This Way to the Gents - 1981

1981's This Way to the Gents is in purist terms, something of an anomaly with regard to what you might actually call an "LP" or "album", not least in the fact that it wasn’t a vinyl release at all, but was made available on cassette only and sold, in pretty large quantities, at gig.  In all honesty it is what in those days used to be more accurately described as a sampler.  This Way to the Gents consists of basically some of the songs that were recorded at Abbey Road Studios in London as part of the prize for winning the EMI Supergroup competition of 1981.  There are nine songs on This Way to the Gents, but there were actually more than nine songs recorded during the Abbey Road Session, but some of them of course didn’t make it onto TWTTG, songs like Cowbag, Over Me and others etc.

The opening tracks of each side are the two sides of the double A-sided debut single, The Faker and Le Pinke Pantheur, referred to on the single as Le Pink Pantser (something to do with Inspector Clouseau and stolen pantaloons etc!).  The next track on Side One is Waiting to be Seen, later recorded as the title track to the second vinyl album, then the early version of Revenge, the one that appeared on the B-side of The Gent.  Fourth up is Girl, the B-side of the Revenge single, the same version and probably the best recorded of these time-limited sessions, and then old favourite Have a Good Time, which surfaced later as a B-side, to Friday on my Mind.

After Panther on Side Two comes the only available version of They’re Gonna Get You, complete with Third Man intro (and hey, that’s almost a concept!), then Stay with Me, far superior to the 7” and 12” single versions, finishing with the early version of The Gent.

The cynics would call This Way to the Gents rushed and consequently suffering and appearing amateurish, but the truth is that compared to some of the overdone productions on later versions of some of the songs on this cassette, it has to be said that the very underproducedness of some of these versions gives This Way to the Gents a charm and likeableness all of its own.  The underproduction of Stay with Me for instance is delightful and at the risk of sounding like I’m trying to overblow Mr Kendell’s contribution, which I’m not (honest guv…), the further forward-placing of the keyboards in the Gents’ sound of that time is very noticeable and welcome.  The keyboard sound in Stay with Me is wonderful.  I’d suppose you’d have to say shame they didn’t get to work a bit more at Abbey Road.

Initial copies of TWTTG were supplied with the coloured blue and white cover pictured (it actually had another fold-out bit with band details on, but as at this point, I don’t have a copy of that), then with a cover with just the yellow coloured bit and finally the version that was shifted in massive quantities at the later gigs, just with a black and white photocopied version of the cover without the band details flap.