Majorlabelland And Assorted Oddities
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
One of the most adored British bands of the ‘80s, the Mighty Lemon Drops were becoming bigger on a small indie label, where they released their debut EP, Out of Hand before they were snapped up by Sire Records, an offshoot of Warner Brothers in 1986. After releasing their first album, 1987’s Happy Head, the band released what is now considered their best record, 1988’s World Without End. The record garnered the band their biggest hit with “Inside Out” and they thought the future would be smooth sailing. During the making of their next record, 1989’s Laughter, their bassist and primary co-songwriter Tony Linehan decided to leave. In a 2012 interview, guitarist David Newton talked about his departure, “Tony left after recording two tracks for what would become the Laughter album. We had spent the best part of four years with each other most days, & that will magnify any differences personality-wise or musically you might have: it was a stupid situation really and Tony now considers it a mistake on his part to leave, but we were also still quite young & things like this happen!” Thus began a tumultuous time for the band as they struggled to bring themselves back to their previously high standards. By this time, they’d started becoming Sire’s ‘pet band,’ basically a band the label could tinker with and use their own resources to advance and promote. They would put them on tour with labelmates The Ocean Blue and John Wesley Harding, a triple billing that made no sense at all. The band had begun to believe that things weren’t going the way they should’ve been going, that what they what they needed was a change of direction and sound and by doing this, they would still be popular but the next album proved to be a disaster. With the release of 1991’s Sound…Goodbye to Your Standards, Sire brought producer and sometime songwriter Andy Paley in to work with the band. It turned out to be the biggest mistake they ever made. What resulted was a horrendous record lacking any hooks or efficient melodies and the sound of a band totally out of their element, yet unable to come up with anything strong. After a while, the band even turned their back on the record, with David Newton talking candidly about the making of the album in 2012, “Laughter sold a respectable amount in the USA but didn’t do so well in the UK/Europe, so Chrysalis [their British record label] opted not to take up the option for a fourth album. Sire were happy to keep the band and put the next album out worldwide via Warner Brothers, provided we ‘re-negotiate’ the contract as the amount of $$$ they were contracted to ‘advance’ for a fourth album was for a much larger amount than we had sold records. One of the ‘negotiating’ factors was that we used Sire’s ‘in house’ producer, and American guy named Andy Paley (& his engineer Mark Linnett), and that was a HUGE mistake! They didn’t understand, and made no effort to understand, what we were about, what music was contemporary to what we did, our ‘musical lineage’ if you like (we had been lucky to use amazing producers like Stephen Street, Tim Palmer & Mark Wallis for our other records, who TOTALLY understood where we were coming from)…these guys didn’t have a clue and didn’t appear to care.” Once the album came out, the record completely flopped and as a result, fans and radio began shunning them. David Newton continues the story, “We should have been dropped after Sound’s dismal failure really, but I/we were inspired & wanted to prove that we still had life/legs, so I had the idea of making an album by ourselves really inexpensively/cheaply. Surprisingly Sire opted to fund it and release it.” In 1992, they released Ricochet, an album that was barely promoted upon its release and remains the most unheard record in the band’s catalogue. David Newton: “I LOVE this album, so did Sire, but didn’t predict it being a huge success, so we decided to do one last US tour before breaking up, & in October 1992 The Mighty Lemon Drops, Material Issue & Too Much Joy hit the road on what was a big-fun tour, playing our final show in November in Chicago.” Over the years, the band’s legacy has continued to build over the years as more and more people discover how special they were. But their legacy was tainted by Sire’s meddling and almost complete lack of interest after their experiment failed. The band members have all moved on to different things; David Newton stayed in music, producing bands and starting his own band, Thee Mighty Angels and Tony Linehan works as a project manager and moved to New Zealand.
Formats
Book Details
About the Book
“Majorlabelland and Assorted Oddities” is comprised of an essay about hard rock bands in the eighties and nineties and their struggles with major record labels which resulted in several albums that have never been released. Interviews have been conducted with almost forty musicians from some two dozen bands and they all graciously agreed to chat about their career and the problems they encountered that ended some of their careers’ dead in its tracks. The book is also comprised of short stories that have been complied since the author was in college and they fi t the feel of the book: very antiestablishment and hovering on the fringes of society and conformity. Closing out the book are interviews done with several other musicians, most of which have never been published before. They are all intriguing because the musicians talk about facets of their career that they haven’t spoken about in years if at all. This book captures a time in the music industry when there were no rules.
About the Author
“Pete always had one of the greatest combinations an editor could ask for; a workaholic mentality with a clear, authoritative voice when it came to music. Asking Pete to write about music was like asking a brewer to taste beers. It’s no surprise that his jump from short to long form with his fi rst book, Keeping it Tight in the Old Dominion: A History of Virginia Rock Music, was a success. Read on fearless reader, you’re in good hands.”