Troy Tate - Lifeline (1982)

In January 1982 Troy Tate, still with the Teardrop Explodes, released his second single:

Lifeline (1982)
- Lifeline (Hold on to That)
- Kamikaze
- Thomas (Moonbase version)

.

.

.

NME dismissed the release follows:
‘Troy Teardrop loks in no mind to neglect his solo sideline. Pity that this ‘interesting’ cut does nothing much to establish an identity for him. Better is b-side ‘Thomas’, a version of his last and first solo single’ (NME, Feb. 27, 1982).

Tate talked about the single and much more in an interview with Ray Brittlewink of Merseysound (November 1981).

‘Q. What’s the title of the next single you have worked on and who plays on it?
‘A. The A-side is Lifeline and the b-side will be Kamkazzi (sic) – on those sessions were Rolo (Wild Swans), Dave Balfe, and a girl called Virginia Ashley (sic, a.k.a. Virginia Astley) who played on Townsend’s latest LP, she has done some singing on that. And I’ve got Joe Musker on the b-side – he would have been on the a-side but he couldn’t make it. So we used Ally Patterson from TV21 who was at Rockfield Studios at the time, and we were friends and liked what he had done with TV21, and he and I had been in Shake together as well, so it seemed pointless ringing Pete Kershew up who I usually work with to come down when Ally could do the job, plus we had planned to do a single together for a long time anyway, and now was our chance. […]

‘Q. If you wouldn’t have joined Teardrop what do you think you would have been doing now?
‘A. I would have been doing my own stuff, I think, and formed a band around that. Because there aren’t that many bands that I would like to join really and there isn’t that much choice when you think about it. And it’s just that everything’s gone well, and this year’s been like a dream come true. […]

‘Q. Is ‘Thomas’ about a certain person or just fictitious?
‘A. No. It’s not about anyone in particular that I know. I suppose it could be about friends but also about your own self, just how fate sets you up in certain situations. […] I wanted a short story line for it which it is. And again it was interesting to use someone different. Like in Teardrop you all rehearse together and you know everything but when you get someone who doesn’t know the songs it’s harder but more exciting. See, I can do that because I do one thing with Teardrop which I enjoy and then I do my own stuff and experiment with other people and I feel lucky in that respect.

‘Q. Do you find working with people you know better than with someone new?
‘A. No, if I had the time I would like to use all different musicians. Like I don’t like starting with a set idea about a song anyway and stick to saying from the start it[‘s] going to be like this or that. Like with ‘Thomas’, that was called Missile Time before I changed it.

‘Q. Were you disappointed over Thomas not being more of a success?
‘A. I wasn’t say disappointed over it not getting a chart entry. I was more fed up that it didn’t get any radio play, because we thought it was a good record, and the things that I have done say with Teardrop, TV21 and Shake had all done OK, and I thought this would. Mind you there is the possibility everyone thought it was shit so they didn’t play it.

‘Q. What are your plans for an album and solo dates?
‘A. Well I would like to do them but, like the single, I would do it when say I have something to say and the time. Because like next we’re doing the Teardrop LP and maybe some dates, then I wouldn’t mind two weeks off and stop having so much fun’ […]

‘Q. Who’s your main influence?
‘A. John Lennon and anyone else who’s been good. I know Lennon is an obvious answer, but he had a gutsy and intelligent way about him. I don’t like anything too bland.

‘Q. What do you think of Liverpool and the so-called scene?
‘A. It’s great the people are so alive and open about things, and even if people don’t like you they say well fuck you. And I love the girls here and everyone has their own different thing. Even when people are depressed here they have time to laugh, like where I cam from, Yorkshire. I love London, but here things are on a smaller scale so you can get around quicker like when I lived in Edinburgh.’

(Merseysound #19, November 1981)


Lifeline can be found here (thanks to our friends at fade2gray)

Troy Tate - Thomas (1981)

While still playing guitar with the Teardrop Explodes, Troy Tate released his first single as a solo artist in June 1981.

Thomas (1981)
- Thomas
- London’s Swinging

Sounds welcomed the release with the following article:

‘Pre-employ in the Teardrop camp and post the decline of Shake, Troy has drifted from the glamorous environs of the music biz into labours of a less salubrious nature. By day assembling on a factory production line and by night and weekends in a restaurant kitchen hidden behind a sky bound stack of dirty dishes discarded by the hunger-mad, food crazy diners in their quest for appetite satiation. In the few spare hours that this busy life of toil and tedium offered Troy was committing to tape demos of self-penned material. This action resulted in a publishing agreement with Warner Bros and the in-the-racks-now-pop-kids single 'Thomas' with the rear graced by 'London's Swinging' on Why Fi c/o RCA (sleeve designed by the beautifully titled Pablo Cuckoo).

'Thomas' sets off in a broody fashion, in some ways akin to a slow burning John Cale ballad. Troy's voice being well up in the mix makes it necessary to raise sound levels to allow the delicacies of the masked staccato strumming and the discreet build-up to the marching beat that underlays the chorus to emerge and fully maximise listening pleasure.

"It was recorded on an eight-track machine in the bedroom of Phil Chapman. There was no room for a drum kit in there so they were added separately just before I left for America.
"Now there's some hilarious reviews saying it's over produced. It was edited the day before we did 'Treason' for Top Of The Pops and the artwork done literally just an hour before the programme."

‘Lyrically 'Thomas' could, given the lightest of casual hearings, be dismissed as just another well-meaning but dreary anti-war tirade. But let the artiste enlighten:

"It's basically about the way events take over people. I meet people I used to play in groups with and now they're sales reps or whatever, not that there's anything wrong with being a sales rep but 'Thomas' is a twist on the way fate can push people into situations they didn't want.
"On my mind too was that that is the way an army mobilisation can happen. If they're not careful everyone could be in the army if the government and/or world events dictate it.
"The song covers this in a slightly off-centre way. I didn't want to just sing 'Oh, I hate war'. The line 'the train's on time' comes from the title of a story by Heinrich Boll, written during the war about the way people get sucked into it in quite arbitrary fashion. 'It's like watching war films when you're a kid and before you know it you're out there fighting in Northern Ireland or Poland and it's nothing to do with you.
"In some ways it's like the music business too. Like having the hit single and selling out all the gigs, we never expected that to happen. It's taken two months for that to start to sink in.
"One gig I was watching the Delmontes (UK tour support), I was tired and a bit out of it and I seriously wondered who the main band were. You suddenly think God! All these people are coming to see us!"

‘The not-to-be missed flip, 'London's Swinging' bursts out with an Iggy/Bowie style raunch, heavy duty sustained guitar leading the cut and thrust form start to finish. These grooves are made doubly dangerous by the oft-used refrain which fairly bulldozes its way to the cranium.

"That one's partly autobiographical. When the economy is bad everything is down to a minimum and people think I've got a job. Get some money and get ripped on Friday night and don't give a shit. People aren’t grabbing things and changing them any more.
"There's the comparison with the Swinging London of the sixties. Nowadays London isn't really part of England anymore and the swinging is from a yard arm.
"It's partly a tongue-in-cheek rock and roll song as well the ‘Johnny' in it has been in every rock and roll song ever written. It's like a package and I do like the idea of rock being disposable, you can take it seriously and throw it away.
"It's not like religion or the government, rock and roll keeps changing and rock and roll is bananas and that’s why I love it."

‘Prolonged globe-trotting, rather than sapping energies, has fuelled and strengthened Troy's zest for existence. Pausing only for a brief week-long rest, he's recording further personal compositions in readiness for a future follow-up RCA forty-five.

‘Strings still buzzing, he remains studio bound for the making of the second Teardrop LP, the material on which will be publicly unveiled on a September scheduled Euro-tour. Any possible unfilled studio seconds will find Troy crawling round to face the mixing desk, hopefully producing (past credits include TV21) Birmingham's Pinkies. Does he never relax?

"It's important to do things, not just talk about them. I don't want to sit around on my arse. The Teardrop Explodes is a very positive thing, a real buzz gets across to the audience and it encourages them to do things for themselves. It's a slightly different angle on the punk thing. Be creative and go out and take life. Don't let anybody give you any shit.
"I went to see James Brown at the Lone Star Club in New York. A legend just ten feet away from me on a tiny stage, doing the splits and jumping up and down and after a heart attack. It was a great inspiration seeing someone like that, you know you’ve just got to keep going.
"If there is anybody reading this (!) and they really believe in something and really want to do it, then they will do it."

(Sounds, August 1981)



Thomas can be found here (thanks to our friends at fade2gray)



(see also: http://micksinclair.com/sounds/troy.html )

Julian Cope – Tamworth demos (1982-83) (Part 2)

After the end of the Teardrop Explodes and the beginning of his solo career Julian Cope recorded several songs in Tamworth. Among those:


- Strasbourg
- Quizmaster
- An Elegant Chaos
- Kolly Kibber's Birthday
- Wreck My Car
- Sunshine Playroom
- She Brings Me Flowers
- Jesus Christ & the Mysterons
- Hobby
- Hey, High Class Butcher

tamowrth 2

Julian Cope – Tamworth demos (1982-83) (Part 1)

After the split of the Teardrop Explodes, Julian Cope retired to Tamworth. This is his recollection of that period:

‘I hadn't written anything that people had actually liked since `You Disappear from the view' almost a year earlier. In later Teardrop sessions, I'd play a song and it would be listened to and then dismissed. I kept playing the songs on acoustic guitar, but Balfe's comments still rang in my years. I had played him a song called 'Bandy's First Jump' for the third album, but he'd hated it. By that time, he seemed to hate anything with guitars in it.

‘With Dorian away, I was forced to keep busy. I couldn't drive a car so I was stuck. Stuck in this house with songs that no-one likes. I recorded them on to my ghetto blaster and listened back. I played electric guitar along with the songs and they sounded good. I should do something, really, I reasoned. But I was in Tamworth and this was nowhere. For a few days, I was frustrated, but the mood wouldn't go away.

‘I didn't know how to book a studio; that had always been done for me. But I had to record. It was the first time in ages that I'd felt that way. My mother told me about a teacher she knew. He had a studio. I thought it was probably a crap studio. A teacher? I'll ring him in a day or so. I sat in the Mill Lane house with my Dinky Toys book and some pot. Dorian was in New York and I knew I had to make the phone call.

‘What a snob I was! I went to the studio and it was brilliant. I was sooo surprised. The guy who ran it was called Steve Adams, a junior school teacher and ex-weirdo. The local taxi took me to this tiny cottage in Birchmoor, a village on the other side of Tamworth, near to Glascote Heath where I'd grown up. Birchmoor was a heath of great desolation and remove. As a child, my father had taken me on walks there, but I had always seen it as being "Beyond" my area. It was untamed and heathen, and the tiny houses squatted upon the moor.

‘[…] Steve Adams expected me to be big time and know about VU and all that studio stuff. I faked it for a while to make him feel better, but soon we were recording really fast and easily. I wasn't bothered about the sound. I put the drum-machine of my Casio into the Vex AC30 amplifier and played the song on acoustic guitar over its dry thumping. The song was a beautiful major-chord thing called `Strasbourg' whose current arrangement was only one minute and 40 seconds long but featured a repeated Glam Descend link of considerable charm. Listening back to the empty song, I considered what Troy Tate might have contributed and set up the amp in a way that made me feel Troy-like as I recorded. I added a tight fuzz theme and distorted early Teardrop-type keyboard, then tightened the whole track up with tambourine. Ey-up, I was a bloody one-man-band. Balfe had made me terrified to pick up a guitar or bass anymore. Now look! And listen to this stuff ... it's a moving fucking thing.

‘I was ecstatic. This was the sound I had wanted for the third Teardrop album, instead of those dumb programmed synthesizers. Synths should fart and squeak, but Balfe had kept his on Rhythm/Dribble. Fuck that!

‘I made a list of all my songs, things that I'd been scared to try. I'll try them! I can play! I can play! When Dorian rang me, I played `Strasbourg' down the phone for her and she loved it. She loved it. I'm alive! I was dancing round the room. I played it to her again and a third time and danced all the time she listened.
In my sudden realisation that I could still be capable, we seemed suddenly so much closer and so much stronger that the most powerful lyric of the new song pulverised me with its truth:

"If I were France, and you were Germany, What an alliance that would be."

‘[…] I continued to record at Steve Adams' studio. I suggested he change its name to The Drug Attic, but he politely declined. The songs were coming thick and fast by now. I had hit upon a formula - just put everything on to tape that you can. I never gave Steve much time to sort out sounds; it would go down before we had a chance to get bored with it.
I had handpainted the little Casio keyboard that Balfe sold me. Dorian and Joss [Julian’s brother] painted little scenes all over it, and it had become the basis for all my songs.’

(Julian Cope, Repossessed, 9-13)

Among the songs recorded in Tamworth there were:
- Strasbourg
- Death Mask (Quizmaster)
- Head Hang Low
- Blaze Star
- Holy Love
- Bill Drummond Said
- Mik Mak Mok
- The Bloody Assizes

Strasbourg, Quizmaster, Head Hang Low would figure on Julian Cope’s first solo effort ‘World Shut Your Mouth’ (1984). Bill Drummond Said, Holy Love, The Bloody Assizes featured on Cope’s second album ‘Fried’ (1984). Mik, Mak, Mok would be the b-side on the Sunspots EP (1985).

tamworth 1

The Rain (1982)

Not to be confused with another Liverpool band of the same name (active in 1987-93), The Rain are the four members of Europe after the Rain - Kate Tate (vocals), Andy Sage (guitars), Mark Tinka (keyboards) and Mike Doran (drums, later Surface Tension, Electric Morning) – plus Tadzio Jodlowski (guitar, later Pink Industry).

This is how Breakout Magazine #10 (June 1982) described the band:

‘The Rain (formerly Europe after the Rain) are a comparatively new band on the Merseyside music scene, having been formed in November of the last year by Andy and sing Kate Tate. To date they have played only three gigs and received airplay from John Peel.

‘I asked Andy about the content of their music. “There’s quite a lot of funk in the set and some psychedelia. Both are city music, we feel like we’re city music – psychedelia covers the mass of influences that you get from the city, the funk is the jungle rhythm of the city. This music wouldn’t come from the countryside. It’s also got a romantic edge to it because Liverpool’s a very romantic place. For example, in Manchester the recent fashions have been severe and industrial, like A Certain Ratio with those high shaven heads. Here, it’s very decadent and romantic, back-combed hair and so on, like Katie.

‘The songs are mainly about love and the things that go on in your personal life, it’s very moody stuff. I’ll come along with some words or a vision of some music, a basic plan and we will draw an arrangement out of it. Writing a song is like creating a seed and the best arrangement for that song lies within it. It’s not like you add things on to it, they come from within. Something will happen to me and I’ll magnify it, get melodramatic. Often you feel things more intensely than is real,a nd you should express such feelings.”

‘Music and fashion have never been far apart from each other. Music has both crated the fashions of the day and been created by them. For many musicians fashion takes a back seat, for some it is what draws attention to their music, but there are few bands that regard music and fashion as having equal importance.

‘The Rain fit comfortably in the latter category, a group of people for whom music and fashion are motivated by the same thing. Guitarist and songwriter Andy Sage explains:
“Fashion’s really important and the same attitude that goes into music goes into fashion. Music is as much of an expression as clothes are. If you see anyone around Liverpool who looks really good or different, odds-on they’re in a band – often it’s not because of the band that they’re dressed up but because it’s the best outlet. A lot of people think that fashion is frivolous or dismiss it as vanity but it’s an attitude, you’re taking care of yourself – if you are looking good it shows that you are alert, active, wanting to do something. It’s like adrenalin, like rock’n’roll is.”

‘The band’s keyboard player, Mark Tinka (who since this interview was done has returned to his hometown of London) has a slightly different view of things – “It’s entertainment that is central to why I like playing and the same is true of getting dressed up and walking down the street. You are then entertaining people by the way you are. That’s what the café is about, for me, the café’s about entertainment as well. Those are the things that I feel I an do best in order to entertain other people and myself.”

‘The Café is the Open Mouth Café in Whitechapel, the band’s base and where they rehearse in the evenings. Andy and Mike, The Rain’s drummer both work there, so it’s important as a social base as well.”’

No recording by this band.

Europe after the Rain (1980-82)

Kate Tate (vocals), Andy Sage (guitars), Mark Tinka (keyboards) and Mike Doran (drums, later Surface Tension, Electric Morning) had been playing together since 1980, but came together as a band under the name Europe after the Rain at the very end of 1981. Most probably the band was named after the opening track of John Foxx’s Ep The Garden, released in September 1981.
Europe after the Rain played their first gig in February 1982.

This is how Breakout Magazine review the show:
‘They played an adequately long set and at a volume that made them very comfortable to listen to, generating a mellow, pensive atmosphere.
‘Their songs are about people and their situations, politically motivated but not political in themselves.
‘Continuity is provided by the keyboards and soft basslines, punctuation from the drums, intense droning vocals and the occasional rythm (sic) guitar. There is no bass in the band, the guitar being used both for bass and rythm (sic) parts.
‘The overall effect is controlled, intense and melancholy but melodic music. Worth trying to get to see.’

No recording has survived of the band, which by the end of 1982 turned into The Rain.

Jah Scouse

Jah Scouse (a.k.a. Ian Kay), Liverpool toaster, who collaborated and toured Europe with Young Marble Giants. The band (and more precisely, brothers Stuart and Philip Moxham) backed him on Jah Scouse first (and for a long time only) vinyl release in 1984, Better Things, produced by Phil Legg (Essential Logic). The 7” contained two numbers, and notably Merge (backed with Vegan Mix, which also featured Charles Bullen (This Heat)).