Thanks Bob, for remembering The Records and some of our songs (second time around if I cast my mind back to 2006). Since then, the group’s bassist Phil Brown and co-writer and singer John Wicks have sadly died. I am occasionally in touch with Jude Cole who appeared on ‘Crashes’ and toured with us in 1980. Jude covered our song Starry Eyes on his ‘Coup De Main’ collection in 2021. The Records catalogue (three LPs and various 45s on Virgin during 1978-1982) is unfortunately out of print and largely unavailable on streaming services. We had hoped that Universal might reissue The Records material, albeit it to a modest market, or consider licensing the recordings to a third party for a CD-set - maybe in 2024?
Best wishes for the holiday season and beyond, Will Birch at therecords.com
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It’s like the Beatles but better.
bluhammock
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The Records! What a great band. Only a handful of times in my 62 years can I remember exactly where I was when I heard a song. End of August 79, just before returning to Syracuse for sophomore year, in my bedroom at my parents’ house, Starry Eyes came on WBCN….and I was like “ oh my god what the hell is THIS???” A few days later I learned they’d be doing a free show on campus. And they were killer. In a set only 65 minutes long, they played most of their great debut album, several tunes from their yet-to-be-recorded sophomore effort (including Hearts in Her Eyes), and covers of Rock and Roll Love Letter and Spirit’s 1984. In the heyday of power pop, the Records epitomized that genre….fun, hard rocking, tuneful….just great rock and roll that rattles around in my brain to this day, 44 years later. Thanks for reminding me of a great band and a wonderful time in music and my life.
Mitch Goldman
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Rachel Sweet backed up Graham Parker on his Squeezing out Sparks tour when they played Vancouver's Commodore Ballroom in 1979 or so. Before Rachel Sweet, on the same bill was Fingerprintz. Interestingly when Fingerprintz finished their set, they came back and backed up Rachel Sweet.
On another note a few of us were huge City Boy fans back in the day. They too played the Commodore in the mid to late 70’s. I remember the concert if only because chairs were set up on the Ballroom floor for everyone to sit on. Perhaps the first and only time we sat in chairs at the Commodore which is famous for its ‘bouncing’ floor which encourages everyone to stand and move to the music.
Love your trips down memory lane.
Matthew Asher
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Hey Bob City Boy producer was Mutt Lange .... he also produced an Outlaws record for me that was on Arista Records
Great record had vocals similar to the early Def Leppard
As Mutt was doing Outlaws, Def Leppard, AC/DC and City Boy all in the matter of maybe 4 years.
Charlie Brusco
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Great column. I must have sold off 2000 of my LPs trying to shed possessions and the detritus. There are many LPs, I will never give up, like the obscure stuff Nick Drake, Bruce Cockburn, and Richard Thompson and all the British folkies, Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Pentangle, etc....The Records LP grabbed me the first time I heard it and it is a keeper. If I recall correctly my copy of Starry Eyes actually came with a 45 too. If it did I can't find it. But yeah what a great song. (It reminds me of that later Searchers song when they were making a comeback. I know, "you must remember this..."
www.youtube.com/watch?v=VK6v0PBDSy0 Chip Lovitt
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I stumbled on this inside story from Will Birch about The Records US tour for the second album while doing a deep after your entertaining post. Thought you might enjoy it.
willbirch.com/2020/07/15/40-years-ago-today-the-records-1980/ Ralph Covert
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Rachel Sweet, Horslips, city Boy, and Strawbs in one blog!? My radio career was not a waste! Thanks for the quick trip down a dark alley next to Memory Lane.
Bob Walton
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Dude! Wish I could have been in on that conversation! Absolutely lurve The Records and Rachel Sweet, saw them both at the El Mocambo in Toronto when their first albums came out. Saw City Boy opening for Be Bop Deluxe. Had the Stone The Crows 1st album, Like Andy, I was onto Genesis from the get and yes, Foxtrot is brilliant. Didn’t see that tour but caught the Selling England By The Pound tour at Massey Hall and they played Supper’s Ready from Foxtrot and it absolutely blew my mind. Strawbs and Wakeman - check and check. Horslips!?! The Man Who Sold America is still a personal fave. I think we lived parallel lives…
Mike Campbell
Programming Director
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Dyan Diamond did play the Whiskey. I was there. We were booking her for a show in San Diego. Kim Fowley was there too (of course). I think it was the only time I was backstage at the Whiskey. I believe she lives in So Cal and is no longer in the biz. That's about as much as I've been able to figure out. I still have some fond memories of being in a hotel bathroom with her, my friend and Greg Kihn with Greg's manager pounding on the door trying to get us out of there.
The Strawbs were a great band for their time.
Bruce Greenberg
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Always enjoy your writing. This one included some artists I’ve loved along the way. The Records were one of the greatest power pop artists of all time. Their song Up All Night remains one of the most beautiful songs ever, a new wave Beach Boys song perhaps!? And your mention of Badger made me smile, their first album was magnificent, sort of like Yes around THE YES ALBUM (maybe a bit harder and w a touch of the blues) of course due to ex-YES keys man Tony Kaye, and Badger lead singer David Foster co-writing two early YES songs w Anderson. If you’re a YES fan haven't heard the band FLASH, their first album is great, featuring Peter Banks ex-YES guitar player, it sounds like a great lost YES album : ) And of course Genesis whether Foxtrot, Selling England by the Pound or the Lamb, singlehandedly, w Gabriel, they set a blueprint for just how ambitious and awe inspiring progressive rock can be. One last thought on YES, if you’ve never listened to TO BE OVER from Relayer or their much unfairly maligned amazing Tales album, its some of the most, beautiful, brilliant, and timeless music ever created...
Jimmy Steal
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Yeah, it's a quintessential power pop song. I was friendly with John Wicks, one of the song's writers, toward the end of his life. He was an affable guy.
emiltonmyers
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“Hearts” is on so many of my playlists. The Records’ Live version shows they can/could sing and play their butts off for reall (and with fewer than 8,000 plays on Spotify—a crime!)
Mat Orefice
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Bob!!! Great to see you write about the Records. As a junior at the University of Wisconsin in 1981, a friend gave me a recorded cassette of the first two Records albums. I played it incessantly. I searched the record stores in Madison and could never find the actual albums. In the late 1990's, still unable to find the albums in Denver, I bought a CD burner and I transferred these cassettes to a CD. I still have it and it still gets played. They were a GREAT band and deserve much more attention than they ever got!!!
ShineOn!
MartyHecker
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Stiff records indeed. Best t-shirt ever: "If It Ain't Stiff, It Ain't Worth A F*ck"
Played Rachel Sweet's "B-A-B-Y" a lot on WLIR. I think she was 16 when that album came out?
Bob Waugh
Annapolis
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Great article! I have that Searchers album and that song is one of my wife's favorites!!
Steve Whitfield
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We always referred to obscure bands or records as of "kiss of death" records. We'd buy one of their records and you'd never hear of them again. I had The Strawbs, City Boy and Horslips, and saw Maggie Bell open for somebody at The Spectrum in Philly maybe the mid to late 70"s.
Keep up the good work.
Gary Jackson
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The Records had an EP that was enclosed with their first US album, that showcased their varied influences. I was totally unfamiliar with the original versions of "1984" by Spirit and "Abracadabra (Have You Seen Her) by Blue Ash, but The Records introduced me to them.
Also, I saw the Searchers in their skinny tie period at My Father's Place nightclub on Long Island to drum up support for "Hearts In Her Eyes". They performed letter perfect versions of all their mid 60s hits and I was not disappointed.
Stuart Taubel
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Down that same Brit rock rabbit hole you could find records by the band Bronco, with one of the better Brit raspy-voiced singers, Jess Roden (who distinguished himself on the Paul Kossoff track, "Molten Gold," in a duet with Paul Rodgers) and guitarist Robbie Blunt, who made lovely Strat sounds on the Robert Plant 80's track, "Big Log."
Robert Miranda
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Dave Cousins and the Strawbs, What a lovely group. Had the chance to see them one time at Winterland in SF.
And how about Lindisfarne and Stackridge and Glencoe and the Sutherland Brothers and Wishbone Ash?
Pretty sure they meet the definition of being obscure,
Best,
Michael Wright
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Can of worms ….. down the rabbit hole
Lindisfarne - Fog On The Tyne
David Ackles - American Gothic
Bram Tchaikovsky - Strange Man, Changed Man
Doug Pomerantz
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The Strawbs (post-Wakeman) were pretty big in Montreal, where I went to university. Their song “Hero and Heroine” was played constantly on the local rock FM station. I have three or four of their albums, as I suspect do many people of my vintage who were music fans in Montreal in those days.
City Boy! I have the first album and used to listen to it all the time before punk came along and changed my taste. In fact, I just listened to most of it again a few months ago. It’s a bit on the precious side, but is certainly very well put together. And who was the producer who gave it that sheen? The young Mutt Lange. First time I ever saw his name on a record, I think.
Rachel Sweet was beloved by the punk crowd, partly thanks to getting lumped in with the other Ohio bands who sounded nothing like her, like Devo and Pere Ubu, but also because her records were good: nice throwbacks to the early 60s girl group sound.
As for “Hearts in Her Eyes”, I loved both versions. The Records, of course, also had a much loved semi-hit with “Starry Eyes”.
I’m not sure what it says that I have so many of the total obscurities you discussed.
Tycho Manson
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Did you say Horslips? That is not a sentence I have uttered or even considered, well, ever -- until now when I read your latest missive.
Since you are one of the few people I know of on this side of the Atlantic who is aware of this long-overlooked Celtic-meets-rock band, you may be tickled to learn that this year saw the release of a 35-CD (!!!) Horslips box set, the wryly tilted "More Than You Can Chew." More, indeed!
www.celticnote.com/merch/horslipsboxset Good call on Maggie Bell, her second and final solo album for Swan Song, 1975's "Suicide Sal," still sounds terrific and features two guitar cameos by Jimmy Page, plus one of the most rocking Beatles' cover versions ever and her excellent redntion of two latter-day songs by Free.
As for some of my favorite obscure albums from the '70s, I'll cite three: "Eggs Over Easy" by the American trio of the same name that moved to London and kick-started the pub-rock movement; "Glencoe" by Glencoe (great songs, great band; no hint of commercial sucess); and "Plainsong" by the Ian Matthews-led Plainsong, whose vocal harmonies CSNY surely would have admired. (Years later, Glenn Frey publicly acknowledged that Matthews' arrangement of Steve Young's "Seven Bridges Road," from one of Matthews; solo albums, heavily influenced the Eagles' version of the same song).
Cheers,
George Varga
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Obscure records... that could be the theme of my life! Loving obscure records. I would buy them at full retail and then see them in the cutout bins for 49 cents a year later. It was so disheartening. Horslips was certainly one of those. The Man Who Built America on DJM!!! What a GREAT album. So many great melodies and potential hit singles.
Rachel Sweet too... Her version of Del Shannon's "I Go To Pieces" is the best I've ever heard, superior to the hit version by Peter and Gordon. I even remember the catalog number of the single because it meant that much to me. Stiff - BUY 44 (it was the first "import" single I ever bought!) The b-side was the equally great "Who Does Lisa Like". The Records backed her. Not only on a track or two but also on the Be Stiff tour (despite the fact that they were on Virgin). The debut album by The Records had a HUGE impact on me. I listened to it daily for a long time...the American version. I later bought the import which had a different running order and the original version of "Starry Eyes" but I preferred the American version with the tracks segueing into one another seamlessly. I was still young when that record came out (I turned 12 in 1978), so I was too young to see them live back then, but when lead singer John Wicks was living in the DC area and putting together a new "Records" band, I had a chance to meet him and we quickly became close friends. Over the weekend I was organizing boxes of cassettes from my past (thousands of them) and I came across all of his demo tapes from the mid 1990s and several live recordings that I made at various venues at the time. He had a great band, the old songs sounded ridiculously good, and his new songs stood up besides them. I do miss him. He was a great guy and a huge talent.
Strawbs - also a favorite of mine...I have every album on original vinyl and remastered CD (except for the ones only on CD!). Some of their records are better than others and they have gone through many different flavors throughout the years but they've always maintained their Strawbishness. From folk to folk-prog to prog to hard rock to pop, etc. The album with Wakeman that still floors me is From the Witchwood. Wakeman plays every keyboard you can imagine on it and it all sounds wonderful and not pompous at all. Some of the late 70s stuff sounds almost Badfinger-ish...check out "I Only Want My Love to Grow in You". That cut could have made it onto the Ham and Gibbons-less Airwaves record. I think Dave Cousins' voice may have been too trad-English-folk for many people though....
What about Fotomaker? Charlie? Pearl Harbour and the Explosions? The Cryers? Of course I could go on and on... But yeah, let's hear it for the great obscure records from yesteryear!
Dave DiSanzo
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Jude Cole! Start the car 1992. One of my major favorites I still play all the time. Go check out the guys that played on the record. The guys from Toto, Tommy Shaw, Jack Blades, Tim Pierce, Lee Sklar, Lenny Castro & more. Incredible record!
Tom Hedtke
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Thanks for reminding me of Jude Cole. Baby it’s Tonight is such a great pop song. Early 90’s. Bad timing. Melody in grunge era. Don’t like the video but the song elevates. Yes poppy but that’s OK.
youtu.be/4pavmG-YKLM?si=PiR8_dEapM6E9gSc Derek Morris
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Jude didn’t give up. He is doing some incredible work these days. And yes, he’s brilliant.
Kim Bullard
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