Development
With the departure of Alan Rankine and Michael Dempsey, the Associates were effectively a Billy MacKenzie solo project for this album. MacKenzie started work with Steve Reid, a guitarist from Dundee and Howard Hughes, an accomplished keyboard player in late 1982 after the departure of Rankine and came up with an album's worth of material. However the sessions were chaotic and the resulting album was deemed unreleasable by Warner Music Group and they demanded Billy to work on it to make it releasable. The master tapes for this version went missing over the Xmas period in 1982 (allegedly Billy hid them due to his own dissatisfaction with the record). The album was restarted from scratch and was finally finished after a further two years in 1985 with four different producers. It cost £250,000 to make, a lot of money for even a major label record in those times. The album was a commercial failure, it made number 23 in the UK charts but only sold around 40,000 copies putting Billy in significant debt to Warner Music Group.
Read more about this topic: Perhaps (album)
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