7" Stay With Me b/w In the Heat of the Sun - 1985

12" Stay With Me b/w Tomorrow Never Comes (remix)/Don't Turn Away (remix)

 

Now, I've always looked upon Stay With Me as a bit of an anomaly to be honest.  I mean, here we were, in the middle of a huge period of mod appeal and out comes a single with what to me was the most overblown schmaltzy '80s production that you could imagine.  We got the first listen of this recording over the house PA at Rooftop Gardens one Friday night whilst soundchecking that night's gig there and to be perfectly honest, for me personally that's exactly where it belonged...on an 80s nightclub sound system.  I much prefer the Abbey Road demo quality version that appears on the This Way to the Gents cassette album, an album where many of the versions have a charm all of their own.  The flipside of the 12" version had two album tracks from How it all Began album, Tomorrow Never Comes and Don't Turn Away, apparently remixes from the album, but quite in what way they were remixed I've never really been able to spot.

     Again, the 7" b-side is an interesting one, In the Heat of the Sun, featuring an additional female vocalist whose identity I don't know.  The first Gents single to have money thrown at a 12" version with an identical cover but in different colours.  Nice song, I personally didn't like the treatment.  At least the cover wasn't a disaster.