King's Korner Band -  King's Korner March Past - 1982

The first thing I ever recorded, in a pub car park on a Saturday, with a load of aging jazz musicians on penny whistles and washboards etc. There was even a kitchen sink. I plugged away on an acoustic at the back somewhere with Fal. You can probably hear about two or three chords clearly in amongst the mish-mash of trumpets and other far louder instruments that they placed closer to the two microphones in the middle of the car park. I was never going to compete with that, so I drank beer and appeared in a couple of photographs standing behind some people who were taller than me. Luckily I don't have a copy, but Fal found a sleeve for it, and a track listing...the bastard.

This single was a bugger to get out, but we needed to do something new rather than release something off No Rest for the Wicked. We were short on new songs as I'd just joined, and were on tour for most of the year. The demo was done off Talgarth Road. We went to Glyn Johns to record a release version, but ended up scrapping it after 'production difficulties'. We revisited the demo, but original engineer Keith Hancock made an arse of the mixes, filling them with jazz funk keyboards. Eventually Stuart Stawman rescued this from oblivion with a few overdubs by Justin and a new mix, but it was never as good as it could have been. BNW II has a story all of its own.

After spending much of 1985 touring, we went into 1986 in writing mode, spending months in rehearsal rooms. We demoed on two 4-track machines in a rehearsal room, with vocals recorded in Justin's kitchen. Having spoken to many producers, Glyn Johns returned to battle us once more. Initial recordings were done at Townhouse 3 in South London. These sessions drew to a hasty conclusion in June, and resumed in July at a more suitable, but highly secret location. As with anything you become attached to, there were things that could have been better, and times where we should have listened to a vastly more experienced and expensive producer more closely, rather than ignoring him. Two singles, which should have come out first, followed the album release. Neither were our first choice. Andy Wallace remixed Lights Go Out and Poison Street for the US market, without much success, although the mixes were top notch.

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