Month: July 2023

Imagine: you’re at the height of your fame, despite being a new band (although you yourself have been in several bands over the years), and you’re described as the focal point of a ‘movement’ that only really exists in the minds of the media. You want to do something out of the ordinary, musically, but it would be career suicide (again, in the minds of the media. Mostly).

What do you do?

You start a side project.

Here at Unspun Heroes, we know a thing or two about a side project. This is, after all, one of them. But we’re not (hopefully) at the height of our fame and we’re not going to do anything that breaks our initial vision.

For Pearl Jam’s founding guitarist, Stone Gossard, an outlet for his considerable musical talents came via jamming with his friends. And so, Brad was formed. Named after the man who owned the rights to the band’s original name, Shame – which subsequently became the album title – they released a very un-grunge record.

It’s experimental, off-beat, different, constantly shifting its musical references, shuffling them like a blackjack croupier on the Vegas strip. Yet, it’s so very Stone in sound and intent.

Kerrang placed it in their list of 100 albums you need to hear before you die, five years after its release, but in 1993 it barely troubled the charts on either side of the Atlantic.

30 years on, it’s held up (rightly) as one of the best albums of that year. I’d suggest it’s better than the output of Pearl Jam’s difficult third album, but that’s my opinion and it may well differ from yours. I know, it’s hard to comprehend that people can like different things and still like the same things as well.

Four years ago, Shawn Smith, the singer of Brad (and Satchel, plus others) passed away. The album he was working on with the other members of Brad was released earlier this year, in tribute. Yet, the first Brad album showcases Smith’s unusual style and Gossard’s abilities to reach past the niche he was placed in by the rock media. The original pressing commands high numbers on the resale market. Now it’s 30 years old, not only it is worth a second, third… hundredth listen, it’s surely worth a reissue. They came close on subsequent releases, but Shame was the album that defined them. Rather than shame, though, it’s pride that shines through.

Listen here.

As the eighties came to an end, and the heavier punk rock days of the NYC indie scene gave way to psychedelic indie pop, so Lida Husik arrived. Originally from Washington D.C., she settled in New York and signed to seminal label, Shimmy Disc (home to artists such as Ween, Galaxie 500 and Daniel Johnston). They released three of her albums, of which Bozo was the first.

Introspective and almost like a collection of demos, Lida played virtually every instrument on Bozo’s 12 songs – a huge feat considering she is completely self-taught. Imagine if The Velvet Underground had sprung up a couple of decades later and you’ll get a sense of the sound, but there is more to this than a pastiche of that well-known NYC sound.

Described as an album with songs that are ‘programmed to sink slowly into the listener’s subconscious, like a magic potion’, it’s feels like it could have been created as an aural depiction of a drug haze, or the US-version of shoegaze; it reminds me of the morning after wandering around the countryside while on ‘shrooms. Impressionistic, experimental.

It’s claimed that Lida’s first two album were recorded while on massive doses of hallucinogens, which might explain things. No doubt, also influenced by The Teardrop Explodes’ use of swirling organs and liberal use of LSD from a decade before. It’s this that makes it both of its time and timeless.

This is not a dark album; its naïve construction and hazy delivery ensure it is lifted away from the introspection contemporary artists were known for. Occasionally, on songs such as Halloween and Mom, it delights with melodies that might even be described as catchy. For sure there are earworms here (Farmhouse, for example), yet this is not music I would describe as tunes for bopping along to while you mix cocktails or make cheese on toast (or both, I’m not here to judge).

What it does deserve is wider attention. Bozo showcases an artist doing things on her own terms, and succeeding.

And as the late, great Bill Hicks said, “If you think drugs are bad, go home tonight and burn all your albums, all your tapes and all your CDs, because the people who made that great music that has enhanced your lives throughout the years… real fucking high on drugs.”

Listen on Spotify, or YouTube.

“This might be the greatest record no-one has ever heard of!”

It’s not unusual for the Unspun Heroes team to send each other over-excited WhatsApp messages about new discoveries, but two weeks ago we found a record that none of us had heard of, doesn’t exist on Spotify and where very little is known about the musicians. 

The eponymous debut album of a short-lived UK group, Tranquility, is sort of folky, Americana, proggy stuff with immaculate close harmony singing that CSN would have been proud of. The guitar playing is tight and on the right side of noodly, the rhythm section is bang on and the driving organ underneath gives it all a sense of epicness.

If Tranquility were released in the late 60s, rather than early 70s, it might have done very well. But it got caught between changing musical times and tastes. Everyone had come down from the Summer of Love, the economy was shot to pieces and people were looking for a different, grittier type of escapism. While Bowie was giving birth to glam and Sabbath were inventing doom metal, Tranquility were still making gorgeous songs that talked about love and gratitude and nature. Post decimal UK was more interested in sequins, space and Satan.

Now, not every song on the album is a winner; a couple of the songs on Side Two stray into the sort of music hall nonsense that The Beatles and every other UK band in 1968 were peddling. But, the main songwriter and lead guitarist Terry Shaddick hits much more than he misses. 

And that brings us on to the musicians – who are they? There is no wikipedia entry for the band and no information on the usual sources such as Allmusic. A bit of digging shows most of the players disappeared into obscurity, but Terry Shaddick did re-emerge in the 1980s as a professional songwriter, penning – of all things – Physical by Olivia Newton John. Which is weirdly great.

You can pick up the original Tranquility LP on Discogs for less than a tenner. Or you can listen to it on YouTube if you “want to get digital, digital”. [Ed: Complaints about Dad jokes to @moonbolt please.] Either way, it is perfect Sunday listening and a complete joy to have picked up on a whim. 

Feel free to drop us a line with any similar Unspun Hero recommendations, or add to our playlist which you can find out more about here.

Editor’s note
After a little more digging, it turns out Tranquility were put together by Donovan’s former manager, Ashley Kozak. They were held in high esteem in the US, so much so that when they toured in support of their debut they booked an additional two months’ worth of dates!

Also, it turns out that Physical was originally penned for Rod Stewart.

When it comes to pop’s mainstream male black musicians, the mid-1980s belonged, ostensibly, to Michael Jackson. Alongside were the supporting cast of Billy Ocean and Luther Vandross. You could hear the intros to any music from these three artists and know instantly who was singing. Yes, there were others, but these three were household names in the UK.

I think the same thing could, or should, be said of the singer who’s the focus of today’s post. Especially when referencing Track One, Side Two from one of the albums that passed a lot of people by when it came out in 1985. An album that continues to pass many people by.

Back in the 80s, people living in large towns and cities in the UK bought their music from a shop called Woolworths. Okay, they used independent records stores, too (and at Christmas from WHSmith when your gran bought you vouchers – because it’s a stationers and pens and pencils and beautiful notepads aren’t the kind of thing 12 year old boys like me wanted, they’re the kind of things that 50 year old me wants, but I am totally off-track now, so…)

What I’m saying is, there were only a few places that always had the latest, greatest thing. Woolworths was one of them.

Back in 1985, I can vividly remember walking into my local Woolworths, taking the stairs to the second floor and seeing an album that had a man in a brown leather trench coat on the front. He had a moustache even though Movember hadn’t been invented. And he oozed coolness to pre-teen me. The cover also had a sort of cartoon-style text that just said Colonel Abrams. I probably thought that, maybe, he was in the army or something. Whatever, it spoke to me. I wanted the album.

I pulled out my money and paid whatever it cost to have it. I’m guessing it was about four pounds. I treasured it on the long bus journey home.

Then I made a mistake that, it turned out, was the best mistake to make. I put Side Two on first.

The song that kicks off the second side of this debut album is Trapped. Wow. What a track. As an opener (to me) it blew my tiny mind so much I lifted the needle at the end of it and placed it back down so I could hear it again. I was hooked.

That’s not to say the rest of the album is bad. It’s not. The basslines and synth work on many tracks is sublime, including the actual opening track, The Truth, I’m Not Gonna Let, and Picture Me In Love With You. This is a man who played in a band with Prince on guitar and had been working as a singer in the music industry for a couple of decades before scoring his biggest hit.

Colonel made the kind of music I would later hear as the soulful building blocks of Chicago House, and what is now known as R&B. The rhythms are layered. The toots and wheeps of the synths don’t follow the melody but suck the listener in like a sonic whirlpool. And the beats… it’s here that the production (by the notable producer, and drummer, Richard James Burgess) not only positions this album in the decade of its making, but also makes it more than the sum of its parts.

This was a man at the top of his game, with major label backing and some of the best production available. However, a glittering career was to remain out of Colonel’s reach. In 2015, he was back in the limelight, but sadly for very different reasons. The man behind the soulful voice from Detroit, a city renowned for its music and its musical legacy, was struggling. Homeless and suffering from diabetes, he was down on his luck. Despite a crowdfunding campaign, Colonel passed away in 2016. A year of many legends passing away, so his name was simply added to a long list of lost luminaries.

Unlike many of those artists, Colonel’s work has yet to revisited. The CD of this amazing debut was reissued in 2010. It contains a gold-selling record, but it’s more than just one track. It’s time to revisit it for the classic it absolutely is.