We at Lost Tunes are proud to host a brand new version of Stephen Duffy's Kiss Me With Your Mouth. It precedes some great Lilac Time reissues we will have for you very soon
We at Lost Tunes are proud to host a brand new version of Stephen Duffy's Kiss Me With Your Mouth. It precedes some great Lilac Time reissues we will have for you very soon. Stephen Duffy is a prolific and much feted British songwriter whose music career began 30 years ago. Having begun his career in the embryonic Duran Duran with Nick Rhodes and John Taylor, Stephen left the band in 1979 – a year before the new romantics signed to EMI. But Stephen wasn’t without a major label deal for long. After releasing a single as The Hawks (aka Obviously Five Believers) he teamed up with members of Fashion and Dexys Midnight Runners to form Tin Tin and signed to WEA. The original dance version of Kiss Me was released and it was huge. As Stephen recalls “I found the success of the US remix of Kiss Me inspired genuine teenage pandemonium on the streets of Bloxwich and Sutton Coldfield. Girls pretended to faint. I was called out to provincial high street discotheques all over the country. Somewhere in the Black Country I shared a dressing room with the wet t shirt competition that was on after me." A couple of years later, Stephen, now known as Stephen ‘Tin Tin’ Duffy, was a solo artist and signed to Virgin 10 Records. The re-recorded version of Kiss Me was released and sold 250,000 units in three weeks, peaked at Number 4 in the UK Charts and became one of the defining songs of the era. It was the last song played on the medium wave service of Radio 1 before it became an FM-only station on 1 July 1994. Having decided the Pop-Star-Life-Style wasn’t really for him, Stephen formed The Lilac Time, inspired by Nick Drake with the name taken from Drake‘s River Man. Signed to Fontana the released three albums to great critical acclaim – the eponymous debut, Paradise Circus and & Love For All. However they were dropped but snapped up by Alan McGee and his Creation label who put out the Astronauts album in 1990. This marked a hiatus for The Lilac Time as Stephen went solo again. Another major label deal with Parlophone saw him team up with fellow Aston Villa fan, Nigel Kennedy and released the remarkable Music In Colours album. The project was born out of attending matches at Villa Park, Stephen’s first experience of playing with an orchestra in Australia and being neighbours in The Malverns. Stephen recalls the recording of the album as “the best and most magical experience I've ever had in a studio". With Brit Pop about to take over the world, Stephen moved to America, but returned with the ‘Duffy’ album released via the Indolent imprint, home to some of the scene’s biggest bands such as Sleeper. This led onto the Brit Pop supergroup, MeMeMe - a one-off colleborative project with Alex James (Blur), Justin Welch (Elastica) and Charlie Bloor, a friend of Alex James. Originally the tracks were recorded as background tracks for Damien Hirst's film art installation at the Spellbound Exhibition, which took place at London's Hayward Gallery in March 1996. After ‘Contractual Issues’ and the collapse of Indolent, the follow up album to Duffy – I Love My Friends – was belatedly released by Cooking Vinyl in 1998 before Stephen reformed The Lilac Time and released two albums Looking For A Day In The Night and Lilac6. The band then became Stephen Duffy and The Lilac Time and released two more albums – Keep Going and Runout Groove. So there we have the potted history of one Stephen Anthony James Duffy’s 30 years in the wilderness. And all without even mentioning that he co-wrote and co-produced Robbie Williams’ Intensive Care album and toured the world as musical director on Robbie’s Close Encounters World Tour.
It’s treats aplenty on Lost Tunes with over 30 albums added this week that are all exclusive to Lost Tunes. Between them they bring together all styles of music from progressive space rock to earthy English folk music that’s a firm favourite of Fleet Foxes. There’s also some psychedelic experimentalists, a long lost early album from Band Of Gold hit maker Freda Payne and some of the last ever recordings by the Small Faces as back up to Johnny Hallyday!
It’s treats aplenty on Lost Tunes with over 30 albums added this week that are all exclusive to Lost Tunes. Between them they bring together all styles of music from progressive space rock to earthy English folk music that’s a firm favourite of Fleet Foxes. There’s also some psychedelic experimentalists, a long lost early album from Band Of Gold hit maker Freda Payne and some of the last ever recordings by the Small Faces as back up to Johnny Hallyday!
Duncan Browne’s Give Me Take You is acclaimed on The Fleet Foxes’ myspace as one of the few inspirations on the band. It’s a truly remarkable album as is the only release from Trader Horne that teamed up former Them member Jackie McAuley and Judy Dyble who’d previously been in Fairport Convention. Their harmonies are exquisite.
In this new batch there’s also some tormented acid folk from Jimmy Campbell, three albums that are all worth checking out, as are the quirky psyche sounds of Paul Brett’s Sage whose three albums are buried treasures in the truest sense of the word.
Freda Payne’s How Do You Say I Don’t Love You Anymore is one of those lamented albums that disappeared into the ether in the mid ‘60s. By the time she hit big with Band Of Gold it was a priceless set and its soulful groove underlines her vast talent and evocative vocal.
Golden Earrings, from Holland, also hit big in the ‘70s with the brash and screeching classic Radar Love but it’s their first three albums that have been unearthed here. Starting with Nederbeat, their version of The Beatles beat boom, they soon accepted the psychedelic chalice and wigged out accordingly, as did Spooky Tooth who decided to follow their biggest hit with Better By You Better Than Me by drafting in French experimental sound manipulator Pierre Henry. Discover what happened…
We also have four classic albums from prog’s under rated classically-tinged Fruup, the similarly overlooked Galliard and CMU – the Contemporary Music Unit to you – not to mention a couple of stellar Cozy Powell albums where the drummer dances with Gary Moore and Jeff Beck, and let’s not forget the first two Man albums in all their psychedelic prog glory. So, don’t worry that the English Summer has been reduced to four seasons in one day… every day, you can just sit at home and languish in these luxurious treasures.
As the sixties drew to a close, Trojan Records was riding the crest of the Reggae wave. Launched in the summer of 1967, the company had rapidly grown from just one of a handful of West Indian music specialists into a significant force on the Pop scene. Major crossover hits from an array of Jamaican acts had propelled Trojan - and Reggae music as a whole - into mainstream consciousness, and as sales for 7” singles continued to go through the roof, the company sought to repeat the success with long-playing collections
As the sixties drew to a close, Trojan Records was riding the crest of the Reggae wave. Launched in the summer of 1967, the company had rapidly grown from just one of a handful of West Indian music specialists into a significant force on the Pop scene. Major crossover hits from an array of Jamaican acts had propelled Trojan - and Reggae music as a whole - into mainstream consciousness, and as sales for 7” singles continued to go through the roof, the company sought to repeat the success with long-playing collections. The overwhelming popularity of an early compilation of club favourites entitled Tighten Up had bolstered confidence in the possibilities of cracking the albums market and with a slew of Reggae tracks already having made the UK charts, the Trojan team had little difficulty selecting a dozen hits for what would become the ultimate hits package.
The product of their brief collaboration was an LP that not only provided the ideal introduction to the exciting new sound emanating from Jamaica, but also a wonderful listening experience, with all but two of the dozen featured tracks being top 40 hits. Among the highlights were Desmond Dekker’s chart-topper, Israelites, perennial football favourite, Liquidator by the Harry J All Stars’, Jimmy Cliff’s joyous Wonderful World, Beautiful People and the first international best-seller from producer, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Return Of Django - although in truth every track was a classic.
Packaged in an alluring sleeve and given a ludicrously low price of 19/11, (about 98p in today’s money), the suitably entitled Reggae Chartbusters LP hit the stores at the tail end of ‘69 and unsurprisingly sold by the cartload, promptly topping the newly formed UK Reggae charts for months on end, and rivalling the much vaunted Tighten Up Volume 2 as the nation’s favourite Reggae collection of the decade.
Having found a winning formula, Trojan were keen to further exploit the Reggae Chartbusters brand, although the company had to wait another year before enough recordings worthy of inclusion had been amassed. Issued late in 1970, Volume 2 contained a selection equally as strong as the preceding set, with major works including Bob & Marcia’s Young, Gifted & Black, You Can Get It If You Really Want by the ever-popular Desmond Dekker, the Maytals’ skinhead favourite, Monkey Man and Jimmy Cliff’s much-lauded anti-war anthem, Vietnam.
Such was the popularity of Reggae during this golden period in its history, less than twelve months had elapsed before Trojan had accumulating enough hits for the third and ultimately final Chartbusters collection. Arguably the strongest selection yet, over half of the dozen tracks had breached the UK top ten, with the stand-out being the company’s first ever number one, Double Barrel by Dave & Ansel Collins, although best-selling works by such luminaries as the Pioneers, Greyhound, Bruce Ruffin and Bob & Marcia ran the track a close second.
As 1972 came to a close, the great British Reggae-loving public eagerly anticipated the next album in the series, but it never came. Just why Trojan decided to pull the plug remains a mystery - each of the three sets had topped the Reggae charts and a fourth collection would have surely repeated the feat, yet possibly because it was felt the consumer was getting too much of a good deal, the plug was pulled and the run of Reggae Chartbusters LPs came to an abrupt end.
Within a few years, Trojan was struggling financially and its position as Europe’s leading Reggae provider had come increasingly under threat by a host of independents, along with the company’s former co-owner, Island Records. Jamaican music too was changing, with Roots, Dub and DJ sounds superseding the chart-friendly material that had been prevalent throughout the late sixties and early seventies.
Despite this change of direction, the Pop charts continued to be peppered with Reggae records throughout the remainder of the decade, and while the glory years of the ‘skinhead era’ were well and truly over, enough big-sellers made the national listings for Creole Records to revive the Reggae Chartbusters concept for a number of collections of their own. But the dawn of the eighties heralded the end of a golden age for the genre. Bob Marley’s death, along with the development of the introspective stylings of Dancehall sounded the death knell for Reggae as a credible commercial style outside Jamaican shores. Sure, the likes of Boris Gardiner, Maxi Priest and Aswad would still occasionally light up the charts, but from there on in, getting a Reggae record in the top 50 became an increasingly difficult task.
The fall from grace of contemporary Jamaican music coincided with renewed interest in earlier sounds and in such an environment, Trojan once again became a relevant force - this time as the custodians of the world’s greatest Reggae archive. In recent years the label has led the field in championing the music that laid the foundations of the modern Jamaican record industry and now, to commemorate the launch of the best-selling Reggae Chartbusters series some forty years ago, it has revived the celebrated line, with the original trio of releases augmented by another three volumes.
In addition, the dozen recordings that comprised each of the initial LPs have been bolstered by eight bonus tracks, while the modus operandi of highlighting 20 of the most popular Reggae sounds from a given period is repeated on the newly created sets, with the fourth volume featuring the best-selling Reggae 45’s from the tail end of the Skinhead era. Among these are Dandy Livingstone’s jaunty Suzanne Beware Of The Devil, Desmond Dekker’s comeback hit, Sing A Little Song, the skanked-up Smoke Gets In Your Eyes by Teddy Brown & Blue Haze and Judge Dread’s outlandishly risqué, Big Seven. Elsewhere are several best-sellers that through the peculiarities of distribution of Jamaican music in the UK, narrowly missed out on making the national listings - their number including club favourites from Zap Pow, Dennis Brown and a popular vocal trio yet to make their international breakthrough, Bob Marley & the Wailers.
The mid-seventies, from which the material on Volume 5 is collected, was a period of transition for Reggae, as is reflected in the variety of styles highlighted, from romantically-themed titles such as Ken Boothe’s chart-topper, Everything I Own, John Holt’s highly orchestrated Help Me Make It Through The Night and Susan Cadogan’s masochistic Hurt So Good, to less commercial, if no less significant works from Johnny Clarke, Junior Byles and Rupie Edwards.
The series is brought to a close with a score of best-selling tracks from the latter part of the seventies, by which time Roots and Dub were firmly established as the pre-eminent forms of music in Jamaica, while Lovers Rock dominated the Reggae play-lists in Britain. This contrast is duly reflected in the fascinating selection on Volume 6, with righteous works by Gregory Isaacs, Dennis Brown and the In Crowd sitting comfortably alongside major hits by leading UK-based singers, Janet Kay, Marie Pierre and Louisa Mark.
Included among the 120 classic tracks on these 6 albums are over 40 major UK chart hits, with every major Reggae artist from the sixties and seventies featured, as well as many of the one-hit wonders who briefly blazed onto the Pop scene, only to fade just as quickly. Every effort has been made to ensure each set faithfully retains the style and spirit of their respective period, and presents the most complete and enjoyable introduction to classic Reggae ever to see issue.
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