There is a point to this, so bear with me.

Contrary to popular belief, Messers Fairlight, Hardcastle and Horn were not the first samplers in pop music. The first samplers that I came across in my pop life were those Netto-cheap compilation LPs that record companies would put out as (no other word for it) bait to snare the curiously weak willed and their wallets.

Hairy-handed record exec? Got a few pallid debutants on your rostra? Then just bung a tune by each of them on a hastily packaged ‘Limited Edition!’ LP, add one song (too poor to be even a b-side) by your biggest star, put a sticker on saying BUY ME FOR BUTTONS! and watch all your young turks curdle up the charts on its coat tails.

I fell for this cheap stunt not once but three times.

In 1986 Mercury Records released Beat Runs Wild. It cost £1.99 and a nineteen-year-old student called, well, me, paid his money and took it home. It showcases such luminaries as Tom Verlaine, Pete Shelley, Topper Headon and, er, Wet Wet Wet, Swing Out Sister and Curiosity Killed The Cat.

I’m playing it now.

The sleeve was shocking, only partially redeemed by the strap line: ‘Also available on Cassette.’ As if anyone would buy it twice — memories of macaroni cheese and Henrik Ibsen notwithstanding, it hasn’t aged well. I do seem to remember playing it quite a lot. Or at least bits of it, as both Pete and Tom are on form and I’ll still defend to the death ‘Another Lost Weekend’ by Swing Out Sister, whose first two singles I bought after that (so crack open the Asti, Mr Hairy Hands, it worked!). But as for the others, all it did was pre-warn me, and I can safely say that I was the first person on the Humanities course to be able to say with total conviction that ‘Love And Money’ and ‘Zerra One’ were irredeemable rubbish. And then Ben’s beret and Marty’s smile ate the charts and I snorted my derision and hid my copy.

Next up was Sampled (yes, I nicked their gag) released by ZTT. This was a different kettle of fish entirely, for me at least, as I already had most of what was on it, because I had fallen, hook, line and multi-format release for the whole ZTT shebang. I’m not proud, but nor I am repentant of the fact that I was a bit of a (whisper it) ZTT completist, so the fact that this LP cost less than any of that label’s ten cassette singles (or Zanglettes, since you ask) I had already shelled out for was a mere bonus.

I’m playing it now.

Sampled has a sleeve that is beyond parody, tracks by all the ZTT acts you’ve ever heard of and quite a few by those you haven’t. Instinct, for instance, never managed to release anything else other than ‘Swamp Out’, their contribution here. Did they get bored waiting for the in-house producers to get round to them? Or were they the only act here that actually bothered to read the small print on their contracts (which would shame even a Vietnamese sweat-shop owner) and thus quite rightly and in the nick of time give it all up for landscape gardening and accountancy? Perhaps we’ll never know, though I did get to see them live and can report that they were pretty good actually. There, I told you I was a completist.

Oh, and if anyone out there is laughing at my ZTT fixation, you should check out Frankie’s live take on ‘Born To Run’ that’s included. I never thought I’d say this about anyone ever, but they, ahem, rocked.

Finally, about a year later, Doing It For The Kids was released by Creation Records: ‘An LP for the price of a 7” single’. I think I played it once at the time.

I’m playing it now . . .

. . . and I was really expecting to hate it. I was going to re-name it ‘Creation: The Doldrums Years Pt 1’. Of course Pt2 would recall the post-Oasis crash when, flush with Gallagher groats and cocaine supernovas, for every Super Furry Animals, Arnold and Primal Scream there was a Three Colours Red, 18 Wheeler and Hurricane #1. Back in ’88 there were similar villains but lots of heroes too. Felt, The Jazz Butcher and Razorcuts are all bringing unexpected smiles to my jaded chops. The sleeve’s good too, if a little familiar. And that reminds me . . .

The daddy of all these sampler LPs, or at least the dotty old aunt, was Pillows and Prayers, released by Cherry Red Records in, oooh, 1982 was it?

I’m not playing it now, because I never bought it.

My sister bought it for the princely sum of £1.99. I say ‘princely sum’ because she bought the picture disc, which was a whole pound more costly than the frankly much better packaged regular release (so the whole ZTT thing was her fault!).

Apologies if my guess of the date of release is wrong, likewise if any of the following is wrong too, but I’ve decided to eschew boring old Google and rely on memory, just to prove how much this wonderful record has stayed with me over the years.

The first time I ever opened an NME and saw that Pillows and Prayers wasn’t No. 1 in the Indie Chart I thought it was a typing error! It seemed to be the only island of sanity in a sea of Crass and Dead Kennedys. So, let me see: Monochrome Set, The Passage, The Marine Girls, Tracey Thorne, Ben Watt, Everything But The Girl, Joe Crow, Attila The Stockbroker, Quentin Crisp, Kevin Coyne. Hmmm. Frankly, I’m annoyed, as I thought I’d have done better than that. Oh, hang on, wasn’t Thomas Leer on there? (I won’t bore you with his ZTT connection.)

So, I can remember 11 acts out of about 18. Not bad considering I haven’t heard or seen this LP for, I dunno, nearly twenty-five years now. And I can still reel off most of ‘A Bang And A Wimpy’. And my impression of Quentin Crisp still ends dinner parties with embarrassed silences. And Joe Crow’s ‘Compulsion’ would still be in my Top 10 of Lost Classics—so much so that when I heard that the little bloke with the leather skirts from Depeche Mode had covered it I AVOIDED IT LIKE THE PLAGUE! The sleeve was great to, obviously influencing Mr McGee’s efforts (see above).

So, when I was told that our beloved Scaremongers had signed to Cherry Red, my first thought was ‘blimey, are they still going?’ Then my second thought was Pillows and Prayers. And I’ve been thinking it ever since.

By the way, in writing this piece, I found out that spellcheck doesn’t recognise ‘Google’, but it does recognise ‘googly’. A cause for celebration, methinks. Now, excuse me while I Googly the life out of Pillows and Prayers.

David Reakes

The BBC’s estimable flagship arts magazine, The Culture Show, returns on BBC2 on Tuesday 4 June at 10 pm and toppermost amongst its items is Mark Kermode (like Armitage, another alumnus of the old late night Mark Radcliffe Show) who ‘accompanies Simon at the ordeal of his first ever gig as the lead singer of the Scaremongers in super cool Shoreditch’. In this post-Top of the Pops/Whistle Test world this is surely as good as it gets. (For this viewer, apart from the obvious thrill of this televisual treat, we’ll be seeing if the footage of the now legendary Gramaphone Club gig corresponds with our memory of it — particularly as we were standing right next to the camera operator’s ear hole like supernumerary key grips or summat.) Anyway, catch the show on Tuesday — another accomplished first for the Scaremongers.

Neil S.

First up is the great Neil Sentance, a man who knows more about the Scaremongers than I do! He was the chap who emailed me last April to tell me that, according to what he'd heard on the Mark Radcliffe show, I was in a band with a renowned poet. Since then, Neil and his wife, the great poet Kate Scott, travelled from Devon to see us play our first gig, which is a herculean effort by anyone's standards.

Check out his gig review - it's so good, I wish I'd been in the audience watching!

Personnel:
Vocals: Armitage, Sue Roberts, Smith
Bass: Glen Smith
Keyboards: Nick Watts
Guitars: Martin Malone
The Rest: Smith
Recorded and mixed: Steve Whitfield (aided by Dez)

Recorded and mixed at Chairworks in Castleford, 1st-3rd March 2008
Mastered by Pob

Smith says:

The annoying thing about Cardigan Girl is the composition was pretty much all Armitage's work. The guy is bored of a weekday, picks up his guitar and writes his first song, and it's a corker. I added the acoustic bit at the beginning, (and that's my first vocal on record, three cheers for me) but other than, it's Armitage all the way. Doesn't he have enough stuff he's good at without invading my turf?

This is the first appearance of real drums on our songs, (along with Modesty and Grace), which is a big step forward. And it's also the first appearance of Martin Malone on guitar. Martin used to be in the band Eskimo Chains, (in fact, I think he used to be the band Eskimo Chains) and his magificent jangle-athon really makes this record. The other great characteristic, from our point of view, is Nick Watts' excellent Hamond work. We were after something that hinted at Felt without being transparently a Felt rip off, and Nick nailed it. Similarly, we wanted Martin's guitar work to be Johnny Marr-esque, (we were thinking Big Mouth Strkes Again) without being blatent, and Martin's naturally exhuberant fretwork caught that mood perfectly.

Ned Williams created a great video for Cardigan Girl. Thanks, Ned:

Personnel:
Vocals: Armitage, Sue Roberts, Smith
Bass: Glen Smith
Keyboards: Nick Watts
Stylophone: Steve Whitfield
Cymbal Crash: Dez
The Rest: Smith
Recorded and mixed: Steve Whitfield (aided by Dez)

Recorded and mixed at Chairworks in Castleford, 1st-3rd March 2008
Mastered by Pob

Smith says:

I seem to classify songs by where I wrote them, or where I came up with the first idea for them. Some songs are Shelley songs, the ones I wrote when I was living at home with my parents. There are some college songs, which I wrote when I was away in Manchester. There are some post-Poly songs, which were written either in Shelley or Scissett. There are some Sheffield songs, (but really not that many - I started recording when I was living in Sheffield, and so it was more about learning to document what I'd written, rather than writing anything new). And there are a few London songs, and Modesty and Grace is definitely a London song.

I wrote it over a chord loop on Cubase, and it was going to be a dazzling Europop classic, except I couldn't get the verses to sit right. The riff and the hook were in place, and the vocal line, but it didn't sing very well, and all my verses were shamefully trite - I had this notion it could be translated into French, as everything sounds better when it's sung in French. The 'whores of fate' refrain wasn't there at the time - that arrived courtesy of Armitage when he got his ink-stained fingers on it, as did the words for the verses. And it was too slow, and it sounded lame.

So when it came to recording it, we speeded it up, and put real drums on it, which were really just a drum loop with a few fills dropped in. We didn't have a middle 8 for it, so we concocted one in the studio. I love the guitar on the break (a Les Paul Studio through a Fender Deluxe amp, guitar geeks), and I love the Hammond that Nick plays (a real Hammond - my dream's come true!) but the thing that really moves it along is Glen's bass line, which is subtle but gives it such a pulse! (True confessions - when we came up with the bassline, we were thinking of Red Light Spells Danger by Billy Ocean, one of the great disco classics).

Lyrics

Credits:
Director - Martin McDonnell (martin @ blackboxfilms . .com )
Producer - Rob Miller (robmiller22 @ hotmail . com)
Camera - Sam Al-Kadi
G Brown - Christian Hayes
Scaremongers - Chisara Agor
- Kyle Bennett
- Chloe Downes
- Adam Dransfield
- Malachi O'Shea

We had three great days in the studio, and we got through some really good work. I remembered how to play drums, for a start, and all our musician friends who came in to help us each added something magnificent we couldn't have created on our own. We came out with three songs - one of which there's two versions of - and we know they are the best things we've done yet. Special thanks to studio engineer Steve Whitfield and drum king, Dez, Lord of the Cymbal Crashers, for their time, effort, ideas and patience.

As a benchmark of how pleased we are, we're not going to release Less Is More/If You Ever Leave Me as a Double A-Side as we'd planned. Instead we're going to master Cardigan Girl and Modesty and Grace, and run with those.

More news when we're ready to go.

It's been a few months since I posted so there's some catching up to do. We've been doing a lot of behind the scenes, stuff which hopefully should come to fruition over the next few weeks.

The big news is we have a Second Double A-Side at the manufacturers, due to arrive at Vinyl Tap, our distributor, some time over the next few days. The two songs on there are Less Is More and If You Ever Leave Me, and as far as we're concerned they are a step forward, noise-wise.

We've also got a studio booked for the first weekend in March, where we're going to record at least three songs, this time with the magic ingredient of proper live drums. We've been wanting to add drums for a while, and now we are, and I'm playing them. If you listen carefully, you'll hear bones creaking and joints moving against their will.

And we've got some gigs lined up. But more of those later - frankly, right now I have to go and buy the chips for tea!