| I've shamelessly reproduced this (with my
own notes) from Tim's introduction to the Anagram CD 'Adverts - Punk singles Collection'
and I make no apologies as it tells the story so well. |
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"...so halfway through the recording of
One Chord Wonders we trooped out of the studio to have our first proper photo session.
This meant standing around in the demolition site across the road for half an
hour in the freezing cold to get the shot that would be on the cover of the
first single. Instead it ended up on the back and Stiff came up with a picture
of Gaye for the front. We were all suprised, but you've got to hand it to them ,
it's a classic. Frankly I can' remember how long it took to record and mix
the single, but it was a long time - one, maybe two days. At the end of Quickstep
you can hear Laurie complaining that his cymbal has just fallen off . Jake
Riviera at Stiff loved One Chord Wonders, but hated Quickstep, saying it was too
long for a punk song, clocking in at nearly three minutes. When the record came
out , the timings on the label were mysteriously given as One Chord Wonders -
1.99, Quickstep - 2 hours forty - nine seconds. After One Chord
Wonders, our new
manager, the much loved and missed Michael Dempsey (
publisher ' 100 Nights At The Roxy' and ' Sniffing Glue - The Bible'. Paul Punk 77)
started angling to move us onto a major label, and we fetched up on Anchor. Soon
we were heading down to Pebble Beach studios in sedate Worthing to spend a
weekend recording Gary Gilmore Eyes. One problem: as we set of towards the
South Coast we still hadn't decided who as to produce it. After some heated
discussion we stopped the car by a call box somewhere on the outskirts of London
and phoned Larry Wallis ( ex Pink Fairy. Paul Punk 77), who'd produced One Chord
Wonders. He said yes, and arrived at the studio a couple of hours after us,
armed with a crate of beer, the requisite producers tool. Bored Teenagers was
the hit follow up single that never happened, due to the fact we put it on the
B-side. Instead we followed up with Safety in
Numbers, in retrospect a rather
unwise critique of what punk was turning into. Once again we were in Pebble
Beach, this time with Miles, who qualified as producer because he'd once
"sat in on the recordings for Sergeant Pepper." |
The B-side
We Who Wait was a real typical Adverts
thing, all snappy, wordy and bristling with energy. And it sounds the same
backwards as forwards. Gaye wreaked her revenge for her over - exposure on the
One Chord Wonders cover by only allowing a photo of her bass guitar among the
ban shots on the back of the sleeve. On to the album (
Crossing The Red Sea With
The Adverts), and for this we were to have the luxury of Abbey Road studios and
producer John Leckie. From these recordings we chose
No Time To Be 21 as our stamens
of intent 45. In a familiar pattern the same thing had happened with Gilmore. We
got on Top Of The Pops with it, and the next week it plummeted out of the charts
( the normal scenario was appearance then record
climbs charts ! Paul Punk 77) . B- side New
Day Dawning was squeezed off the album because of lack of space.
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After these
recordings we lost a drummer, got another one (John Towe-ex ATV, Gen X and
Chelsea. Paul Punk77), lost him, got another one
( Rod Latter ex Rings
& Maniacs. Paul Punk77) who we later lost, got a keyboard player, got a new
record deal (RCA records- Anchor went bust. PaulPunk77), blew the budget for the
album in a week and spent the next year scraping around to find spare days
in the cheapest studios in town...Early on we recorded Television's Over
for a single, altered in epic fashion by the time it turned up on our
bete noir second album. As the group began to buckle under the strain of
going from nought to sixty in a year, I'd been keeping the creative
juices flowing by writing with Doctors Of madness front man Richard
Strange. Back From The Dead is the only song from this collaboration
that ever came out, and went onto the B-side of Television's
Over.
Statistics show that this post-Red Sea single sold less than one copy.
Cunningly our next plan to storm the charts was to release My
Place,
which started with the line, "Some God must have spewed me
up.." and had a kind of acoustic swish to shake off our last few
remaining fans. Alive recording of New Church on the B-side showed we
could still do the punk thing if we wanted, and was taken from the
soundtrack of a film we'd just made from German television (
film was actually called 'Punk in London' . Paul Punk77),
an experience too ghastly to go into here. The last gasp was the title
track of the second album, Cast Of
Thousands, edited down and released
as a single, complete with the same hideous cover as the LP, which we
were conned into posing for...The B-side of the single (and last
track on the album) had one foot hanging over the outer edge of what
most people would call "punk" and was titled I Will Walk You
Home. For most of our fans that particular walk - from
One Chord Wonders
to Cast Of Thousands was the one they weren't prepared to make. |
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But look , we didn't
know that punk rock meant having to make the same record over and over
again. We wanted do more, try new things, break out of the formula,
respond to what was happening in the group and around it. We thought that's
what punk was. We could hardly hear ourselves recording cast Of
Thousands over the sound of the critics sharpening their knives, but it
still felt the right direction to go in ."
T.V Smith
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"The wonders don't
care..and they don't give a damn."
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