Roger Béchirian - Engineer/Mixer/Producer

One of the fun things (for me, at least) about reading music/design books is gaining more insight into the entire process of recording music, from start to finish. And along the way, discovering new / forgotten artists and groups as well!
Although Barney Bubbles’ Wild World lacks a list of all the sleeves he designed or was involved in, it still showed me a few names I had never heard of…
One of those was Roger Béchirian, for whom Barney had come with a wonderful cover design based on Alex Steinweiss’ sleeves from the 1950s.
This graced a promo album called The Art of Roger Béchirian Vol. 1, released by F-Beat in 1982, which apparently was given away as a special Christmas present that year!
It contained 35 ‘snippets’ of songs on which Roger had a part in…
A quick search revealed that Roger is a well-known producer who has worked with several key artists that keep popping up here on Jokonky, plus quite a few obscure ones!
The liner notes of the album read as follows: 

Welcome to the art of Roger Bechirian, a track-by-track guided tour through his career as producer of countless commercial successes and musically satisfying moments. All the artistes represented on this record have benefitted from Roger's deft hand at the controls, as on hits by Lene Lovich, The Undertones, The Photos, The Rumour, Squeeze, a.o.
Side two contains a varied selection of Roger's work, demonstrating his ability to produce top results over a wide and diverse range of musical styles: Elvis Costello, The dB’s, Dirty Looks, The Blues Band, Shakin’ Pyramids, a.o.
We trust that you will enjoy listening to this brief sampling of Roger's work. We would like to thank all the record companies involved for the loan of these snippets. 

Yup, 15 different record companies were involved in this project!

Unnecessary to say that this album was never re-released in any form...

A bit of background, Roger was born in India but moved with his family to England when he was ten. He started developing his skills by editing music recorded from the TV! After taking college classes in electronics, he began working at a four-track recording studio in 1972.
Roger met Stiff Records founders Jake Rivera and Dave Robinson in 1974 and began mixing songs for the label. He slowly evolved into a producer, but also performed as a musician, being a member of Blanket of Secrecy!

As I began working on this project, I decided to stick to just one song of each artist/group in order to give a better overview of Roger’s work.
This enabled me to include some later songs as well, from after 1982.
The resulting compilation includes 24 songs ranging from 1979 to 1987, focusing on singles releases only.

By the way, in case you’re wondering, Roger is still active as a producer and a fun interviewee, check it out here. He has some great stories to tell about his work with Elvis, Nick, Dave, The Monkees, and even The Sex Pistols!

Redd Kross - This Way Up (b-sides, demos, live tracks)

2024 was The Year of Redd Kross:  a self-titled double album of new songs, a documentary film (Born Innocent) and a memoir (Now You’re One Of Us). 

In some ways, 2024 was the year that 1990 should have been for Redd Kross.  Third Eye was their first major label album, and Jeff & Steven costarred in a film called Spirit of '76.  Unfortunately, neither the movie nor the record was a success, and the perception in the music industry was that Redd Kross had failed to grab the brass ring.  

Lead guitarist Robert Hecker left after Third Eye. Robert's band It’s OK will release a new album in 2025 (with Roy McDonald on drums). Jeff and Steven focused on the UK, Europe and Australia for most of the 90’s, touring and recording with a new lineup.  

I had always assumed that Redd Kross left Atlantic and signed with Mercury Records after Third Eye.  I learned from the book that they actually signed with Andrew Lauder’s UK label This Way Up (which was distributed by Mercury in the US).  This Way Up released a number of RK singles and EP’s with non-LP b-sides.

Near the end of the book, Steven McDonald laments that the band has not been more prolific.  There are enough b-sides, demos and other stray tracks to make Deluxxe Editions of Third Eye, Phaseshifter and Show World (similar to the Merge Records reissue of Neurotica).  Say, there’s an idea!

ELSEWHERE ON THE BLOG: Songs That Redd Kross Taught Us and Tween Baes From Tostardo.

Gatecrashing by Jona

In the late 1970’s I used to frequent a 2nd hand record stand on the Hilversum market every Saturday and the guy who ran it introduced me to a lot of good artists and groups.

One of those turned out to be a musician I had completely forgotten about: Jona Lewie…

I went home with 2 Stiff Records 7 inches; Stop The Cavalry and Big Shot - Momentarily, and played both a hell of a lot! Of course, it didn’t take long to score afterwards a copy of his big hit You’ll Always Find Me In The Kitchen At Parties…

Joan only recorded 2 albums for Stiff: On The Other Hand There's A Fist (1978) and Heart Skips Beat (1982), which I both dutifully purchased, excellent songs I thought. Unfortunately for Jona there were no more hits and that was the end of his career at Stiff.

Visiting record shops in various towns I did however manage to find more of his work, incl. his first album Gatecrasher on Sonet which was a 11 track collection of singles, some released under his own name, others as Terry Dactyl And The Dinosaurs With Jona Lewie. Then I discovered why I was vaguely familiar with his name, in 1977 he’d scored a minor hit with Come Away (a cover of Roberto Leaĺ’s Bate O Pe) and even appeared on Dutch television!

Another 45 I found was Cherry Ring with a non-album B-side: After We Swun, a very quirky blues track, utterly bonkers but brilliant!

Both Stiff albums and compilations of those tracks are still rereleased, especially Find Me In The Kitchen (used for a commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCtLrVihFhQ ) and Stop The Cavalry (which has become a Christmas standard, despite that holiday being mentioned only once!).

Gatecrasher was never released on CD which was a shame to say the least…

BUT in 2020 Grapefruit Records released a 6 CD box set:

Brett Marvin & The Thunderbolts – The Sonet Anthology of which Jona was a member as well and the last CD consisted of the entire Terry Dactyl And The Dinosaurs With Jona Lewie output! It even included that wacky B-side…

This made it possible to come up with an extended Gatecrasher collection for your listening pleasure!

 

Question: What's your favorite Jona Lewie (if any!) song?

Faux Deluxe: Robert Palmer's Rhythm & Blues

Koen recalls: In 1999 Robert Palmer’s Rhythm & Blues album was released.  Reviews were mixed, and I must admit to ignoring it completely at the time.  One single (True Love) was taken from it and became a minor hit, but that was all.

Fast forward to the present time and my attitude towards this album has changed quite a bit, not at least thanks to 2 superb performances at Later With Jools Holland in 1999 which can be found on YouTube: Twenty Million Things (just Palmer, Jools Holland and David Grant) and Stone Cold, complete with a male choir, very soulful!

Also interesting: Twenty Million Things was an old song written by Lowell George of Little Feat, the band Robert used to great effect on his first album (Sneakin' Sally Through The Alley) in 1974!

But if we take a closer look at Rhythm & Blues, things turn weird, very weird indeed. Some songs have different titles. e.g. Let's Get It On 98 / Let's Get It On 99 and Work To Make It Work 98 / Work To Make It Work 99… The reason is that Rhythm & Blues was first released in Japan in 1998, whereas the international versions were issued in 1999!

(the cover of the Japanese version)

Other discrepancies turn up as well: several songs on the Japanese edition are (much!) longer than on the international ones: e.g., Let's Get It On 98 is 6:25, whereas Let's Get It On 99 is only 4:07!

To make it even more convoluted, there are also quite a few song differences between the various editions: Captured, Spellbound, and The Long And Winding Road are exclusive to the Japanese edition.  Twenty Million Things was included on all international versions except the Japanese.

Dance For Me was only on the US & UE versions.  Tennis replaced Dance For Me on the Canadian, UK, & European versions. And Big Shot was a B-side only of the True Love single. Consequently, this album was a perfect candidate for another JOKONKY Deluxe Edition!

ELSEWHERE ON PALMERBLOG:  Koen's deluxe edition of Woke Up Laughing (Robert Palmer's Adventures In Tropical Music) and Stinky's deluxe Homemade Live Album version of Clues!

I Found That Purity Of Essence Rare

Koen writes: The music industry can be a weird business, plenty of stories of labels/managers who ripped off their artists and/or exploited them in other ways.

On the other hand, artists recording for different labels under different names wasn’t uncommon in the past either, e.g. John Lee Hooker had an impressive number of aliases: Birmingham Sam, Boogie John, Delta John, John Lee Cooker, Johnny Lee, Johnny Williams, Texas Slim, and The Boogie Man!

Claiming copyright of traditional songs by just changing a few words used to be standard. Some bands with the same name played live gigs on the same dates but in far-away places with different musicians!  The list could on for a long time…

In the sixties it was common that albums released in the UK would have slightly different track lists from the US versions, e.g. the first few lps of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, etc. Much later Japanese CD releases usually got 1 or 2 bonus tracks which increased their value a lot!

Lately some modern-day artists have been re-recording earlier albums for copyright reasons, e.g. Taylor Swift.  Recently, Strohmian shared a story on the Twilight Zone blog that gave all of the above a completely new twist!

Graham Parker’s old band, The Rumour (with Brinsley Schwarz!) released three albums.  The second one - 1979’s Frogs, Sprouts, Clogs And Krauts (wonderful title!) - even had a minor hit in Holland: 'Frozen Years'. 

But they never really broke through, and their 3rd album became their swan song.  The original UK release of Purity Of Essence came out on Stiff Records in 1980.  And now we are entering the Twilight Zone of recorded music…  From the liner notes by Martin Belmont:

"The Rumour recorded its third album without Graham Parker (and its first without keyboard player and singer Bob Andrews) in 1980. The title 'Purity of Essence' came from the Stanley Kubrick film 'Dr Strangelove', a band favourite on the tour bus. The album was produced by Alan Winstanley at Eden Studios in West London, and released in the UK on Stiff Records. 

"Joe Boyd wanted to release it in the States on his Hannibal imprint, but, after being unable to reach a financial agreement with Stiff, he figured it would be cheaper to re-record the entire album. We did this at Island Studios with the considerable production skills of John Wood, and that is the version on this CD.

"The two recordings differ in a couple of ways: firstly, three songs have changed from the UK set: 'All Boys Lie' - a Clive Langer composition from his days with Deaf School; 'Rubber Band Man' - a Thom Bell song that had been a massive hit for The Detroit Spinners with their wonderful singer Phillip Wynne in 1976; and 'Depression' - written by Glen Tilbrook and Chris Difford from Squeeze. These three songs were only released on the US version, and replaced 'Pyramids' 'My Little Red Book' and 'That's The Way The Ball Rolls' from the UK release. 

"The second change is that the US version has a much more energetic, confident and 'live in the studio' feel, with very few overdubs. The instrumentation is simple; mostly two guitars, bass and drums, with vocals from Brinsley, Steve and one from me. The only guest featured on the sessions is Glen Tilbrook, who added the organ part to 'Depression'."

Despite the availability of 2 versions of the same album and 2 singles, 'My Little Red Book' & 'I Don’t Want The Night To End' (a Nick Lowe cover!), sales didn’t improve, and the band decided to call it quits, sad but true.

The JOKONKY edition is (in essence) a double CD with 25 numbers total for your listening pleasure.  Tell us which version YOU prefer!

Robert Palmer's Adventures in Tropical Music

Please welcome art58koen with the first of what will hopefully be a series of posts. In the tradition of Willard's Wormholes, he has assembled an updated "faux deluxe" version of a Robert Palmer compilation from 25 years ago.  Take it away, Koen...

On this blog, Robert Palmer has been the subject of a post before, resulting in a cool live version of his 1980 Clues album.

For the average music fan, Palmer is mainly seen as the "Addicted To Love" superstar with sexy video clips and therefore "not really relevant". Big mistake, as he was a musician’s musician, knew what he was doing in the studio, and played various instruments too! Checking out his albums showed that almost every one had one or two "odd tracks" that are not the usual rock music at all. Fact is that Palmer was seriously interested in all kinds of music, and that showed particularly in those tracks: African highlife, calypso, samba, reggae, etc. Apparently, Chris Blackwell (head of Island Records) ranked Palmer as the most knowledgeable music nut he'd ever encountered, acquiring a taste for obscure sub-genres and new trends long before anyone else.

Palmer's preferred medium for enjoying music were self-made mix tapes which would be stuffed with everything from Fred Astaire to African folk, and his albums ran a similar course!

In the 1990s Gerald Seligman, the founder of the Hemisphere world music label, suggested the initial idea for Woke Up Laughing, but Palmer wasn't interested in a simple compilation, preferring instead a rethink and a fresh approach. The result was that several tracks got remixed, new vocals, and even a hybrid of an earlier and new version: Woke Up Laughing 79/89 [latter portion of track (1:49-5:32) recorded in 1989]. The CD liner notes included an in-depth interview with Palmer in which he provided lots of details in the making of the chosen tracks, talk about an eclectic artist!

While working on this post, I played Woke Up Laughing again and it still sounds excellent, a great flow of different kinds of music.

The subtitle of the CD is Adventures in Tropical Music: 1977 - 1997, and that gave me the idea of expanding it, as Palmer continued doing this all throughout his career, from rock to new wave, swamp funk, soul, rhythm & blues, American Songbook, proto-techno, disco pop, and finally blues! Even his final blues album, Drive, had a surprise calypso song on it…

Also it seemed a good idea to include the unmixed original tracks as long as they followed the ‘tropical music’ line. The collaboration with Adrian Belew on guitar (& Palmer on everything else!) is probably bordering on tropical madness, but he sings it in French and it’s one of my personal favorites!

The pdf contains all artwork, incl. the extensive interview with Seligman, plus additional pics of album covers, labels, etc. The single Lee Perry track (warning: vinyl rip, poor quality!) warranted adding another interview with Palmer to the pdf about the working conditions in Kingston, Jamaica during his time there. Most other artists probably would have packed their suitcases and left the same day, but Palmer hung on for a while -- impressive.

Bush Tetras Live Rent-Controlled In My Head

 

Cynthia! Pat! Steve! Cait!

It's Bandcamp Friday, and you should buy the new Bush Tetras album, They Live In My Head! Steve Shelley produced and played drums. Steve joined Bush Tetras after original drummer Dee Pop died in 2021. Cait "Rocky" O'Riordan is the brand new Bush Tetras bassist.  It's a GREAT record --  Pat Place's guitar is ferocious, and Cynthia Sley's voice sounds stronger than ever. 

Bush Tetras debuted on 99 Records in 1980.  They broke up in 1983 but reunited in the mid-90's.  Beauty Lies (1996) was produced by Nona Hendryx. A followup album called Happy was completed with producer Don Fleming, but got shelved.  In 2007, ROIR put out an odds & sods comp called Very Very Happy, which included several Happy demos.

A Bush Tetras career overview called Rhythm & Paranoia was released on the Wharf Cat label in 2021. Beauty Lies, the lost album Happy and the new one are all on Wharf Cat's Bandcamp page now.

As mentioned previously in these pages, Cynthia Sley has a son with Ivan Julian, and the two proud parents made an LP in 1988 (grab that Lovelies album on the Down Underground blog!) Now here we are in 2023, with a new Bush Tetras album and a new Ivan Julian solo album (which you should also buy on Bandcamp today!)

Maybe It's Clues... Live!

Robert Palmer's 1980 album Clues is one of Stinky's all-time favorites. That makes it a natural candidate for the patented Homemade Live Album treatment. 

Stinky searched high and low across the internet, looking for Clues. Three songs eluded him, and are included today in their studio incarnations, as recorded down in Nassau. The rest were cherry-picked by Stinky as the best performances from multiple live sources.

And perhaps it's appropriate, considering that Palmer followed this album with Maybe It's Live, which was a hybrid of new studio tracks and concert recordings of his best known songs. Today's share is rounded out with live versions and remixes of other Robert Palmer songs (19 tracks in all), so it's more of a "Faux Deluxe" collection (as Willard used to call it). 

The talented Mr. Palmer produced Clues himself, wrote most of the songs, and played guitar and bass. His choices of cover songs are surprising: "Not A Second Time" (from Meet The Beatles) and Gary Numan's "I Dream Of Wires". Numan and Palmer cowrote the song "Found You Now", and Numan played on the album. Numan's own recording of "I Dream Of Wires" was released in the same month as Clues.

Faux Deluxe: Naz Nomad & The Nightmares

After the departure of Brian James, The Damned made one of the most remarkable comebacks in modern music. 1979's classic Machine Gun Etiquette revealed Captain Sensible as a guitar hero, and the group as exceptional songwriters. It was quickly followed in 1980 by the double disc Black Album. 

By 1982's Strawberries, Captain Sensible apparently began to feel that he was casting pearls before swine, and he brought forth two novelty pop singles ("Happy Talk" and "Wot"), as if to prove that he could top the charts. He left the Damned in 1984.

What were the other members of The Damned to do?  Once again, they defied expectations by creating what was purported to be the previously unreleased soundtrack album for a lost Sixties film called Give Daddy The Knife, Cindy. This soundtrack was allegedly performed by a mysterious group called Naz Nomad and The Nightmares.

Dave Vanian led the group as Naz Nomad, Rat Scabies became Nick Detroit, bassist Bryn Merrick was rechristened Buddy Lee Junior, and Roman Jugg did double duty as guitarist Sphinx Svenson and keyboardist Ulla. 

Naz Nomad photographed by Pere-Ake Warn

The Damned's next two albums, 1985's Phantasmagoria and 1987's Anything, were written and performed by Scabies, Vanian, Jugg, and Merrick.  The latter three then started a new band called The Phantom Chords.

This post is recycled from a contribution I made to the late and lamented Willard's Wormholes blog. If you recall, Willard used to create "Faux Deluxe" expanded versions of his favorite albums. I was led by his example to pair Give Daddy The Knife, Cindy with the original songs covered by Naz & Co. Two live covers (of the Doors and the MC5) round out the set.

For more of Pere-Ake Warn's photography, visit his website. Sounds gave Roman Jugg the knife in the photo above. Thanks to the Aural Sculptors blog for sharing the live Naz tracks from 1987's Acid Daze festival. Surfadelic recently shared more music by Big Boy Pete, author of my favorite Naz Nomad track, "Cold Turkey".