How it all Began - 1985

The first real LP the boys put out, at the time of the revived mod er...revival, in I think it must have been about June of 1985, because I remember seeing the cover art for the first time on the ferry to the Isle of Wight on the 4th of May '85 (may the fourth be with you...) and just couldn't believe the effort that this Lez Bradley geezer (whoever he was) had turned out.  Hand-drawn lettering and and a similar standard of drawing.  More like it was drawn by Bez than Lez.  Anyway, for better or worse, that was the cover art but the thing was, when you got as far as what was inside then it wasn't a half bad record at all.  How it all Began.  Now I know people who would deny this till he's blue in the face, but the title was something which I myself originally murmured in somebody or other's direction might be a good title for an LP, being as they had a song called that, but never mind, it was so obvious that I'm not going to try and claim all the credit for myself.

The album basically featured all the band's original recordings of their great singles up to that point apart from the two Abbey Road versions of Faker and Pink Pantser and around seven or eight newer songs which had germinated around 1984/85ish and recorded at the Slaughterhouse for Russell Webster's Lambs to the Slaughter label.  I think New Direction had yet to be a single at that point, but apart from Revenge, Panther, The Gent, New Direction and Shout!, the newer songs included one or two real belters, like Day to Day, where Chambo gets to do his guitar hero bit, In My Dreams (speeded up from an original version done at Fairview) and then there was Don't Turn Away, which starts with a keyboard sound like an ice cream van and Tomorrow Never Comes, the one that started with "the bit we nicked from Electric Dreams!".

How it all Began was in many ways a "best moments so far" (another way of saying which is Greatest Hits, but in its best moments it was strong and in its weaker ones still a great deal better than most of the mod bands around at the time.  Of course, it benefited from being properly recorded (and that only comes from backup, ie money) with plenty of studio time, in a studio owned by the record company boss...and fortunately they'd done the earlier singles properly as well.