Barry McLeod and Robert Campbell [henceforth known as 'Bob'] cut our musical teeth in a couple of school bands that emerged from Hyndland Secondary school in Glasgow. This is an opportunity to apologise to the residents of the Partick Cricket Club and Anniesland Church for the regular practices at startling volume that must have set a few teeth on edge. The locals endured us with good humour and these bands taught us a lot [mostly about getting through a practice without strangling your best friends and, of course, the constant search for 'complete creative control'].
The first band, The Lemons, allowed us to demonstrate our 'last year at school' punk pretensions. We had bought our first guitars and fuzz box and were determined to use them [and The Undertones and The Clash have a lot to answer for]. Leaving punk, and our singer behind, we formed a band called Protection, a West End combo which plumbed the depths of progressive rock for no apparent reason. This musical period deserves no elaboration and is a constant source of much hilarity whenever the tapes are wheeled out by the guilty parties.
From this background The Incredible Blondes were formed in 1984 by Barry McLeod and Bob Campbell and were based in Glasgow. Each band, I suppose, likes to think it has some form of style or appraoch that is reflected in their music. For The Incredible Blondes, it was always a case of two styles. The first was a jangly guitar style as practised by the Postcard bands of that era. Twenty years on you can still see the influence that this small label from the West End of Glasgow has had upon a myriad of Indie bands worldwide. The second style was a hangover from our love of high energy fuzzy New Wave bands from the late 1970s in the UK. There are too many bands to cite here and again their influence is clear to see in many current bands.
With these styles acting as the basis of our band we then recorded a number of songs together and sent the demos off to various record companies and radio stations. Radio 1 picked up on the demo in late 1985 and gave us a session in London on the Janice Long Show. Of course, Radio 1 accurately pegged us immediately as having a "Velvet Underground" and also reminding Janice of Postcard. Our view was that anyone from a non-rock band background would be hugely flattered [and not a little embarrassed] by such comparisons. We recorded four songs for the show called "White Lies Free," "Ritzy Girl," The Morning After" and "Pin it Up."
After the session, Nick Low from NoStrings emerges into our little story and asked us if we would like to do a single. This was a bizarre accident that couldn't have been planned better if we had organised it. Nick worked in Centre City Sound rehearsal studio [much remembered by regular clients] and was booking us into the studio at exactly the moment when Radio 1 was playing an Incredible Blondes track. Once it had clicked with Nick that these talented boys in front of him were the very chaps gracing the airwaves he moved swiftly to offer us the chance to record a single. We did our best to look nonchalent about the fact that we happened to be on the Radio and adopted a bored almost foppish air of indifference. This approach, the same as we used with girls with a staggering level of failure, seemed to work in this case. The single featured "Where Do I Stand?" on the A side and "True" on the B side, and was released early in 1987. The band took on a permanent keboards player [Eddie Campbell, later to play in 'Texas'] and Stephen Boyle on bass guitar in time to record the single. The band played a number of gigs around Glasgow for a few months and disbanded when Barry and Robert went to university in Glasgow.
A chance meeting with Nick on our local video store led to Nick suggesting putting together a collection of The Incredible Blondes material for release as an album. This was stimulated by some very kind comments about the original single from people who had got a hold of a copy from Canada, Germany and Japan. The forthcoming album is the output of this process which also includes some new songs that have been recorded in Nick's studio over many long nights over the past six months at Demus productions.
Two of the songs were co-written with my old friend and fellow Lemon, John Wilkie. It was good fun to re-enact old struggles for 'creative control.' John also contributed his bass playing skills to a couple of tracks for which many thanks. Thanks are also due to Jim McDermott for his drumming on the new tracks and for the trumpet contributions of Chas Fraser. Last, but not least, thanks are due to Aya, who patiently attempted to teach me to sing Where Do I Stand? in Japanese. In fact, we liked her voice so much that we decided to feature Aya as the lead singer on a Japanese Version of the song, with limited support in Japanese from myself. We hope she likes the finished version when she listens to it in Kyoto, Japan. Finally final thanks to Nick (this is like the oscars) whose enthusiasm and support for The Incredible Blondes songs really have been the drive and inspiration to come up with new material. So it's his fault! The first 500 copies of the CD will also include a Blonde vinyl album [for those of you still with record players], so make sure you get in quick.
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