Sampladelica, by David Reakes

My friend, actor, one-time Huddersfieldian and man who knows the ’80s music scene better than anyone alive, David Reakes, says:

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