7" Give it to Me b/w At the Dance Part 1 - 1986

12" Give it to Me b/w At the Dance Parts 1 & 2/The More You Get, the More You Need/The Gents' Drunken Party - 1986

 

     The penultimate Gents single, and this is where it got good for me...as you will see from other areas on this site, I was pretty much the photographer of the band and imagine my surprise when manager Paul Burton turned up at a party we were at in Doncaster one Saturday night and started handing out 12" Give it to Me's, saying "Here's something a bit special for you Slick"...and what he meant was that he had used two of my shots, taken at the Kettledrum in Wakefield on the front and back of the 12" sleeve!  Now that's fame man, that's my moment of glory, my claim to Gents history!  I wasn't too keen when I saw those competition designs over the bottom half of my photograph on the front, the entries in one of his ideas of a competition for fans' designs, but hey, I shouldn't be ungrateful, I did a record sleeve!

     Anyway, back to the single - Give it to Me is a little rocker and a welcome break from some of the stop/start songs they made into singles with little or no appeal for a dancefloor.  The lyrics amount to little more than "Get yer knickers off girly", and maybe that's part of its wonderful 80s appeal.

     Another record with an interesting b-side on the 12" version.  As well as At the Dance Parts 1 & 2, there is The More You Get the More You Need, which is one of Martin's songs and was in reaction to the current news story at that time of a baby, Holly Roth, with a hole in the heart.  That is followed by the band being drunk in the studio being humerous.