Talk to any fisherman and they will have a story about the ‘one that got away’. How they struggled to reel it in, that it was ‘this big’ and with each telling the space between their outstretched hands increases. This is my tale of the one that got away. It’s the album that I really worked hard to reel in but the line snapped.
Here’s my story.
Quite possibly, when you hear the words ‘Bourgie, Bourgie’, you think of the 1980 hit song from Gladys Knight and the Pips. However, some of you might be inclined to think of the band that almost was, in particular their unreleased album from 1984, Dinky Honey.
I wasn’t aware of this album until earlier this year when someone called Graeme bought some of the Unspun Heroes releases and emailed me directly. We got chatting, followed one another on BlueSky and swapped some album suggestions, albums we’d love to have on vinyl. Dinky Honey was one he mentioned and I was intrigued with the back story.
So I did some internet sleuthing.
Finding a lost album requires a combination of luck and persistence. Get that combination spot on and you can probably find a copy of any album, however obscure, out there. However, not only do you need to find someone who has it, you also need them to be able to digitise it and share it. Not everyone is open to doing that. Thankfully, this is a lost album that a lot of people want and I had something up my sleeve to help make the decision easy for the owner of the cassette tape.
Now I needed to find someone who could locate the band. More internet sleuthing let me to guitarist Mick Slaven’s email address and I wrote to him.
Now, if you put your email address on the internet you get a lot of junk mail. Like thousands a day, sometimes more. Mick gets a lot of spam emails, he explained to me in his reply. Somehow, though, my request made it into his inbox and he didn’t delete it. Mick told me the original tapes were long gone and that he had no idea where to get hold of the songs. However, he was in touch with the rest of the band and was happy to ask them about the possibility of releasing an album that had been hidden from the world for 41 years.
This wasn’t easy, but after sending some emails, I was able to get a digital copy of the MCA promo cassette, although one track had some terrible surface noise which required me to hunt down a specific track elsewhere. Once I had the entire album in digital form, I had a listen. Was it as good as Graeme had said? I prepared myself for disappointment.
It never arrived.
Bourgie Bourgie rose like a phoenix from the ashes of Glasgow’s Jazzateers who comprised Keith Band on bass, Ian Burgoyne and Mick Slaven on guitars, and Kenny MacDonald on drums. Only once Paul Quinn was installed as the vocalist, having spent time working with Orange Juice thanks to his childhood friendship with Edwyn Collins, did the band really come into their own.
And they really did start making up for lost time, rearranging some early Jazzateers‘ songs and then writing new tracks together. First up on Dinky Honey was Breaking Point, also the band’s first single.
So far, so very good.
I hunted down their other single, Careless and the B-Sides to both. Apres Ski, the flip side to Breaking Point, runs for almost eight minutes (although the album has a four-minute edit) and really showcases Paul Quinn’s vocal abilities alongside Ian Burgoyne’s and Slaven’s consummate guitar chops.
Careless is the more pop-oriented of the two singles, but that doesn’t diminish its quality in any way. It has the sort of sound that you’d expect to break through and land the band on Top Of The Pops, but sadly the single didn’t trouble the Top 40. At this point they went off to Germany to record the album that never was – well, never was more than a promo cassette.
As I do with any album I’m interested in releasing, I listened again and again. The more I listened the more I started to love the album.
Yes, it was clearly an album from 1984 – although I’d suggest that it might not have been a big hit in the day, as it’s an album slightly out of time – too late for the early 80’s post-punk sound and too early (not to mention having proper guitar solos) for the jangle of the indie pop era. So I listened again and again. The more I listened the more I started to love the album. This was bad. I was building up anticipation for being able to release it.
Regardless, of my opinion on how well it might have done had it been released, it retains a quality that far exceeds that of many other albums from that time. Quinn’s vocal range stands out among his peers, and Slaven’s guitar solos weren’t your average pop-rock motifs. The rest of the band are far from in the background, either. Keith and Ian brought songwriting and arranging skills with them, and Kenny was no slouch with his technical studio skills and exceptional drumming performance.
Once I listened to the album as a whole, I started to wonder why they’d never made it big and, also, why they’d broken up before the album could be released. It’s not a part of the story I asked Mick about, although the classic ‘musical differences’ appears on many of the internet reviews of their songs.
The Jazzateers had already appeared in two different guises, releasing songs on Postcard and, latterly, being signed to Rough Trade and recording an album likened to The New York Dolls. Only after this period did they morph into Bourgie Bourgie and find their stride. Quinn fell back into recording with Collins for Alan Horne’s Swamplands label. The Jazzateers tried once more to find their place but their run of unreleased albums continued.
Sometimes the time isn’t right for a band. And sometimes the right time is many years later. For Bourgie Bourgie, I think that time is now. Sadly, it won’t be with Unspun Heroes, as obtaining agreement with the band has proved, even 40+ years after the album was recorded, too much and so the story ends here.
If you’re able to combine luck with persistence, just as I was, you’ll have the chance to listen to the great lost album of 1984. It’s well worth trying. And who knows, perhaps someone with better reach and connections than me will finally give this album it’s time in the limelight. I hope so.