Resurrection

Clamor of Time

Spinning Fury (Part 1)

Car Crash Baby

Stream/Download

Endless

Always With Me

Ascent

In Darkness

Rekt

Start Again

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)

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

Be Bop (Electro)

Sputnikworld

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