Description
Black vinyl with gatefold cover. Limited 350 copies
Formed in April 1980 and with a name chosen One night after we’d been out on the beer, admits Ian Toomey. There was Page Three kicking off and lots of sleazy stuff happening, and it sounded like a show-stopping name to us, Bitches Sin was the Toomey Brothers quest for some kind of musical ideal. There seemed to be no band that set out to hit you between the eyes with aggressive, hard, exciting metal music, he recalls; and if they did then all the songs sounded the same. Pete and I tried to find a band where we liked all their stuff and couldn’t, so we decided to form one of our own. And that was Bitches Sin. Bitches Sin wasted little time in getting into a studio, venturing to Smile Studios in Manchester in August 1980 to record their first demo £12 And No Kinks. The seven-track tape came to the attention of Neat Records who offered to issue a single, and the result of this was the band’s debut release Always Ready (For Love). A great single in its own right, the seven-incher was soon to be over-shadowed however by two other recordings made at Neat’s Impulse Studios – a re-recording of Down The Road from the demo tape (which had been recorded as the same time as the single and which appeared in May 1981 on the aforementioned Lead Weight compilation cassette), and the attention-grabbing Strangers On The Shore, for many people the highlight of Heavy Metal Records Heavy Metal Heroes LP. Oddly, recalls Ian, Neat didn’t feel that Strangers On The Shore fitted in with the label’s sound, which I find quite hilarious really! With the single doing its thing quite nicely in national and international Heavy Metal charts, Bitches Sin went on to record another demo, Your Place Or Mine, after which Ian set his sights on a prestigious session for BBC Radio One’s The Friday Rock Show. After the single came out, I arranged to see The Friday Rock Show’s producer Tony Wilson and took with me the two demos and some assorted band stuff. I remember being quite apprehensive about the meeting at the time, but after listening to a few songs he said he’d liked what he ‘d heard and would be in touch, and not long after we were invited to the BBC’s Maida Vale studios to record a session. However, Pete and I drive ourselves very hard and that pace isn’t for everyone, and, as a consequence of such a punishing work ethic, by the time Bitches Sin arrived at Maida Vale on 26th August 1981 the band boasted quite a different line-up with Tony Tomkinson (vocals), Dave Newsham (bass) and Tony Leece (drums) alongside the two guitarists. The album youre not looking at features Bitches Sin’s first demo £12 And No Kinks in its entirety together with the BBC Session recorded for The Friday Rock Show in August 1981 and aired a couple of months later (the album cover, incidentally, is another shot of model Sharalee from the same session that produced the sleeve to the Always Ready (For Love) 7″). ‘£12 And No Kinks was recorded on 6th and 7th August 1980 over a period of about ten hours – all seven songs, including setting up and mixing, recalls Ian. This was the band’s first ever visit to a recording studio; money and time were tight and it’s all live takes aside from one overdub – the second guitar solo on Ice Angels. All the rest is live in the studio. The title, by the way, came from a contact or call girl ad, and we thought the sleazy title and cassette cover fitted in with our name. Things were no less pressured at the BBC, where like most Friday Rock Show sessions, the four-song set was recorded in one day at the Beeb’s Maida Vale studios. On the plus side though, it was produced by in-house genius Tony Wilson, and he certainly brought out the power that drives both Bitches Sin and the band’s songs: just check out the difference between the early version of Down The Road and its BBC counterpart (a version which is often viewed as one of those songs – like offerings from Raven and Jaguar – that form the bridge between the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal and the later Speed Metal daze, and which Ian regards as Probably the fastest we have ever played). The BBC session was all done in one day but we struggled for ages to get the set-up right as Tony Leece had forgotten to tune his drums. He and I had an almighty row, and if you listen to the drum track you’ll hear how hard he’s hitting those drums – probably instead of hitting me, I suspect.
Track listing:
1. Down The Road
2. White Lady
3. Bitches Sin
4. Two Of A Kind
5. Ice Angels
6. Tighter Than Tight
7. Heavy Life
8. Down The Road
9. Fallen Star
10. Hold On To Love
11. Strangers On The Shore