fact that it is nothing but a voice, nothing but something to be heard, only adds to the enchantment. As listeners, we have to complete the signal, imagine the colours, the smells, the textures. Radio lets us add ourselves to the message, become part of its meaning. In its glow we commune with ourselves even as we commune with the other.

It is this quality of radio, its uncanniness, its ability to seem both intimately familiar and perfectly strange, that is captured in Tom Robinson's 1984 single, "Listen To The Radio (Atmospherics)." The song first appeared two years earlier as the opening track of North By Northwest, Robinson's debut lp, following a string of mid-seventies successes in TRB, including the now classic chant along, "2-4-6-8 Motorway." Robinson's outspoken and trenchant criticisms of the Thatcher government, together with his open embrace of the struggle for gay and lesbian rights, kept him in the spot light in the early days of punk rock, but his albums sold poorly, leading him to disband TRB and try again with the short-lived post-punk outfit, Sector 27. 1983's "War Baby" saw him belatedly return to the charts as a solo act, and in the following year a cover version of "Listen To The Radio," by the Canadian band Pukka Orchestra, made it into the top twenty north of the 49th Parallel. Sensing a possible breakout hit, Panic Records issued a re-recorded version, giving it a new arrangement and more radio friendly production, and adding a co-writing credit for Peter Gabriel, who apparently suggested some of the lyrics.

Robinson's voice is one of the most moving of the mid seventies and early eighties. Smoky, at times weary, but somehow still defiant, it carries the listener with its impressionistic tale of the life of a minor bureaucrat behind the iron curtain where only the radio brings news of the outside world. "Atmospherics after dark," he sings. "Noise and voices from the past / Across the dial from Moscow to Cologne." Only radio brings such consolation, put the coffee on and smoke another cigarette.

Here is the twelve-inch, extended version of "Listen To The Radio (Atmospherics)," together with its b-sides and, as an added bonus, The Pukka Orchestra's funked out eighties dance version. Tell us which you prefer!

--Crash The Driver

Tom Robinson - Listen To The Radio (Atmospherics)

01 Listen To The Radio (Atmospherics)
02 (Atmospherics) Part 2
03 (Don't Do Me) Any Favours

UK 12" Panic [NICT 3] 1984

The Pukka Orchestra - S/T

04 Listen To The Radio

Canada LP Solid Gold [SGR 1022] 1984

Flowers & B-52's Updates

The internet can be a very wonderful thing indeed. Especially when it brings such a warm and encouraging response as we received for our posting of The Complete Works of (The) Flowers. Among the many appreciative comments we had not one but two from the Head Flower herself, Hilary Morrison, a woman whose voice has left an indelible impression on anyone who ever listened to the clutch of singles and ep tracks that her band gave us. We were absolutely thrilled to hear from her, let me tell you. You can read our original post and the comments that followed here.

And thanks to our good friend Dualtrack, whose blog should be required reading for any thinking person, we have updated our .zip file of The Flowers, with a much improved rip of "(Life) After Dark." Get it here.

Our recent post of David Byrne's original mixes of the tracks on The B-52's Mesopotamia was missing two of the longer, dancier versions that appeared on some early release copies of the ep. Thanks to VanceMan (whose brilliantly titled blog, Another Misty Bus Queue Morning, is also very much worth visiting), we have now rectified these omissions. If you downloaded the previous version, you'll want to get this updated one for the fantastic mix of "Cake" alone. Download it here.

Thanks to everyone who has helped make The Same Mistakes such a pleasure, and stayed tune for more!