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The Direct Records Story Volume One
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Quantity in Basket:
None
Price: $18.00
Artist:
Various Artists
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RELEASE ON THE KOOL KAT LABEL! The Direct Hits’ Colin Swan provides the backdrop to this new series - “The
thing to remember when listening to this CD is, we had very little equipment,
cheap guitars, a low noise threshold in both Geno Buckmaster and my council
flat bedrooms, and to be honest, a lack of real musical ability, but that’s the
charm of it! However, what I think we did have was some good tunes. Somebody must have liked what we were doing,
as we sold hundreds and hundreds of these homemade DIY cassettes. Consequently if you’re expecting an audio
delight, that’s not what’s on
offer here! These tracks are culled from
between 1982 and 1984, of which there still remains ‘hundreds’ of unreleased
tracks. What you hear on ‘Volume One’ is
a host of people in their early/mid 20’s fighting against what
was mainstream in the charts at the time.
Sheer enthusiasm, a ‘this-is-the-only-way-to-do-it ‘, DIY approach to
produce something that only a small amount of like-minded people dug. I did some ‘ghosting’ on some of the vocals,
usually only because the band in question asked me to, or weren’t confident
enough to do it themselves, but not very often.
We had a bunch of people who lived in South London who came along and
helped out, some disappeared, some are still friends today and some I just
can’t remember! But
it was always about the feel. Geno had
his demo studio at home in Battersea, I had mine in Tooting. The plan was to write songs as we always did,
and those that weren’t deemed suitable for The Direct Hits would then be given to
different singers or bands to record versions of. We did release covers as well, if we thought
they were really good covers. This compilation, although not technically
brilliant, is made for all the people who bought the cassettes using the old
fashioned pre-internet, pre-download, pre-Paypal methods to buy the music they
wanted. Many of these tapes went to the
USA, Canada, Japan, Australia, Moscow, even Israel and far flung corners of
Europe, particularly Germany, which is how we ended up touring there. I often wonder how many of these tapes are
still intact in someone’s attic or basement! We approached Kool Kat Musik
to work on this re-issue program mainly because label head Ray Gianchetti was a
fan club member back in the 80’s, so
it was a no brainer to work with someone who not only knew the history of the
label, but who now runs the premier, highly respected pop label and mailorder
company dealing the hard-to-find-but-special music that would be otherwise dead
and buried.” Direct
Records actively released material from 1982 till around 1987, and although the
label didn’t release cassettes after that, the studio was moved from Tooting to
Love Lane London with a much improved set up and sound and continued to produce
recordings by various artists. Some of
these found their way onto now out-of-print Direct Records compilation CD's that
were only available through the fan club. There are some familiar names other
than The Direct Hits, Colin Swan and Geno Buckmaster. A pre-Mood Six Phil Ward did a batch of solo
recordings for the label. But the rest
here are well worth discovering! “The
Direct Hits fan club, along with The Freshies fan club, were two of the best in
terms of bang-for-your buck. I have 30
DHFC fan club-only cassettes from that time period. I was thrilled and honored when Colin reached
out to me to release the ‘Direct Records Story’ series of CDs. Thinking back to the 80’s, who would have
guessed that today I’d be helping document the Direct Records story!” - Ray
Gianchetti In the end, it’s all about
the music though, isn’t it? Of course,
GREAT!!!
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