Formation and Early Years
In 1974 Radio Caroline's Ronan O'Rahilly set up the pop group The Loving Awareness Band, comprising John Turnbull (guitar) and Mick Gallagher (keyboards) both formerly of 1960s psychedelic rock band Skip Bifferty with the session musicians Norman Watt-Roy (bass) and Charlie Charles (born Hugh Glenn Mortimer Charles, Guyana 1945) (drums). In 1976 The Loving Awareness Band released their only album Loving Awareness (ML001) on O'Rahilly's label More Love Records. The album has appeared on CD more than once, although these reissues have been sourced from a mint vinyl pressing rather than from the original master tapes.
The Loving Awareness Band broke up in 1977 and Watt-Roy and Charles joined a new band being formed by Ian Dury, who had begun writing songs with pianist and guitarist Chaz Jankel (the brother of noted music video, TV, commercial and film director Annabel Jankel). With Jankel fashioning Dury's lyrics into number of songs, the two began recording with Charles, Watt-Roy, Gallagher, Turnbull and former Kilburn and the High-roads saxophonist Davey Payne. An album was recorded, but was of no interest to major record labels. Next door to Dury's manager's office, however, was the newly formed Stiff Records, a perfect home for Dury's maverick style.
The band was invited by Stiff to join the "Live Stiffs Tour", and the band Ian Dury and the Blockheads was born, with the name ostensibly taken from the song of the same name which portrayed a drunken Essex Untermensch stereotype:
| “ | They've got womanly breasts under pale mauve vests Shoes like dead pigs' noses |
” |
|
—from "Blockheads" |
||
The tour, which also featured Elvis Costello and the Attractions, Nick Lowe, Wreckless Eric and Larry Wallis, was a great success, and Stiff launched a concerted Ian Dury marketing campaign.
Read more about this topic: The Blockheads, History
Famous quotes containing the words formation, early and/or years:
“I want you to consider this distinction as you go forward in life. Being male is not enough; being a man is a right to be earned and an honor to be cherished. I cannot tell you how to earn that right or deserve that honor. . . but I can tell you that the formation of your manhood must be a conscious act governed by the highest vision of the man you want to be.”
—Kent Nerburn (20th century)
“Early education can only promise to help make the third and fourth and fifth years of life good ones. It cannot insure without fail that any tomorrow will be successful. Nothing “fixes” a child for life, no matter what happens next. But exciting, pleasing early experiences are seldom sloughed off. They go with the child, on into first grade, on into the child’s long life ahead.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)
“And hereby hangs a moral highly applicable to our own trustee-ridden universities, if to nothing else. If we really wanted liberty of speech and thought, we could probably get it—Spain fifty years ago certainly had a longer tradition of despotism than has the United States—but do we want it? In these years we will see.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)