Sons of Egypt - Some Demos

The path that led Holly Johnson from being a solo artist to leading Frankie Goes to Hollywood has been quite complicated. After the split of the first line-up of FGTH (including Ambrose Reynolds and Steve Lovell) Johnson was quite active and productive in the underground musical scene. Among the relics of the period 1980-1982 are the demos recorded with the Sons of Egypt.
Here are his memories of the time:

‘Steve (Lovel, ndr), Buddy Mate (a boy working in a Virgin Record shop, ndr.) and I started rehearsing in ‘The Ministry’, a well equipped rehearsal room […]. Our band was to be called WIN (World Intelligence Network), a name taken from the puppet series ‘Joe 90’. Eventually however, Steve and I decided that Buddy’s bass playing wasn’t slick enough. Rather guiltily, we sacked him’ (A Bone in My Flute, 139)

‘A few months after we asked him to leave our group, Buddy Mate formed his own band, out of a group of young scally teenagers. His still-at-school girlfriend Julie played keyboards, Brian Nash (Nasher) played guitar, Buddy played bass guitar, Peter Gill (Ped) played drums and Ged O'Tool (Mark's brother) sang. They used to rehearse in The Cells, a disused prison behind the Hollywood Club in Duke Street, ten minutes' walk away from my flat. I used to go down the hill and watch them rehearse and I even named them - The Dancing Girls.

Eventually, at a friend's suggestion, I replaced Ged as the singer. They thought I was hip as I'd had two singles out on the Eric's label and had been in Big In Japan, a group that some of them had seen as kids at Eric's Saturday matinees. Nasher had a job as an apprentice electrician with the council, and Ped, having just been made redundant from Hygena, had used his redundancy money to buy himself a better drum kit. They were all around sixteen or seventeen years old. I was an `old man' of twenty-one or twenty-two.

I tried to rewrite the songs that they had, putting new lyrics to their backing music. We eventually got a spot on a local Granada TV show as `Sons Of Egypt' which became our name for some unknown reason. `Shake, Shake' was one of the songs [Bring on the Violins was the other, ndr]. The performance was quite good, but the songs in general were not.’ (ABIMF, 141)

‘I had realised I needed to get a live band going if I was ever going to attract record company attention. Eventually Ped and I decided to leave Buddy's band and form another with Mark O'Tool as bass player. We felt a bit guilty leaving Buddy in the lurch, but we knew that his bass playing and his attitude were holding things back.

Almost on the first rehearsal we wrote `Love Has Got A Gun`. a song that appeared on the first Frankie Goes To Hollywood album. […] Quite a few songs were bashed out, just like this, by the three of us Sometimes we would drag the equipment out into the sunny yard at the back of the building. Anyone who joined the band late ­would have to accept that we had written most of the songs.

At this time Sounds, a pop-music newspaper, printed a farn tree of Liverpool bands in which `Frankie Goes To Hollywood’ somehow appeared. This was the band that had never played ­live, with the line-up of Steve Lovell, Ambrose Reynolds a7, Holly Johnson. We decided to take this name, one I had create for my old band, as the name for the new one.

We tried out a few guitarists from the echelons of Mark’s family. There were two brothers who could both play, Vinny and Ged, the latter becoming the guitarist for the first performance, though neither was a very important part of the sound which was dominated by the rhythm section. Ped and I had tried to get &­ guitarist from The Jazz Babies (a.k.a. The Jass Babies, Rob Boardman) to join, but without success. I played maracas while singing at these early rehearsals to fill out our sparse sound. We eventually also added a girl singer, Sonia M (a.k.a. Sonya Mazonda or Mazunda), to do backing vocals. She also added visual interest. She was a short rotund girl of Eastern extraction who told us she collected semen and urine samples in a clinic in the Liverpool Royal Hospital. She had a red satin dress that she had made herself, with a small padded devil's tail safety-pinned to the hem at the back. She was the kind of girl whose stiletto heels came from wire baskets outside shoe shops. Her voice could be described as overpowering. Her style was rather `Frank 'n' Furter Goes To Kwik Save'. (ABIMF, 142-143)

Songs of Egypt recorded several versions of 'Shake Shake' and a few other songs which would then be part of the early FGTH's repertoire. Here you'll find:

- Shake Shake
- Untitled 1 (Is anybody out there)
- Untitled 2 (Bring on the violins)

sons of egypt

Watch the band’s performance on Granada TV here