Drop the Roof
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The first Out of my Hair album and the only one to get a proper release was called Drop the Roof.
When the band first signed a deal with RCA they were put in the studio (Milo's in Shoreditch) with an engineer called Marcus (sorry Marcus I can't remember your last name). They recorded one decent track there, River of Gold, which found it's way to Janis Long, a well known DJ in the UK, and she played it many times we heard on Radio London where she was working at the time. It was exciting, being the band's first radio breakthrough. However RCA didn't think the track sounded right. River of Gold-Milo Sessions
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Next they went into Eddies studio in Camden under the arches in Castlehaven Road, with Phil Vinall, a Helios desk (Pink Floyd recorded Dark Side of the Moon on one of these as legend goes) and a lot of very vintage gear, and got one track they were satisfied with- Strange Company, which ended up on the B-side to both the Heart's Desire EP and the Safe Boy EP, as well as the Japanese release of the album.
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He gave the song to RCA a long with a new recording of River of Gold and although they liked it his A&R man insisted that no radio station would ever play it coz of the sound so they would release it but give it no promotion whatsoever. And in a way this moment was emblematic of his whole relationship with RCA, because what actually happened was that the song was played to death on the radio, especially on Radio 1 where it was number 1 on the listeners choice new releases for about a week, but you couldn't buy it in any shops and there was no publicity at all.
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 Drop the Roof If you would like to get Drop the Roof please click the button below |
"I remember being in a car with Stewart, my best friend, and Tiffy, my girlfriend. We were on our way to Scotland to do some radio sessions and it was a beautiful spring day. Shaker Maker had just come out, by Oasis, and there was that feeling of new things happening (it was of course the beginning of a period crassly termed as....yuk...Britpop!!!!) And when In the Groove came on the radio, with the sun shining, we suddenly felt like we had the world at our feet. It was in a way the beginning and the end, because I think that was the happiest and most innocent experience of my whole music career, my Rosebud moment. When I returned to London and found I couldn't buy the record anywhere the frustration was amazing and I realized that the way I heard sound was not gonna work with the way my record company heard sound".
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The next stage was to move all the gear into a studio in Rotherhithe but this was a time when it was very exciting to be in band in london and to basically go out and get smashed to pieces, so the rest of the recording is all a bit of a daze. Comfort and the drummer Kenny Rumbles were partners in crime and fully enjoyed this particular period of their lives without remembering much about it. However they did record quite a few songs that somehow made it on to Drop the Roof, and one that didn't, Heart's Desire, the bands 2nd Single, which was hit, of sorts, in France.
Heart's Desire-for full EP click here
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