NOT AVAILABLE ON CD : A SERIES FOR FRIDAYS (Part 1)

I thought I'd take a break this week from finding five great album tracks and start a new series.  But it will be one that is occasional - monthly at most - and it might only get as far as five or six postings as let's face it, most LPs have at some point in time been released on CD.

I actually thought that the record I've picked out to open the series was available in the shiny metal disc format as I recall seeing it in the shops.  A bit of research threw up that a CD version was issued in 2004 but that it turns out it was a bit of a dog's breakfast.  It turns out that the some versions the songs on the CD do not match the versions released on the original LP  - indeed one is a totally different version altogether lifted from a live recoding made for a b-side!!

Anyway, here's the story behind Bite, the third and final LP by Altered Images released originally in June 1983.

The band had enjoyed a fair bit of chart success in the early 80s but in doing so had become far more pop-orientated than their original sound which was akin to that of Siouxie & The Banshees who in fact were instrumental in giving Altered Images a leg-up in the music industry thanks to a support slot on an 1980 tour.  Anyone who bought either of the first two LPs - Happy Birthday (1981) and Pinky Blue (1982) - would I'm sure readily admit that the band, while a great singles act, struggled to fill two sides of an LP with quality material. There's a particularly awful cover-version of Neil Diamond's Song Sung Blue on the latter LP....

Drummer Tich Anderson and guitarist Jim McNiven left the band not long after Pinky Blue and were replaced by Stephen Lironi whose influence helped bring a huge shift in how the band sounded, but I don;t think anyone was quite prepared for what emerged on Bite. (McNiven incidentally would be a big part of One Dove who were mentioned in passing in the posting the other day featuring Dot Allison)

The first hints of something quite radical and different was the fantastic single Don't Talk To Me About Love which was released in March 1983.  With a production courtesy of Mike Chapman, who had also done so much to polish off some of the rougher edges of Blondie and take them to a wider audience, the 45 is a great bit of pop/funk that was well worthy of its #7 placing in the UK charts. Indeed, let's not beat about the bush....there's more than a hint of Heart Of Glass about this single.

It was interesting that Chapman, recognising that Clare Grogan had a distinctive singing style that was well suited to the post-punk stuff of early Altered Images but less so to what the band were now trying to deliver, added loads of backing vocals to the Don't Talk To Me About Love. In doing so, he was mimicking what was happening to a great many other Scottish acts of the era - Aztec Camera and Friends Again for two were given groups of backing singers to add to their live sound.

Next single was Bring Me Closer in May 1983 which was the work of another big name producer in Tony Visconti.  Again, there were backing singers a-plenty, strings and saxophones but it sounded a bit rawer and less sophisticated than Don't Talk.....  and it stalled at #29. 

Then in June 1983, Bite was released.

The first thing that stunned most fans was that Clare Grogan was unrecognisable on the sleeve.  Even now, if it wasn't for the fact that the name of the band appears on the sleeve, you'd be hard pushed to look at that sleeve and any of the others from previous LPs or singles and think it was the same person.

The second thing that stunned most fans was that it contained only 8 songs - four produced on late 1982 by Chapman and four in early 1983 by Visconti.  And with two already out as singles, it showed there wasn't a huge amount of new songs out there. 

July 1983 saw the release of Love To Stay, an edited version of one of the LP tracks, with its b-side being a live version of yet another track on Bite. It was a flop, stalling at #46.

This was obviously an LP that had cost a lot of money to make and when you add in the promo videos and the whole new wardrobe and look for the band, it was clear it was making a big loss in the grand scheme of things.  The band did tour the LP but it was to far from filled-venues and what fans did turn up made it clear they preferred the old stuff.....

September 1983 saw the release of Change Of Heart, a fourth single from Bite.  But this disappeared without trace.  Within weeks, Altered Images had split up.......

mp3 : Altered Images - Bring Me Closer
mp3 : Altered Images - Another Lost Look
mp3 : Altered Images - Love To Stay
mp3 : Altered Images - Now That You're Here
mp3 : Altered Images - Don't Talk To Me About Love
mp3 : Altered Images - Stand So Quiet
mp3 : Altered Images - Change Of Heart
mp3 : Altered Images - Thinking About You

It's easy to mock Bite as an act of folly and a work by a band that was just too impatient to move away from what made them a success in the first place.  It's way more sophisticated and stylish than anything they had done before of that there's no argument and while Don't Talk To Me About Love got them to a wider audience for a short while, there wasn't another big smash single to sustain it.

But.....listening to it all these years later. it is a record that has dated rather well.  In particular, the two slower songs  - Love To Stay and Thinking About You - are excellent records and aren't a million miles away from the sound that would make The Style Council so popular and successful.  It is an album that was out of step with what folk expected of Altered Images and in particular, was given a  real hard time by the critics.  It is the finest of their three LPs and yet it is the one that sold the fewest.  It's also one that I fell in love with back in 1983 and have always had a soft spot for.

Here's some promos and tv appearances to promote the LP:-










Yes.... it is the love interest from Gregory's Girl rekindled in the second vid!!

And finally for today, a demo bonus taken from compilation CD released a couple of years back:-

mp3 : Altered Images - Now That You're Here (demo)

Happy Listening