Sixteen years later and the venue has changed and Starship Sputnik has travelled a lot of miles. We were in my new studio at the house in Somerset and Degville and X would drive down from London to stay and record new demos. We were trying to recapture the excitement of those early Sputnik tracks with their incredibly simple, almost early, fifties bass lines. The studio was upstairs in what had been an old coach house, with bare stone walls and no heating. All the familiar influences stared down at us from the posters framed on the walls.  It's a drama we all face when looking for that naive, but blissful innocence that informs your early work.  How to not sound too sophisticated. You still want it to be like the first Cramps album, that day you slipped it on the stereo and felt that huge jolt of excitement.  Well this track didn't make it onto the Pirate Space album and it's a demo we made one morning. A lot of times X would sing the rough track to get a feel for things and blast down a guitar.  It seemed strange making our Alien space rock and roll with a view of Glastonbury Tor from the window and all of its good vibes.  Jimmy Page might want a word with X about this one!

Dirty White Super Trash

This track was the first time we felt we were finally achieving the sound we were looking for. You can hear the influence of listening to PIL’s Metal Box, endless dub reggae and Human Fly by the Cramps. Yeah, sounds easy in retrospect but at the time nothing else out there sounded like this. All recorded on our original 4 track Porta studio sitting in the corner of the living room at 3 Pindock Mews along with the trusty Roland Space echo for the dub effects. At this time I was still using my old Fender bass with the words “The Whores of Babylon” painted across the front, one of the names we had considered for the band. X was playing his Zebra striped Travis Bean guitar, you can hear the metallic sound, and Deg was getting there, slowly mutating the words. We were using an 808 drum machine, the same machine my new friend Andrew Eldritch was also using to provide the beat....

This was one of the first tracks we were proud of and we would sit at home watching blurry pirate VHS tapes while it blared from the stereo. 

When we started rehearsing the nascent band in the back bedroom at Pindock, we took this blueprint sound and started applying it to our other favourite rock and roll tracks. Jailhouse Rock mutated into Moscow Rock, Great balls of Fire into Fireballs and Say Mama into Go Go PussyCat Kill!

But everything was soon to change again when that Christmas Mick Jones was to buy me a Pro 1 synthesiser.......

Be Bop A Dub

There’s a bootleg in circulation claiming to be this track... but it wasn’t this finished demo version. This recording was from the “Dress for Excess” early sessions during those unending misty days of 87/88. 

I’d seen a newspaper piece about kids in Argentina “surfing” on the roofs of cars through the streets. A dangerous sport, clearly. Perfect for Sputnik... and I immediately saw a future dystopian world with no beaches, only highly motorised and pimped urban city surfers with Sputnik screaming on the car radios above the roar.

A promising demo, but its much too slow in retrospect. Interestingly it also follows a conventional song structure rather than the free form R and R in dub of the early years - progress or backwards step?

We must have decided it was backwards because it got placed in the SSS reject tape graveyard awaiting the 2013 SSSputLord to dig it up, remaster the moment and give it a fresh listen. What do we hear? Actually a good track and melody. The “Beach Boys” bits are a little out of tune to my more adult ears but it shows you what we were thinking. 


We should probably have worked these out in the live arena, and then everyone would have had a chance to take it somewhere else. You’ll see that happening in future releases where we stretch out live, like the live versions of Razz Crazy and Success we performed in Brazil. Why did we not do that Tony I now ask myself? 

Recorded at the SSS experiment camp studio, Maida Vale London on 8 track. 

Surfin' in the City

It had all started out so easily one afternoon in Pindock Mews, sitting on the floor with the Pro 1 synth and the 808 drum machine in Magenta’s front room, former front room of Sid Vicious... 

We’d written all the previous classics using that set up. The sun was streaming in through the windows and we felt positive and full of life. We were writing a song called Success because... we felt successful!

This early demo brazenly steals the "I Feel Love" groove, Degville riffs away on the opening lyrics, and X steals the guitar lick from T Rex’s “Get it On”. All fine treasure to plunder. Then we took a break and went to the pub, forgetting to record what we’d done or saving the sequencer parts. The sequencer crashed while we were ordering our first round.

So how did it all turn into such a fucking nightmare? We must have literally recorded dozens of versions.  Even this first demo recording is cursed as it just cuts out, don’t ask me why. And you can hear we did not have a proper chorus yet. I think we demoed it into submission until you just cannot tell any more. Yet in there -- somewhere -- is a hit song. 

Ironic title in retrospect!

Success (Demo)

We were to finally record the single version of the song Success at PWL studios over the river in Southwark. This part of London was already alien to us because we never crossed the river to go south. It was like an invisible barrier to coolness just like people who live in Manhattan don’t go to Brooklyn. We were strictly West London boys with a neighbourhood stretching from Portobello road in the west to Soho in the East and no further.

But it was my idea to record with Stock Aitken and Waterman, the year’s most successful producers, and I wanted to see my perverse plan through to completion. The saga of those long days and nights of recording is detailed in the History of Sputnik (see www.sputnikworld.com); this is just one of the many intermediate mixes.

Because when Pete Waterman went home to play with his real life train sets, we mischievously got the assistant engineer to record other versions with us, sneakily trying to heavy up the song while they were out of the building - exactly what you’re NOT supposed to do when you ask someone to be your producer. Pete and I had covertly entered into a battle of will and we were both prepared to dance till we dropped. How could I turn a disco pop hit into electronic rock and roll? The rest of the band looked on, innocent players in this insane impossible game of chess... 


Success (Matt's board mix)

We'd already got into the idea of mixing dub versions and ultimately we would take this a step further where the dub version would be the only version of songs as we experimented with playing dub live. We’d seen local reggae band Aswad do it brilliantly and thought why not, do it to rock and roll. After all I’d already had a go way back in the 70s with the Wild Dub version of Generation X’s Wild Youth. It was a limitation of the Porta studio 4 track recording that allowed the echoes to continue after dropping out the original vocal. The Sputnik sound was coming. It felt good that night listening to those recordings, something that was yours at last. We were progressing towards the sound we knew was there somewhere.

Sicky Dub

The tracks starts with Martin in his innocent sweet voice of those early years saying “Song for Tony - Sarah’s revenge!”. There was a camaraderie about us in those days as I tried to plant the seeds of the band in the fertile ground of creativity, nourished with the right influences. 

After months of recording covers of Elvis and New York Dolls songs I’d left Deg and X alone with the equipment at Pindock one evening. When I got home they surprised me, looking pleased with themselves, having recorded this quite cute song, one of the first originals they ever attempted. 

Remember, I’d written over four albums worth of songs already with Billy Idol in Generation X but for them this was a new experience. X had played the bass too, with a kind of circular riff with Deg’s rather naive lyric about a girl he once knew - It was a tiny flicker of originality.

Sicky Sarah

Recorded at SSS Experiment Camp studios during the second album sessions. How do I know? I recognise the bass drum sound! You can see the progress from that simple acoustic demo. The vocal is still being finalised on this demo. This became a fantastic song to play live with its easy mid tempo groove. 

You know, it's an interesting moment to look back on, to put myself in the mindset of those times, sitting in our own studio in Maida Vale in my Mews house. It was a rough street back then, not all gentrified like it is now. There were lots of old garages working on cars outside in the street. There was this mad, immigrant artist woman who lived opposite, who spent her days half naked, with a steel grinder, sending sheets of sparks into the air, obsessed and driven about creating her pieces. When we were recording vocals we had to wait for her to stop her grinder to get a clean sound. There were also various drug dens in some of the run down houses opposite. That would freak me out today, whereas back then, well, I suppose it all added to the atmosphere and our freaky alien appearance just blended in with the street life. The Sputnik office and our original rehearsal space was in the same block, on the main road, so in seconds we could all meet up there too. It was the centre of our world... and how lucky we were to have created that Sputnik World.

I suppose what I feel now looking back is that lyrically this track did not have the flourish and vision of our earlier work. On those first songs we had such a lyrical style, which I would triumphantly describe as an action painting of a thousand neon coloured tv channels. So does it get harder to retain that clear vision as you mature? Or is it that you lose that innocent “gang on the street” thirst for the new? We all struggle with this dilemma, trying to make sure new songs do not just retread the fresh ideas of our youth. It is why you can never go back or pretend you are still there - being eighteen - when you write. You have to be true to yourself, the person you are today, living in our grown up, responsible adult world. 

It is what makes reforming a band that was so extraordinary fraught with danger. 

How sexy was it then, being that androgynous glam Mad Max alien space gang, back in 1984? Walking through Soho in pink high heels and a Cockerel plume of pink hair with the Ultra Vixens snarling at passers by. We felt invincible, that we had this great secret, channeling Elvis into some futuristic rock and roll band like no other. I remember being so excited every time we did a gig thinking "just wait till you see this mother fuckers, this'll blow your tiny minds!!". It was the greatest aphrodisiac in the world.

Now nearly thirty years later, I question whether you can just dress in the warrior clothes of those young men and believe - along with your loyal fans - that everything is still as it was... looking, along with them, in the mirror through nostalgic glasses, even if they are still the mirror shades of Bruce Stirling.  Now I seriously reflect if there is a way to do it with dignity.  I wonder if it’s possible to make it work at this point in time - as we look now with youth no longer on our side - or does it denigrate everything we stood for during that perfect moment in time, by trying for the impossible - trying to claw back time?

What I never want to see again is our creation, the mighty Starship Sputnik, reduced to playing in some pub venue or tiny obscure club.  The legacy we created deserves better than that.  It should be seen playing on a large stage where the idea, the myth and the monster truly belongs. 

It’s seeing two drummers still pounding out that Terminator beat.  It’s seeing Divine channeled into a futuristic Elvis, with a global quiffed Ziggy blowing on guitar. And look, there’s Colonel Kurtz on bass, just the right side of madness, scheming the dreams. Finally, Jane Mansfield on Dub effects in the LED glow of a thousand TV screens while the UltraVixens lurk in the shadows. Playing a festival in some Mad Max desert, a club in Shanghai or on the 142nd floor of a Hong Kong tower.

Now that would be something to dream of.


Sci-Fi Lover (Demo)

X and I would record all the time as we wrote new songs, and here you get an insight to that process. Its a good tune. You can tell we are making up the lyrics as we went along. It's interesting to catch X saying “Martin won’t be able to sing that one..” just before the tape stops. We were becoming increasingly frustrated that Martin would deliver a lifeless vocal during those second album sessions and therefore not giving the song a chance. In fact he did sing this great and the ultimate recorded version is really good. We played it live on the Brazilian tour and I have a great version filmed of this.  It's great to hear the real genesis of a song isn’t it?

Sci-Fi Lover (Acoustic)

I had high hopes for this very Sputty-titled track and the riff felt like a good groove too. It had all the classic Sputnik ideas, but with more space to breathe. One thing I’m certain of is that it was recorded at SSS Experiment camp studios.  I can see us there, recording it under the neon glow of the “Twenty First Century Boy" sign which was a prop from the video of the same, and the sign crackled and popped above the recording desk. like some future city advert out of Blade Runner 

Again, listening to the song today its potential is hampered by a somewhat-lifeless vocal from Degville. Often an average song can be lifted by a spirited vocal which adds a real joy and excitement to a recording. Then again, the opposite is also true, that a tired-sounding vocal can bring the whole thing down. I know I’ve talked before in these track notes about us having trouble with the lead vocals, but listening to these songs again after so long just reminds me of the feel and vibe of the recording back then. 

We had been hard at work for months, writing songs for the classic difficult second album, and that starts to take its toll on everyones spirits. After all the excitement of the first album -- the hit singles and the massive positive press -- you suddenly find yourselves staring at a blank page with the feeling that everyone out there is looking at you with very judgemental eyes, waiting to see what you are going to do next. There is also so much pressure to deliver "hits" that the songwriting becomes something you have to do rather than the spontaneous moments of inspiration that just came while writing all those earlier songs, with a lifetime of stored-up ideas to channel. All groups go through this on the second album. I wonder too if I'd boxed us into a corner with the very narrow brief we were writing in, that it had to “sound like Sputnik”. All those glorious early songs on the 192 beat with their super-simple grooves had mined a golden seam of rock and roll. Now it was like trying to write "Whole Lotta Love" over and over again... It became more and more impossible and frustrating. You keep playing over the old classics in your head wishing you could come up with another one just like them. I’m sure that Suicide must have wanted to write more Ghost Riders....

All those original Sputnik tracks worked so well with the dub effects and they seemed to have so much space with their simple arrangements, which meant you could just jam on the groove forever.

It really took a while to get the formula to work with the newer songs and open our minds to fresh arrangements. When I watch videos of the Brazilian gigs now I can see we had really started to get the balance right, playing songs like Sci Fi Lover alongside Jayne Mansfield.

I’m not laying the blame totally on Degville’s vocal ability during these lacklustre times. We were all suffering a severe dose of fame lag. But as I’ve said before, frustratingly -- when we reformed to work together again in 2001 -- suddenly Degville had found his voice and was at last able to sing with strength and passion. It would have just made things that bit easier if he had mastered that great voice that I knew was lurking somewhere back in 1987. 

So we laid ourselves open to criticism and the accusations of having no real passion in the songs. Did everyone get carried away with the fame and forget to work on their craft, which was ultimately the foundation of everything? I know the last thing I was doing was sitting at home practicing guitar -- I was out having dinner with Charles Saatchi and thinking up ever more grandiose and audacious schemes. Understandably everyone in the band had dreamed and hoped for success, so when it came -- and on the scale that it did in that moment -- it’s not surprising that the focus got lost for a while.

Oh well, you cannot change the past. And ultimately this song did not quite reach its pop hit ambitions.  Sounds good on the chorus though and maybe with more work it could really have been something special.

DiscoMania

An SSS Experiment Camp demo. I can remember this very clearly. It's at the time we reconvened in the mid 90's, after my few years with the Sisters of Mercy. This period spawned many of the songs we used on the “Sputnik : The Next Generation” project. Deg used to come around on his orange space hopper bike to Chippenham Mews to work. We had a smaller version of the old studio set up now as I’d rebuilt the downstairs part of the house in order to create a big playroom rather than just a studio.  I’m playing the synth live as we jam out the idea for the song. It was in this same area I recorded those early demos for the future Carbon/Silicon project with Mick Jones. I drove down my old street the other week for the first time in years and the glass brick exterior wall we erected then are still there, looking exactly the same.  For a brief moment I was right back there, living the excitement of those incredible Sputnik days.

Interestingly a lot of these song title ideas have started to turn up again. “Space Rider” was a particular track idea I had been incubating for a long while and had even considered it once as a new Generation X song title. I used to have a special red “bible” notebook where I’d keep all these ideas written down with little drawings and snatches of lyric. I still have that original notebook and it still holds a million memories.  Nowadays all my inspirational ideas go into a file on my laptop which, although very efficient, doesn’t have quite the same magical impact... but as we all know, a writer must always have something to hand that holds that selection of great titles, ideas and inspirations just in case the moment should arise when someone goes “I’ve got this great guitar riff......”. 

Say I Love You 1000 Times

It's interesting to hear this recording of the writing process.  What comes across straight away is that X has a great guitar sound, but clearly neither I nor Deg have any concrete lyrics to speak of. We seem to be clutching at my title which was about... well, nothing I guess, which is why we both remained lost in space without a paddle. Clearly it's a simple blues track and I had hoped the clever  play on words with the Bytes/ Bites idea would lead somewhere. Often we’d have a good title and in the moment have a bit of a stab at it hoping the Gods of Creativity were with us! We did not really tackle love songs generally which is why I think we were struggling on this one. You have to feel it! 

What makes it interesting is to have these actual recordings of the live moment of creativity. I’d love to have an album of Page and Plant jamming out Zeppelin ideas. Not that I’m putting us on quite the same Mount Olympus as those two......

Love Bytes

We were jamming one day in the  “Harrow House of Horror” rehearsals studio, with its pink quilted walls and the gold giant Elvis logo painted on the floor, when some random conversation got around to Wendy James (no relation) and her band Transvision Vamp.  

We’d first met them when we were playing a gig in Brighton and they were fans of Sputnik and came up to us after the show. Wendy was small, blonde, confident and flirtatious when she came up to me.  The band didn’t make that much of an impression to be perfectly frank, with this thin girl singer and her unobtrusive partner, primarily because you meet so many wanna be bands on tour that they often seem to blur into the background scenery of the gig.  

Even as recently as 2004 when playing a small gig in Sheffield with Carbon/Silicon, the support band caught me and Mick’s attention for once as they seemed to have something special, but again I was too focussed on the work in hand to take much notice of them as I casually caught a couple of their numbers from the side of the stage. I remember thinking the singer definitely had the look, but I wasn’t too sure about the bands name, The Arctic Monkeys. 

Anyway, back to Transvision Vamp and months passed since that night we met then at the Sputnik gig  and would you believe it, the T. Vamps were now  having huge hits and we were probably -- dare I say -- a bit jealous.  

So there we were in rehearsals in Harrow Road, when we started jamming this riff and I quickly spotted that there was a song in the making.  We had the “She’s a Tramp” chorus and made up some lyrics as we went along. Actually listening now, it sounds like X singing a lot of the time so maybe this is X’s work on this one!  But by chance, this time we had my little tape recorder in the room, so we recorded this live jam straight to cassette with the machine propped up in the corner of the room.  Its quite a good guitar riff actually.  This song in creation is one of the few recorded as a live band with all six of us in the room. 

It’s actually good to hear Ray and Chris solidly rocking away, because history has overlooked the fact that they both became a really solid and reliable rhythm section. Unfortunately all my glib headline grabbing talk of “finding people who couldn’t play but who looked like stars” had backfired by then and was so totally taken as literal that the press just assumed I’d meant the band still couldn't play or had never learned.


And the “EMI paid $6m for a band that couldn’t play” was too good a headline to keep trotting out and it really dogged us negatively when we went to America. In fact Ray was one of the most solid drummers I have ever worked with and he combined brilliantly with Chris (who went on to play with MJ’s BAD 2) live. The two of them had developed a uncanny communication when playing live that allowed them to drop out or improvise simultaneously together, playing the groove in a dub style which was quite unique to Sputnik. It was these improvisational elements of the band that meant that no two concerts were ever the same. The music was a live beast that was able to react to the audience, giving us a confrontational capability that made every show so exciting and so different.  Live music indeed.

Now, ultimately, we were just joking around with this song and would never have actually put this out or recorded it. It’s got a certain vibe about Wendy that was probably based on a little bit of envy at the success she was having. I hate it when artists are anything less that supportive of each other on record, as we are all in the same difficult game and God knows there is enough other shit to deal with. Wendy and her band definitely were not a legitimate target, because I have to admit they were really good and the tunes were great.

Of course I’ve become friends with Wendy since then and have realised she’s actually an extremely smart and sassy girl. I had dinner with her recently and enjoyed every minute of the evening spent together. I’m sure she’ll forgive us for this light-hearted slight on her character recorded all those years ago and take it as it was intended in the spirit of the moment. 

Transvision Tramp

At this stage you can hear the massive influence on us that Alan Vega’s first solo album had. When that record came out, with it’s rockabilly version of Ghost Rider, it really showed us you could take Suicides futuristic synth music and play it as minimally as possible as a real band. This was a breakthrough moment.

We went to see Alan Vega perform at London’s Venue in Victoria. Seeing him at the microphone, yelping the guttural beat, legs apart, while his band grooved like a drum machine behind him, made a huge impact on us.  We were becoming clearer than ever how Sputnik should sound.  Little did Alan know that gang of Mad Max aliens were watching intently from the back of the crowd, absorbing his every move, intent on stealing all the best bits!

But we would take it even further, because we would have two drummers, like the Pink Fairies did, hammering out that machine-like rockabilly beat. Also I loved the way the tracks just grooved on forever, with no drum fills or middle 8’s. I’m having that too.  You’ll believe me when I tell you these Alan Vega tracks were on rotation day and night at Pindock mews. On the motorcycle beat you betcha Alan. So we took the song “Rockit USA” by Suicide and applied the same style to it. And damn me, here’s that same bass line again on this demo, but now with a rough chorus. We are gradually mutating the original Suicide lyric into our own, adding the Sputnik buzz words. Thats the way to do it - you start by adapting songs that already have greatness. 

We were all such close friends in those days, me Deg, X and Magenta, playing music all day, then going out to the  "Astral Flight" club just off Carnaby Street in the evening. There is such a close bond in these early times, that old “gang” cliche, but it's a great feeling. Degville was such fun to hang out with back then, with such sweetness and enthusiasm to learn and with no trace of the future monster’s we were to become, that would ultimately sour and devour our gang (but that’s a much longer story in case you’re wondering and I will talk about it more one day). 

You can hear here how the final version of Rockit Miss USA emerged from this chrysalis. It turned into our greatest, most full on anarchic track live. This was our Sister Ray, our Whole Lotta Love.  I miss it now.

Rockit Miss USA (Bass)

I’d had the title for a long time and it was one of our first defining “we must be futuristic” song ideas. 

Let’s rewind to all those years I’d lived through the punk rock phenomena, right back to the early days of The London SS. You may be aware that that band was managed by Bernie Rhodes who was to go on to steer the Clash’s career. During that time Bernie’s mantra to us while we were putting together our group was always tell me “What are you about?”.  Daily he would berate us saying he still had not heard a single original idea from us yet.  I wanted to tear my hair out as I took yet another phone call from him at my parents house in Twickenham, sitting on the hall stairs, freezing, on one of those old bakelite phones. Imagine how frustrating it was to keep hearing this over and over again. It was like a riddle to us. We thought it was just about writing songs and just having a whole group. How naive we were because as we were to discover, there is so much more to it than that. 

Why can’t you just tell us the answer I would shout in my head or at least give us a clue!  But of course that would be too easy. Because if he told us the answer to the riddle then it would not be real, it would be his idea, so we had to come up with it ourselves. It was like in that old TV show Kung Fu trying to reach enlightenment. We had to come up with it ourselves. Bernie (and Malcolm McLaren, his then partner) were really guru smart and SO ahead of us in those days, Malcolm having learnt the craft the hard way, with his time managing the New York Dolls, during their Red Leather Trash period. 

To steer me on the path, Bernie would give me reading lists of books on Modern Art and Sartre as of my education. He got me to go and buy “Gay News” and “Spare Rib” from my local newsagents because he said I was too middle class and safe and to “toughen up” as he put it, to learn to deal with and experience life outside my middle class bubble.  He knew I’d read all the books on the Rolling Stones through to “The Tale of Willy’s Rats” which meant I knew rock and roll history.  What he was teaching me was to look for something new, something bigger, and he believed books on art and reading great literature could help me find enlightenment.

It took us all a long time to figure out what he meant and I can assure you I went to my local library in Twickenham and borrowed all the books he suggested and devoured them, looking to learn the knowledge and refusing to be intimidated by him.

And gradually, we got smart, or at least, smarter. 

Take a 70s band like the Cramps - it is easy to understand and know exactly what their world is about and if you want to be a Cramps fan, then you know how to dress. You know what kind of lyrics and song titles fit in with that image.  You know what they are about, so you know how to expect their artwork to look. Their world is totally and clearly defined. Once you see a band like the Cramps, its easy to copy, but boy is it hard to come up with the original concept. 

Then Punk rock came along, and defined a whole new look, style and attitude. Those massive, culture changing ideas, come along once in a generation, if you’re lucky. The “buzz” words that defined punk were riot, boredom, youth, anarchy, vacant grey cities and clothes that were torn apart. You see what I’m saying?  

Now “Outa Space Kid”, in the demo form, is not there yet, but you can see right there in the title the seeds defining Sputnik’s world - before you’ve even heard the music. That title defines what Degville and the band would be about and what we are saying about where our band belongs. Often it’s a composite of lots of other peoples ideas.  Of course it’s not nearly as simple as “just sit down and write the master plan” as this sounds. It’s more organic than that, and all the players, with their personalities involved at varying levels, all influence the final outcome. But, someone has to know where it’s all heading and by that time I definitely knew, because I had learnt the hard way from Bernie Rhodes, all those years before.

I’d been taught by a Zen Master, so I could place these new musicians in some real fertile rock and roll soil and watch as they developed. We’d listen to the right music and absorb the right movies. I didn’t go as far as reading lists though.....

OK at this stage, there are only a few scratchy lyrics, with terrible rhymes and the bass line is stolen from Great Balls of Fire, but you could see where we were going - on our way to planet Rockabilly Alien. And even though the band had no name yet, I could feel our future, dystopian world starting to materialise through the fog.  Listen how those key “Sputnik” buzz words are starting to take hold: teenage, space, chromium, fantasy, science fiction. You can feel the confidence and certainly underlying the most basic of formats and you can feel that we knew we were going somewhere. Somewhere special which was out of this world.


Outa Space Kid

The Be-Bop Trilogy - searching for the perfect bass.

Bass. The final frontier. The bass sound turned out to be the final key to the whole Sputnik sound. If you’ve been following the story behind these demos each week you’ll have been, I hope, starting to understand how the final sound emerged. So what about the bass? 

Back in the Orwellian days of 1984, every Saturday, we all used to hang out in a clothes shop (or “a stall” within a bigger shop really) called YaYa in the basement of Kensington Market. This was where Degville and Yana sold the clothes they designed. It was such a great creative environment in that marketplace, you could feel the energy as soon as you walked through the two big glass doors and down the stairs. It even smelt different from the London streets outside, a hangover from the patchouli oil smelling Afghan coat hippy stalls of the seventies. The same place that Freddy Mercury and Roger Taylor of their future band Queen, started with their clothes stall.

Back then, the only car we had between us was a tiny white Fiat 500.  Luckily we could park this in the street right opposite the stall because for some unknown reason, the parking Nazis had missed painting a 2 metre section in the inevitable double yellow parking lines right next to Kensington fire station, allowing me to just squeeze the car in and park for free all day. (If you’re reading this out of England yellow lines painted on the street mean you cannot park there - ever). The swarms of local parking wardens were powerless to ticket or tow away this defiant, somehow legally parked renegade vehicle. But, as the months went by, the wardens eventually got to recognise us and would wave us in with a welcoming smile, knowing we had the only car small enough to take advantage of this miniature oasis of parking right in the centre of London.  We took it as a sign that our coming together here was meant to be and because it was so easy to park there all day, Kensington Market became the centre of Sputnik’s world at that time.

Our arrival also amused the on duty firemen no end, sitting as they did just inside the station on old oil drums and watching the little car spluttering up to park before the doors opened and five sci-fi haired freaks emerged, tardis like, from inside. But again, they came to know us too.  There was Degville tottering along in his snakeskin high heels, Yana, a Jayne Mansfield sexy secretary, a Japanese doll assistant “Ace” (our future roadie) a super skinny blonde Neal X, complete with a Zebra striped guitar slung over his back, biker boots and Mad Max top and of course me, the pink pineapple haired driver. 

It must have been quite a remarkable sight of a morning.  We were already becoming, living out the fantasy of Blade Runner and Escape from New York, dodging across Kensington High street through the rain. Then past the old Biba store in the Derry and Toms building where I’d seen Bowie and the New York Dolls perform. I wonder if those firemen and traffic wardens, seeing us on Top of the Pops a year later said to their friends “Oh yeah, we knew them when they was just starting you know, driving this midget car”...

Downstairs in the shop the walls and ceiling were draped with white fabric like some underground Bedouin tent. Freaks, weirdoes and rock kids, future Sputnik fans, just seemed be drawn to the world there.  All day a stream of interesting people, along with prospective girlfriends for the band, would just stroll by or come in and hang out in this expanding underground scene. The clothes hung on one rack along the back wall with skin tight trousers, slashed tops and soon the early Sputnik T shirts. Which people bought, not even realising they were band shirts, since it only ever said the name in tiny letters if at all. 

There was music blasting out distortedly on the huge but cheap stereo sound system.  We’d play the songs and records that were influencing us at the time, our soundtrack to the day.  These are some of the key records that were on the stereo, shaking the walls, always interspersed with a selection of Elvis tracks.

Flowerpot men - Jo’s So Mean: Ben Watkin’s recording was a huge influence.

Psychadellic Furs - Heaven 12” - we loved this.

Suicide - Frankie Teardrop

Assault on Precinct 13, Escape from New York, Midnight Express and the Scarface soundtrack albums.

Alan Vega - Wipeout Beat

And of course the extended version of Donna Summer’s “I feel Love” (We did not know then, or even dare to dream, that Georgio Moroder would one day be producing Sputnik!).

Have a listen, and what is it that catches your attention? Bass. Big fat Synth bass, machine like, never ending, floor shaking. 

With the early versions of Be Bop, I was still using my old four string Rickenbacker bass that I’d played all through the Generation X years.  We had the guitars and the dub style vocals worked out and then finally, finally absorbing all those great songs down in the basement, we got the bass sound.  Listen on the third take here of Electro Be Bop - there it is - the final piece in the jigsaw. That electronic rock and roll bass with a manic Elvis on vocals screaming the mutated lyrics of the future Sputnik.

At last we had our own recording to blast out to the hang out gangs, girls, freaks and firemen of that growing Kensington Market scene. We played it over and over, bass reverberating through the stalls, feeling how it sounded along side our favourites.  And we thought it felt great.  It was anarchic, powerful and threatening - everything Rock and Roll should be. Everything WE wanted to be.

And it was then that the next chapter of the journey started.  We had our own soundtrack now.  I can still see all those souls grooving to the beat in the neon darkness, standing swaying amongst the hanging dresses and shirts, with mad shadows playing on the soft fabric walls of the shop. What great days they were, so massively full of promise.


Be Bop (Electro)

Be Bop (Fourth Reich Baby Dub)

Be Bop (Slow Version)

I’d lived with Magenta DeVine, my girlfriend and muse for nearly seven years at her house in Pindock mews.  That house represented so much history to us, from being the former home of Sid Vicious, my time spent playing with Johnny Thunders, right through all the early years of the creation of Sigue Sigue Sputnik. We had written all of Sputnik’s classic songs right there in the living room sitting in front of the TV.

Now I had my own house in Chippenham Mews, in the little cobbled street that ran behind Harrow road where the Sputnik offices were. Degville lived in the same building as the offices so he was now literally 200 yards from me. You can imagine the interior of his flat.  Zebra skin and pink walls, giant stereo, clothes everywhere in the chaos probably mirroring the inside of his head, surrounded by a sea of make up and coloured hair pieces.  His flat looked exactly like he did. Neal meanwhile lived a couple of miles away and would drive over each day in a tiny yellow fiat car he had christened “The Babe Magnet”. Self explanatory I suppose.

Although I had my own place now I was really staying most of the time with my then girlfriend Janet (Street-Porter) over in Clerkenwell at her large, modernist, four story building and I was leading a very different life to those heady days of the early Sputniks all living together at Magenta’s and going clubbing.

I was by then leading -- what in those days had not yet been described as -- celebrity culture, with all the associated parties, openings, and famous people. It gave me access to a whole new world. I even found myself playing scrabble with Charles Saatchi,which was somewhat ironic given that in the early days I used to wear a T shirt emblazoned with the logo Saatchi Saatchi Sputnik.


One of the inevitable results of success and fame is that everyone starts to live their own separate lives. So you can understand how all bands find themselves in a different place mentally when you come to make the albums that follow the magical first one. The first album is the one that you distill all the years of struggle, ideas and originality into.  Then gradually ou find you’re no longer those aliens hanging out in the amusement arcades of Kings Cross and Kensington market and you feel, well, I can only say, you feel more grown up and inevitably disconnected from your roots.  So its hard to capture that naive excitement and gang mentality that informs the early work.


So the three of us would convene each day at Chippenham mews, where we had the studio on the ground floor, and sit on the giant sofa with our guitars  and scraps of ideas to write new songs. Neal would always be on time, cheery and positive.  It’s what I always loved about him, his very ‘can do’ attitude and enthusiasm.  He was also now a really accomplished guitarist and keyboard player.  He had taught himself to use all the equipment allowing us to make our own records instead of having to rely on outsiders.  It is so hard when fame arrives to not squander the time and opportunities on getting drunk and forgetting that its actually about making music. And to do that you have to constantly strive for improvement.  Neal did that.
 
We had amplifiers guitars and keyboards permanently set up along with a sixteen track recorder. To create the atmosphere we had the neon signs like “21st Century Boy” and others from our video shoots crackling on the wall along side a bank of TV screens.  We tried to create our own little alien world where three very different lives could meet to work and to get into the mood trying to capture that inspirational Blade Runner moment we had found back at Magentas.

Then, after working all day, we’d emerge blinking into the sunlight and sit outside in the street having a beer before disappearing back into our own worlds. 

The track “It's My Planet” was written around some fairly cohesive lyrics on a vaguely “lets look after the environment” idea but more over a play on “Its my party”. On this demo recording in progress you can hear X on live guitar and Tj on real bass against Degville singing. We often just jammed like this to come up with ideas for the chords and once we recorded the track using sequenced synth bass, we’d take out the rhythm guitar parts and overdub the lead guitar licks. There is another version of this where X got Lord Johnson Somerset to come in and play keyboards on the recording.  Don’t ask me why.

On the extra recording X proves he can play those Mick Ronson licks with aplomb.

It's My Planet (Bonus Solo)

It's My Planet (Live Demo)

I was still at school when I went and saw Mott the Hoople at a pub venue called the Winning Post in Twickenham.  The gig was held in a big function room at the side of the pub with a sticky worn carpet and was a part of the regular West London gig circuit.  I queued up each week for the chance to see groups such as Status Quo, Caravan, Cockney Rebel, The Pink Fairies, Hawkwind, Atomic Rooster, The Groundhogs, Barclay James Harvest, Thin Lizzy, Chicken Shack, Rory Gallagher, The Edgar Broughton band, Uriah Heep, Lindisfarne, Quintessence, Stray, Wishbone Ash...... all these iconic bands standing on the low stage a few feet in front of me.  Every week at school we would scan the gig adverts of Melody Maker to see who was on and then I’d rush there every Wednesday evening and wait with mounting excitement beside the humming banks of WEM P.A speakers, nursing a pint of lager for the whole evening.  When the bands finished, they disappeared into the hallowed “back stage” area we could only picture in our imagination, being much too in awe of the whole thing to actually attempt to meet any of the bands. I couldn’t have foreseen back then that six years into the future I myself would stand on that same stage at The Winning Post with my band Generation X and get signed by Chrysalis records in that very venue.  How dreams can come true.

I saw Mott many times and I loved them.  I bought all of their albums from then on and all the albums I’d missed from their earlier years.  I poured over every song and lyric.  Hunters style was to influence a lot of my work. There was a track on their album “Mott” called  “Violence”  where the lyric goes “its the only thing that’ll make them see sense...”. Motts explosive stage act was amazing to my impressionable schoolboy self but their live shows often turned to chaos, giving them a reputation for inciting real violence.   All grist to the myth in my mind of course.  It was playing with such dangerous fire but the vision stayed with me.  To complete the circle, I asked Ian Hunter, the singer of Mott, to produce Generation X’s second album.


The first Sputnik single Love Missile F111 revelled in its Clockwork Orange and Scarface samples and the violent overtones that those movies represented. The ominous voice samples gave the record such menace.  When I was at school I had also been to see A Clockwork Orange at the cinema and its depiction of a futuristic society sedated against the realities of random violence made it all look so exciting. It had seemed like the ultimate cool movie, and at that age you never think about the realities of someone hitting you over the head with an iron bar. It just looks so good on the screen and still does, just ask Tarantino. The images always stayed with me, especially as I went to Brunel University where the correction center scenes were filmed.  Every day at Uni I walked across that courtyard from the movie that I knew so well. I adapted one of the taglines of the movie into “A group who’s principle interests are Ultra Violence.....”


What looked so cool at the Mott shows and looked so cool in the movies came back to metaphorically hit me over the head when Sputnik’s shows inevitably exploded into an orgy of real violence and real people got hurt. Real people got arrested. Tours got cancelled. All our lucrative upcoming Japanese shows were pulled fearing that Sputniks might bring riots and destruction to Tokyo. Did it make me re-think and tone things down? Did it fuck.

This is the original demo of the song that came to be called “Violence is Funky”. The drum loop is a Yardbirds sample, sped up with that great guitar stab. I wonder if it’s Jeff Beck?  I love all the “Caster Troy” voices from the movie "Face Off" and the rising helicopter take off sound effects.  We were using movie samples again, without worrying about getting busted which is the only way to go.  A great driving groove. It's about movie violence or video game violence of course, but in the light of madmen with guns in the last few years I suppose it all seems a little naive sitting here listening today.  But then we were young and had no moral or responsibility panic button of being an “adult” and that’s the best way to make true Rock and Roll. Maybe the only way.

Funky Violence

We mixed this in Milton Keynes as an alternative version, possibly a B-side release. It has that speech on it that was sent out into outer space, narrated by Kurt Waldheim. I quite like the very “Suicide” style drums on this version.

Satellite (Space Speech Mix)

Here’s a different attempt at recording Bowie’s Rebel Rebel. I can’t remember who suggested it - probably Deg's old friend Boy George himself - but we went in with producer Steve Levine at his studio at Fulham Broadway, near my grans old house, to create a torn up, alien version of Rebel Rebel. It was in Farm Lane in an old-fashioned industrial estate. It felt like home turf to me, as I grew up in the back streets of Fulham.   

Steve Levine, a lovely, kind man, was a studio whizz and had produced the Culture Club hits. EMI definitely liked the idea... Sputnik reigned in by a talented, sensible English producer and with no expensive flights or holidays to the L.A sunshine.
 
Steve said he could create all sorts of madness, sensing the enormous possibilities that Sputnik opened up for tearing up the rule book of song structure and sound. He could even out-do that bloody clever Trevor Horn too. All seemed very auspicious.  We came into the studio to find Steve a spaceship captain of banks of blinking recording trickery. He had the latest of every possible piece of studio equipment.

Unfortunately when Deg came in to sing it just didn’t feel like his heart was in it and even I wondered what the hell we were doing there.  Mr X, chirpy as always, played great guitar parts, but a cloud of grey gloom had descended upon the studio. Or at least on me anyway. I felt totally alienated (in the wrong way this time!) and had impossible expectations of us sounding like the Cramps playing Bowie’s masterpiece... as if the lack of magic was somebody else’s fault rather than the bands.

The trouble was we were quoting tracks like Human Fly which were cult songs that had never been - and never would be - mainstream hits. By having such huge success with our first records we now had try to continue to compete in that mainstream, instead of just going “fuck you” to radio and to the record company like we did when we started.  I was losing my nerve because I needed a mainstream hit or the band would be branded a failure. I was wanting a hit, but just couldn’t find a way of making Rebel Rebel sound like an original Sputnik electro rockabilly special.  I should have realised that here we had the possibility of going forward with our sound in a new and totally fresh direction.  

Meanwhile Steve crafted, experimented, plugged in more towers of L.E.Ds and then chopped up everything with a digital razor blade until the song sounded like a musical cubist Picasso.  I think in retrospect that I went to the studio with preconceived negative thoughts, so inevitably on hearing the finished work I declared I hated the whole thing and pulled the plug, leaving a disillusioned Steve with his state of the art studio, feeling as if he’d personally let me down, and I refused to listen to any of the tapes again.  We never returned to Farm Lane.

Until now. Damn. It sounds really interesting now.  Steve had rescued Deg’s vocal as if sung by an alien and X’s guitars roar and jump at you from every angle.  Would it have been a hit? We will never know. I didn’t know I even had a copy of these tapes until recently and there must be a better longer version in Mr Levine’s vaults somewhere. Oh well, I’m sorry Steve. It just goes to show that it’s often all about your perception at that moment in time and sometimes the moment is just wrong and you simply cannot hear what is there until you walk away and come back later. 

Babble Babble Levine

We often used to play Bowie's Rebel Rebel in sound checks and in early rehearsals. What a riff that song has, and X plays it with the right edge of madness. And of course Ziggy summed up the Sputnik alien image... we truly were his bastard sons, if Ziggy had had sex with Mad Max. Bowie made a life-changing difference to me when I first saw that carrot-haired stage act as a schoolboy. I’ve got every record and I lost count of the times that me, Deg and X would sit and watch the final Ziggy Hammersmith show on a blurry bootleg VHS tape.  

I’ve come close, but never really met Bowie; not in a “had a meaningful conversation” way. Once Magenta and I were at a club called Legends at some event in the early eighties while we were planning Sputnik. We were leaning on the wide chrome spiral staircase that led to the downstairs dance floor when Bowie suddenly appeared in front of us. He just seemed to materialise out of the darkness.  It didn’t take me long to realise that he was studying Magenta - who was always an extraordinary and stylish vision in those days - rather than noticing my obvious genius. Naturally she got chatting to Bowie and his assistant CoCo and she and Madge exchanged numbers - probably planning some later assignation - while I lurked, too nervous to join in.  I suppose I consoled myself that he did at least glance in my direction. God had looked at me. “Would you?” I asked Magenta nervously as we were on our way home?  “What do you think” she said...

I missed my chance to talk again, later in the nineties, when I did get introduced to him and Iman at a party. This time I finally did get a sense that I had been noticed by the man, especially when Bowie actually covered Love Missile F1-11 as a B side. Can you imagine - Bowie sang one of my songs.  How cool is that?
 
It's Mike Rossi from Slaughter and the Dogs doing the John Hurt Elephant man voices at the start. 

This somehow became the start of a desperate period on the recording of the second album where we considered doing a cover version to try and get a hit. Fatal. 

Rebellious Man

RubberHead, probably from Deg's dubious porn collection, was a title we just kept coming back to.  At last the Pro 1 synthesiser is hooked up to the 808 drum machine with its limited 16 note sequence!  But here it is, that Sputnik groove with a lyric clearly nicked from Suicide's Frankie Teardrop, one of our classic must-listen-to favourite tracks. “Hey Frankenstein” was an early catchphrase about our mutant image. But I still love the way the groove never stops, just drop out the bass drum occasionally and X grooves with that Bolan guitar. Brilliant.

RubberHead (Electro)

Well you know this one is new to me too. Sounds like a Georgio Moroder special, mixed around the time of 21st Century boy. It’s not a fan remix because I do recognise a lot of the samples. There’s a female voice done by one of Mr Xs old girlfriends (of which there are many...) Patty Brand, (the woman with the Ferrari in the Euro fun film) - I’d recognise her voice anywhere as she was a TV presenter in Holland. This was a pleasant surprise unearthing this as this was one of the best early songs with a terrific Dirty Deg lyric. 

She's My Man (Alternative Mix)

Another version of the Prince track. A completely different style again. Deg doing his best Alan Vega vocals. Seems like there are  a few “jungle” drum samples in there. I think we released a version like this on a Cleopatra Records Prince tribute album.  It's 2001 and Deg is singing really well now. As I’ve said before, why oh why couldn’t he have delivered vocals like this consistently back in 87, 88 instead of torturing us so?? I love this.

Place Your Man

Great bass riff.  We’d taken to playing “I’ll never take the place of your Man” by Prince in sound checks and even encored with it once back in 86, 87. We made quite a few recordings of the song, slowly mutating it, hoping to steal it into an original song I expect. Way back in the early days we’d wanted to get Prince to produce us. After the success of Love Missile we met Prince backstage at one of his impromptu aftershow gigs.  He claimed he never received the tape of the demo’s we sent him. Perhaps his management wanted to keep us away? Who knows what really happened.

Mad Woman

An early remix of the song in its infancy. I always really liked this track and the echo effects are great on this version.

UltraViolence (Alternative Version)

Ok, well it was Atari Baby 2, using the Let it Be chord progression. Recorded upstairs at my house in Chippenham mews just before we built the studio on the ground floor, on 8 track. I was still living at JSP's at this time so it was fine to have my living room as a studio. This is a rough guide vocal but it has real spark. We should have done this song live

UltraViolence (Demo Version)

The bass line on this version eventually turned up as the bass line to She’s my Man! You can feel how the chorus on this version is just not happening. It's a great title though. When we eventually recorded our first single, you’ll see that we never could get the song title into a chorus so we just called it Love Missile F1-11. Great titles conjure up magic before a note is even heard. So we eventually had a hit single where the title lyric does not appear in the song anywhere.The record came out just as Reagan authorised F1-11 attacks on Libya. What timing! Genius.


Love Muscle F1-11

Georgio Moroder is a genius, I can say that unequivocally, but he just might not have taken his genius tablets on this day, making this version.

Georgio thought he’d make a dance version of this track and that was always going to be a problem, because dance music then was at between 120 and 140 beats per second. And Sputnik songs - all of them - were at 196 bpm. I’m not sure what dustbin at EMI this got assigned to, even though it’s quite an interesting groove. We never did get nicked for the Dolf Lungren vocal sample from the Rocky 4 trailer either, the bit where he goes “And soon the whole world will know my name.” Me and Degville found ourselves queuing up for the buffet at a party once with the Dolf. I wish I’d had my tape recorder with me, I could have got him to redo the sample for me. Damn, missed opportunity. 

Anyway this is a completists curio.

Moroder's Dance

We really recorded many versions of this track in Somerset around 2001. I was trying to somehow define everything Sputnik stood for, of how we tried to create the ultimate Electronic Rock and Roll band. 

Elecktronic Rock 'n Roll (Long Demo)

Another Somerset 2001 demo. Starts off promising. Isn’t that Sinatra saying “Good evening”? A song that did not make Pirate Space. We obviously never got to the guitars!

Space Punk Candy Man

Deg and X had a chorus for the title. I can remember writing these lyrics at JSP's house in Clarkenwell, sitting at her big desk, with its views over Clerkenwell, before it became trendy. The house was built on one of the last remaining bomb sites in London and designed by the architect Piers Gough. The lyrics all fit together in one of those perfect jigsaw puzzle ways. Deg astounded me when he claimed “Malaya” did not rhyme with (as he pronounced it) “Mar BELLA”. I liked the Aerosmith, Run DMC bit, obviously their starting point. Deg came up with a fiery vocal for once after a barren patch. 

Supercrook Blues (demo)

Sigue Sigue Sputnik - The Band, The Myth! - Electronic Rock 'n Roll.

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