A Scottish band formed in 1984 featuring ex-members of The Fire Engines Davey Henderson and Russel Burn, along with Ian Stoddart. Joined by Simon Smeeton and Emanuel Shoniwa, and later William Perry, Win released throughout the remainder of the decade a number of singles and two albums – 1987’s unconventionly-monikered “Uh! Tears Baby (A Trash Icon)” and 1989’s “Freaky Trigger”. Win’s single “You’ve Got The Power” won various Single Of The Week awards (and though it didn’t make the top 40 in the UK charts, it sold well in Scotland) and was memorably used to soundtrack a bizarre and fantastical television advert by Scottish brewers McEwan’s (more of which later).
Win were another example of those Scottish bands whose musical style defy simple categorisation, such as The Beta Band, Associates, and The Blue Nile. Plenty of guitars were to the fore on the first album, but so too were the drum machines and synthesisers, thus they could neither be pigeonholed as either a guitar band nor a purely electronic outfit. Shiny pop production values were applied to songs with the most quixotic of titles, and instantly engaging lyrical hooks would suddenly veer off into confusing Fall-style tangents, as with “Shampoo Tears”, whose catchy pop chorus terminates in the frankly baffling “there’s no protection in sugar spears”.
The quotient of sing-a-long-ability for the mid-80s teenage gum-chewing pop purchasers wasn’t aided by perversely impenetrable barbs such as “a dashing young Valium to soften the fear” and “two lipstick smudge guns, honey, pistol weapons drawn baby”, and yet these bonne mottes both sounded and felt right to a chart-tuned ear. It is difficult to say with absolute certainty what any particular song addressed, but themes such as mass media communication, American imperialism, paranoia and conspiracies (including Marilyn Monroe, the Kennedys, and Pope John Paul I) seemed to be present. Davey Henderson once remarked that, “I feel it’s our job to remind people of the dark side, when they’re getting too comfy … the way people allow themselves to forget the bad things, as if it was all a dream”. And yet the singer made no apology for using the medium of pop to communicate this darkness : “… there’s nothing wrong with sugariness … beware of sugar-coated bullets, baby!”.
In many interviews Henderson pushed the groups preoccupation with conspiracy theories : “Aye, well, ultimately we’re paranoid. Sometime I just look up at the map and go, Are they after me? I don’t think anything exists in people’s imaginations unless it’s sparked by something. Watergate was proved, so why can’t it go any further – the Kennedys and Marilyn Monroe and all that? If you think about things like this too much it can get on top of you. You can be so paranoid that you really damage your health – get yourself so scared that you can suffer anxiety attacks just sitting in the house, for no reason at all, without anything triggering it off. So you try and chuck it in a closet and that closet turn into a song. In medieval times people were scared as a product of ignorance, but people can be similiarly scared today. There’s a parallel because with all the modern technology, adults and people of our age aren’t really aware of it or what’s going on in kid’s computer-crazed heads. The parallels with the 13th century are just, 'Do we ever know what the fuck’s going on?'. It’s just like (Umberto Eco’s book) “The Name Of The Rose””.
This paranoia extended to the powers-that-be and their grip on the tiller of the good ship ‘Mass Media’. Henderson explains again : “Nobody likes the falseness of living in a so-called ‘free-world’ and being involved in the massive censorship that happens so subtly. It’s ultra-scary, really, so we try to communicate that to people … that you’re being kidded on”.
In the absence of a suitable catch-all tag to attach the band, the band’s work can be approximated by such adjectives as : quirky, funky, leftfield, subtle, bombastic, modern, arty, angular, poppy, paranoid, subversive. Comparisons to other bands is also a problematic exercise. There’s no question that Henderson’s vocals are Bolanesque in quality, and his quixotic lyrics are very much in the style of his hero Captain Beefheart – and perhaps also in the vein of Mark E Smith. The influence of Prince pervades the music, and the first album has similar bombastic production values to Frankie / Propaganda-era ZTT, and is in the same ballpark as the mercurial ‘designer socialist’ pop of Heaven 17 and ABC.
The Prince influences were confirmed by Davey : “When we saw Prince live, our manager was saying he’s awesome, too much. But to me, Prince is totally real, totally inspiring. He opens things up. He’s the best thing that’s happened to music in the last ten years. There’s a lot of wankers slagging him off for his excesses. The guy is allowed to be a dickhead because he’s giving so much …….. Prince is making something that is absolutely fantastic – the whole Paisley Park thing is what everybody in their right mind would do, given half a chance”. He also remarked : “”Kiss” is one of the best songs ever released, ever!”. The band were also supposedly enthusiastic about bonkers funk-icon George Clinton, Roger Daltrey, Iggy Pop, Suzi Quatro, Slade, Mud(!), and for Henderson there was also a certain group of Californian punkfunkers still extant 20 years later : “The only decent new group in the world is the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. They make me run, baby!”.
Another artistic influence came from an unlikely source, that of television adverts. DH explains : “Oh we LOVE the adverts. … You’ve got to remember though, it’s the songs that are used to sell the product, not the other way around. You remember the tunes from the adverts a long time after you’ve forgotten what they look like.”
From the outset, Henderson was not keen on the band’s name. “We called ourselves Win, which was the worse name ever, but we thought that people would be attracted magnetically to this beautiful thing we hoped to create”. On the same subject of the band’s cognomen, the singer also said : “It was a general sort of feeling in the word, very optimistic. Also things like the miner’s strike, without overstating it, played a part in the name. We didn’t want to be labelled with a double-barrelled name after the Fire Engines so it just seemed right”. Contrary to popular belief, Win did not form to provide the music to a play called “Confessions of a Justified Striker”, having been in existence for several months before that. Henderson spoke of the band’s formation : “I’d been working with Hilary from The Flowers and the others had been doing their stuff. Suddenly it seemed as if my ideas and Ian and Russel’s were all in the same direction so we got together. It wasn’t such a momentous decision”.
A track demo was produced for Trevor Horn’s ZTT Records – an unsurprising choice, seeing as journalist Paul Morley was the label’s PR and had previously given a fulsome review to the Fire Engines single “Get Up And Use Me” (once writing that “if life were less complicated and things had gone to plan, Subway Sect’s ’Ambition’ would now be accepted as one of rock’s great number ones, and groups influenced by Subway Sect, like the Fire Engines, would be bigger than Duran Duran”. Morely also scribed in the NME in 1981 : “The Fire Engines are lovely – the best group I saw in 1980”). The tape ended up at Polygram-owned London Records, where the Swamplands label’s owner Alan Horne came across it by sheer luck. Henderson says of this chance encounter : “Alan was walking down the corridor when he heard our tape coming from another office. He recognised my voice, phoned Russell, and signed us up to Swamplands”. Davey also told Sounds : “At first we wanted to be on ZTT because of Morley but we thought ‘fuck this, it’s a pile of shite. A complete wank off’. Then we were going to do a single for an independent label in Edinburgh until Horne got on the phone screaming ‘danae sign anything!’ and signed us to Swamplands”. (In response to a comment that Win could’ve been ZTT’s Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Henderson quipped “no thanks. We don’t want to be monsters”).
The Swamplands label was set up with money from London Records by Alan Horne, the maverick who built up the short-lived but much-respected Postcard Records. It was Horne who back in 1979 came up with ‘The Sound Of Young Scotland’ scene, which encompassed acts such as Josef K, Altered Images, Orange Juice, and Aztec Camera, all of whom were signed to Postcard (which was “… basically my bedroom”). Horne mooched around until the money from Postcard ran out, then dabbled for a while managing his pal Paul Quinn. London MD Roger Ames tempted Horne out of retirement with the promise of his own label in Swamplands, with an office in the Polygram building (in London W.1), and sizable funds for marketing and recording.
Initially he was sceptical of the deal being offered. “I thought, ‘Does this mean I’m going to have to look after Bananarama and The Bluebells’, and so I said ‘No thanks, it sounds horrible!’. They told me to think about it and I met them one day and they seemed really good. We were talking about Bernie Rhodes and Stevo, and I thought maybe it wouldn’t be so bad after all. I like the way that London’s a kind of big independent, it’s not full of fifty year-old farts”. He was hopeful of the future of the new label : “It’s going to be good. It’s not meaningful and it doesn’t matter in any real sense, it’s just a wee company. The groups are all better than the Postcard ones and I’ve learnt more about the business side of things, so it should work out OK. Maybe in three months time I’ll think it’s really boring and want to go and the whole thing somewhere, but at the moment it seems like it’s going to be great. …… There’s no way that all the groups are going to be huge. I think it’s all a bit too eclectic for that”.
Ever the communicator, Alan Horne pulled no punches talking about the past (“Postcard Records was rubbish and all the records on it were rubbish! … for a while, I suppose I actually thought that Postcard was the most important label in the world, but looking back it’s obvious that it was just a rather badly organised, humorous little operation”) and evangalising his new charges : “Win are the most exciting thing I’ve come across since Orange Juice were starting off and, like that group too, Win have an excitement. The Fire Engines had it, Davey Henderson emanates it. An aesthetic excitement that is earthy and arty. They don’t have to knock you over with a blast of pomp the way the rest are trying to do these days”.
Of Win, Henderson explains : “We created a vibey, Neanderthal, postpunk funk, but for some reason we also wanted to be popstars. Yet we didn’t go all the way and wanted to intellectualise too much over the forms of the songs and their reasons for existing. There were lyrical references to people we loved through art, but were like dilettantes, and rather than be subversive, we subverted ourselves”. Such references were to include David Lynch, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Marc Bolan, and even infamous 70s porn flick Deep Throat! (Henderson also has spoken about a liking of veteran crooner Lee Hazelwood, especially his track “Some Velvet Morning”).
However, this band was to be of a very different mettle to Burn’s and Henderson’s previous incarnation. In a group interview of the original three Win members, the band was asked, “what do Win have that the Fire Engines didn’t?”. (At this point, Ian Stoddart piped up : “Me!”). DS continued : “We want to do different things. The Fire Engines were about total energy, complete excitement. Buzzing off electricity and being totally mental. We’re just doing it within a different structure”. However, escaping the influence of the Engines would be difficult : “The last journalist who came here only wanted to know if we had any old Fire Engines tapes he could listen to. It’d be nice for people to take us just on the strength of what we’re doing now”. In the same interview back in 1985, Henderson commented further on the Engines’ legacy : “Well the thing is that we honestly never realised how important people thought the Fire Engines were until we started to read the reviews. It’s obviously a part of me that I can’t ignore but it’s not something that I think about at every available moment”.
Henderson also spoke of the intentions of Win’s music to motivate : “We want to keep making positive and up sort of celebratory sounds – dead hopeful songs, because we feel there’s a disgusting apathy hitting Britain and it’s horrible and it’s sickening. Personally, I don’t see the point of getting down about anything. It’s a waste of time, it’s a waste of energy, it’s negative and it affects your body”. On a similar tip in another interview, the lead singer opined : “There’s nobody with any hope for tomorrow in their songs and music, like we have.”
Elsewhere the lead vocalist commented : “Win is groovy, chartbound pop songs, sexy, mysterious and chewing gum for the ears, baby. Win is about getting records in the charts, baby. We’re the only people making classic pop at the moment. That’s what we sit in our bedrooms and do all the time. Also, there’s nothing offensive about us baby, or outrageous, we’re moral kinds of people. And our keyboardist’s Andy Stewart’s nephew!”. He used the chewable confectionary metaphor later : “Win is chewing gum for your ears, but really nice chewing gum”.
Confidence was high in mid ’87, with DH expounding : “We’re well wicked basically baby! We want the charts, we want to pack them with our little tunes and our groovy lyrics. We won’t stop until we get EXACTLY what we want. That’s all really. That’s Win”.
Davey spoke of the pop business : “We’re writing with the aim of turning everything into pop songs because it’s the only way to make money. It’s the only way to work because the music business controls the taste of the people. Sometimes, it’s really shite to have to it but it’s like the currency of the business”. Ian Stoddart added to this : “And we are getting better at it”.
However, the process of writing such chart-friendly fodder did not come easy to Henderson : “We just can’t write pop songs. There has to be £22000 spent on each song to turn it into one. It has to be an engineering process because we’re not capable of writing songs like that. We don’t work that way”.
Davey again, this time on the matter of accusations of pop plagiarism : “Pop forgers! That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said about us. Maybe we should get that put that on a tee-shirt. That’s precisely what we want to achieve, to be able to take all those tiny bits from pop’s best moments and put them together in this super popoid groove that is Win. All this rubbish about authenticity and originality, I mean look at that fellow over there” – pointing at a pianist tinkling away in a hotel bar – “There’s only eight notes on a piano and he knows it”. Elsewhere, he continued on a similar tip : “There’s this stupid fallacy about being ‘original’ or ‘profound’. No one who’s ever listened to music can pretend to be totally original, so why not use what’s gone before? We’ve used loads of stuff like the guitar bit at the end of Iggy Pop’s ‘China Girl’ or some Jacksons things, as starting points for songs. Even if not the actual tunes then the ideas behind them, the feel, can be picked up”.
But subversion was ever on Henderson’s mind : “Danger is about biting conservative people’s eyes out. We constantly want to be dangerous and lyrically, we are in a big way”. Politics also were on the lyricist's agenda, with questions being put to him that they were of a leftwing bent : "I've called them that in the past. Or sugar agit-prop, sugar coated bullets". Bassist Ian Stoddart had this to say back in the day on the whole subject of politics, which predated Bono's canonisation by the media by some years : "It becomes like a vocation and you end up doing Band Aid worldwide".
Unfortunately, the lower-than-expected sales of Win’s early singles, coupled with rising label costs and the less-then-stellar sales of other Swamplands artists, caused the bosses back at London Records to ask of Alan Horne what was going on. Politics and recriminations set in, and London pulled the plug on Swamplands, leaving its acts in limbo. “We gave them an OK Corral”, remembers Davey Henderson. “London had to commit themselves by 6 o’Clock on Friday. In fact, they hadn’t actually signed us : we were a Swamplands act, and as the label didn’t exist anymore, we were free to go anyway”. Towards the end of 1985 Horne departed the label *, and Win’s future records were put out on London (though the iconic Swamplands panther could still be found on the packaging).
Finally released in April 1987, the first album “Uh! Tears baby (A Trash Icon)” was hyped within an inch of it’s life and generally received positive reviews (though Henderson remained slightly disappointed with the final product. “It was unrepresentative of what we we really were”). However, poor sales led to the band being dropped by London, with Davey saying at the time : “Our songs are designed to be Number One. We should have been really massive a year ago. Why don’t Radio One play our stuff?”. They were subsequently picked up by Richard Branson’s Virgin (Davey at the time remarking : “At Virgin, we feel like there’s real support for what we’re doing”).
Three new singles were offered up for public consumption, along with the album “Freaky Trigger”, for which Henderson has much fonder memories : “There was an element about the people involved in that album that I really love. “Freaky Trigger” was a reaction to the previous release so we never put on vinyl what we really meant, and never realised our true ambitions”.
“Freaky Trigger” plowed a dissimilar furrow to its predecessor, with bright saccharine-coated poppy tunes finding their way onto the album, only this time with added girly backing singers and Indian percussion, that upon closer inspection possessed the same enigmatic lyrics and quirky titles as the first album’s (“Mind The Gravy”, “We Could Cover Up The “C””), with the album’s highlight “What’ll You Do Til’ Sunday Baby” being the closest thing to a conventional song and single Win had ever produced. However, Henderson denied an overall strategy for an assault on the top 40 : “I’m not suggesting there’s an ounce of intelligence in what we do. All that pop strategist thing is a conspiracy. A conspiracy invented by journalists for a weekly wage”. On another occasion, he added, “We’re not necessarily explorers of life’s dark side, but a lot of pop songs are about superficial things, jangly disco crap. We’re kind of doing similar things, but with a different accent”.
So where did Davey think the group fitted in the musical grand scheme of things? “Because we exist. We are. We’re just a happening little pop group. We think about the words we come out with in songs. We want to colourify and texturalize and make songs alive and bubbling. We want to make people bubble. It’s like giving them a wee massage”.
Confidence was never a problem for Henderson and the chaps. “I think we are superstars. We were brought up on a diet of superstars : Mark Smith, David Bowie, Iggy Pop. Me and Russel aren’t musicians in any way. We can’t play, and that is our charm. We’re inspired amateurs with a lot of attitude, and that’s our charm and probably our downfall. We’re not precious about our art – we’re just precious anyway”.
Unfortunately, history repeated itself with the album again receiving plaudits from the music press but achieving low sales. Virgin dropped Win in March / April 1990 and the troupe split shortly aftwards. Some songs were supposedly written for a third album, and possibly even demo-ed, but they have never seen the light of day. Al Crawford - veteran observer of the UK music scene over at awrc.com - had this tantalising nugget to reveal : "Then there's the legendary demo material for the third album - all I know about that is that it was to be recorded in a studio near Loanhead in Midlothian (I used to pass it on the bus going to and from university every day) and that one of the members of S'Express (dates this a bit) was supposed to be producing". As far as I know, S'Express was essentially just the DJ Mark Moore with hired backing singers so this would be an interesting point to follow up.
The New Musical Express was one of many music journals that mourned the eventual demise of Win : "(they) . . . must be both proud and guilty in the knowledge that they made some of the greatest pop never heard".
(* The story of Postcard and Swamplands - and Alan Horne’s outrageous shenanigans! - are dealt with in some detail in the excellent “The Creation Records Story : My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry For The Prize” by David Cavanagh, and in Brian Hogg’s equally meritous “All That Ever Mattered : The History Of Scottish Rock And Pop”. )
Note that this list of instruments refers to those played by the band members on the second album - there is no list of band members’ respective instrumentation on the first album.
Before the formation of Win, its members had been gainfully employed by a number of bands. Davey Henderson was initially motivated to form a group after seeing a Vic Godard & The Subway Sect gig in 1977, saying later that “… the Subway Sect were one of the scariest things I’d seen, like a bizarre Twilight Zone. Then I knew I could be in a group and do exactly what I wanted” (though a punk outfit, their leader Godard also liked Abba, Debussy, Cole Porter and Iriving Berlin, and supposedly played a gig in Paris lying on their backs with Vic dressed up as a dolphin!)
Initially in an outfit known as the Talkovers with Bobby ‘Rab’ King (later of the Scars) and Angus Groovy (future Fire Engines' manager and big wheel at Codex Communications), they got their first gig at the Wig And Pen, a pub frequented by punks on Cockburn Street in Edinburgh. Davey said “We did this song called “Harmony Hairspray Psst Psst”. Rab drummed like Palmolive, while we jammed on top”. They later supported the Rezillos with an infamously brief performance : “Our set lasted barely a minute. We performed “98-99-100”, then left, but the audience was so excited we went back on stage and repeated it”.
Once it was all over for the Talkovers, the Dirty Reds quickly appeared on the scene (“We wanted to be the baddest and the worst – we succeeded”). Their first line-up included singer Hillary Morrison, Henderson, and drummer Russell Burn. Russell’s own musical ambitions began early : “we always wanted to play in a band ever since we saw the Beatles on TV when we were three”. Also in another act with Davey called Warm Jets, Hillary soon took a couple of the other Dirty Reds into the Flowers (a band in a similar mould to Siouxsie And The Banshees). Burn and Henderson soldiered on with what Davey refers to as “the real Dirty Reds”, which now comprised of Russell, Davey, Burn’s brother Tam Dean, and bassist Graham Mair. “We had a bad reputation around Edinburgh”, confesses Henderson. “They thought we were just going through our Burroughs, experimental phase …… and would stay up all night talking”. They all witnessed the infamous White Riot Tour gig at the Edinburgh Playhouse in April 1977. The Dirty Reds split in 1979, just as they were offered by Alan Horne the opportunity to record the song “Dine In My Mind”, and so the recording never took place.
Tam opted for a career as an actor (he’s been in well known films such as “Local Hero” and “Young Adam”, and TV series such as “Taggart”, “Between The Lines”, and “the Bill”; he has also appeared in the stage productions of such luminaries as Steven Berkoff and the arch-Trainspotter himself, Irvine Welsh) while slide guitarist Murray Slade (ex-Station Six) hooked up with Henderson, Mair and Burn to beget the seminal Fire Engines in Edinburgh in 1979, taking their name from a 13th Floor Elevators track called “Fire Engine” they had heard on a bootleg of Television (of “Marque Moon” fame; the bootleg, "Double Exposure", was produced by Brian Eno). Inspirations for the band included The Fall, James Chance, Voidoids, and James White and The Blacks (and their alter-egos, James White and The Contortions).
The Fire Engines were one of the many acts that formed ‘The Sound Of Young Scotland’ scene, which encompassed acts such as Josef K, Altered Images, Orange Juice, and Aztec Camera. Most of the bands in this scene were on Postcard Records, though not The Fire Engines who were instead on Bob Last’s Edinburgh label Pop : Aural. Alan Horne wanted the Fire Engines for Postcard and was set to release a live tape of the band on his planned sub-label I Wish I Was A Postcard when Last got them into the studio first, intensifying an already-existing rivalry between the men and their labels. In fact, Horne had previously gotten the Engines to play gigs in Glasgow with Orange Juice and Josef K, hoping that the audiences would assume that they were also on Postcard too (attendees at these gigs were the Jesus & Mary Chains' Reid brothers, Primal Scream's Bobby Gillespie and Creation Records' Alan McGee).
(… . Henderson once stated that it was Bobby King from the Scars who first introduced him to Bob Last. Interestingly, The Fire Engines did a cover version of Heaven 17’s “We Don’t Need (That Fascist Groove Thang)” – their interpretation described by one wag as being as “rough as a badger’s arse!” – and it was Bob Last who managed the British Electric Foundation, an outfit who would eventually metamorphasise into Heaven 17. …)
Of the Edinburgh scene, Henderson and Burn would later be quite scathing. DH : “They’re all such dilettantes, these people who are the Edinburgh music scene. They haven’t got a clue, haven’t got a finger anywhere except up their own arses. It’s really depressing because they’re so foolish and middle class. Edinburgh’s got a square mile that’s middle class but there’s a seven mile radius of poverty. No-one ever hears about it though, because you don’t get postcards from poverty, do you? Britain sees Edinburgh as a square mile of 19th Century Georgian beauty, and it’s not.” RB : “So many groups are stuck in that Postcard-type vein, churning the same thing out all the time. It’s going round in wee four year circles”.
Davey dismissed the suggestion that being based in Edinburgh but on a London-based label had its disadvantages : “Not really. There is that distance from the record company and because they’re all there it does make you a bit defensive. One of the reasons that we stay here is to give us a strong base to operate from, so we can feel entitled to reject some of Alan’s suggestions. The ideas for the group tend to be a joint thing but because he’s down there he can get away with more. We have to be firm sometimes though because a fair amount of his ideas are totally naff”.
Henderson recalls “We played to our strengths, which were minimal, but as a band it somehow worked”. Their sets infamously lasted fifteen minutes (a lifetime compared to the blink-and-you-miss-’em Talkovers ‘appearances’), but Davey remained defiant : “What’s the point in getting the audience bored?! Where’s the value there?! Is it the amount of time you’re on or the amount of excitement you get out of it?”. The Engines even answered a 999 call to turn out for a role in the theatre production called “Why Does The Pope Not Come To Glasgow?”, held in the 1980 Edinburgh Fringe.
They put out the album “Lubricate Your Living Room”, a mostly instrumental affair punctuated by the occasional chant or yelp of excitement from Henderson, retailing at a wallet-friendly £2.49 (a bargain at the time for an LP); it was described in adverts as “background music for active people”. The mini-album received postive reviews from critics and sold well considering its independent roots. Davey spoke of the album as a trial-run, not to be considered as a proper debut : “(It’s) like our songs with the words taken away and the lengths extended … it was Bob Last’s idea and he wanted to use us and we were quite into being used in this type of way”.
“We only ever recorded stuff live,” Henderson recalls, “just to preserve the energy, and I remember us having quite a discussion about whether we should even record at all”. Despite their limited technical ability, the band took their music a little too seriously. “It was really intense. If we didn’t feel like we’d delivered, it was personally quite a major trauma for us all. The one time it really happened, it was horrible.”
For the single “Candyskin”, Last splashed out on string players hoping to add a “glossy” patina to their sound, but later conceded that “the Fire Engines were so abrasive you could get away with using a string section without it being kitsch. But after a while, I told them they couldn’t go on doing what they were doing, ‘cos it’d just be less of the same. So they reinvented themselves as Win, a proper pop group”.
The Fire Engines cultish success caught Henderson off guard : “We were totally surprised that the Fire Engines got anywhere, even in the indie scene. We were only doing it for total fun so it was really funny when people started getting so interested”. On also being asked on what made the Engines so special, he replied : "It was just total excitement and actual physical energy. Just that natural sort of whoosh, just go really ape crazy! It was brilliant, it was a great feeling, a totally great feeling!".
Not long after a TV slot on BBC2’s music magazine Riverside, The Fire Engines folded on New Year's Eve 1981. Davey recalls that “Bob told us he wasn’t going to release any more Fire Engines records”. He also once said “It wasn’t very nice towards the end because I felt the need to write songs. You know, songy songs, and we just sort of got lost. Certain people had ideas about the way we should be heading and we had ideas of our own. While it was sparkling along like that it was great, but all of a sudden it went wrrrmmphh”.
Both pre- and post-Win, there was much formation and disintegration of groups involving the six Win members, which are detailed below :
After The Fire Engines, Henderson formed Heartbeat with pianist James Locke and ex-Dirty Reds and Flowers’ Hillary Morrison (not to be confused with the shortlived Heartbeat UK, formed by Culture Club drummer Jon Moss around 1987).
(…. Flowers were also on both Bob Last labels Fast Product and Pop : Aural, one multi-band 12” single on the former (“Criminal Waste”) and two 7” singles of the latter label (“Confessions”, “Ballad Of Miss Demeanor”); she was also at the time Bob’s girlfriend; Morrison was the Hi-Ray who sang on The Fire Engines single “Big Gold Dream” . Davey and Hillary first met in a Virgin Records-store in early 1978 at a Sex Pistols signing session for the just-released "Never Mind The Bollocks"! …)
Heartbeat released just the one track, “Spook Sex”, on a New Musical Express compilation cassette called “Racket Packet” (serial number : NME 006). Henderson was not too enamoured with the project. “I hated it. I wasn’t the prime mover and it wasn’t the place to be”. Despite such feelings he retained his songwriting partnership with Morrison : one of their cowrites was for ex-Altered Images femme fatale Claire Grogan, it being her only solo single ‘Love Bomb’ (on London Records, on May 25th 1987, managed by Bob Last).
After Win’s split, Davey announced he was to release a solo album – this never materialised but in 1992 he did form Nectarine No.9 (once memorably described as “Edinburgh’s premier voodoo beat seditionists”), along with Win-ster Simon Smeeton. They were initially signed to Alan Horne’s reactivated Postcard Records (later relocating to Creeping Bent and Beggars Banquet), and released a slew of albums throughout the 90s and 00s. The Fire Engines reformed in late 2004 for a couple of gigs supporting their heroes The Magic Band (no Captain Beefheart though, who these days is Don van Vliet, an established painter) as well as Franz Ferdinand at the SECC (see below for further details). Of the Magic Band concert, Henderson said “We’d all be going to the gig anyway so this way we can get in for free!”.
Previously to Win, Russel was in the Fire Engines (where he had an aversion to using cymbals, favouring the cowbell instead!) then the group Everest The Hard Way. In this band he was joined by Ian Stoddart and future Altered Images keyboard player Stephen Lironi, releasing one single “Tightrope” in April ’82.
He briefly rejoined the Dirty Reds before hooking up with Davey and Ian to form Win. After Win, Russel spent some time living in Barcelona and recorded the album “A Dali Surprise” in April ’92 under the name of Pie Finger (which was Russel’s nickname in Win, on account of his occasionally heavy-handed keyboard playing! I’ve seen elsewhere another possible nickname of ‘Rusty’). I understand that he contibuted to the various ‘interludes’ on the Nectarine No.9’s 1994 album “Guitar Thieves” and “electronic sub.talk” on their 1998 album “Fried For Blue Material”. It’s assumed that he also was part of the late 2004 Fire Engines reunion too. BTW, Russel’s first name is often spelt as Russell – I’m guessing the one-L is correct as that’s what’s on the solo album – you’d suppose that was the one place where it would be spelt correctly.
Before his time in Win, Ian was also in the group Everest The Hard Way (along with Russel).
(…. I’ve an inkling that Everest The Hard Way’s name was possibly inspired by the book of the same name by bearded mountain climber du jour Chris Bonington; coincidently, one Ian Stoddart – possibly the same character - has left a review of an Everest-related DVD at :
http://www.screenselect.co.uk/visitor/product_detail.html?product_id=13173 … .)
He then joined Edinburgh’s The Happy Family, home also to David Weddell (ex-Josef K), who were one of the early acts to sign to the 4AD label. Ian left after the release in March 1982 of their single “Puritans”, and the band went on to release an album called “The Man On Your Street”. More info can be found at :
http://www.mp3.com/the-happy-family/artists/444225/summary.html
Ian joined The Apples after Win (3 singles, including “Eye Wonder”, “Beautiful People” – another review at http://www.awrc.com/review/a/beautiful_people.html - and “Stay People Child” on Epic Records; an album was produced but the band fell out with the record label over their interference, when Epic remixed work that the band thought was already finished; promo copies received poor reviews, and it was shelved). He later became a member of jazzfunksters Captain Shifty who released a single on the Acid Jazz label (“Whatever You Do”) and contributed to the Acid Jazz compilation album “Greater London Grooves”.
These days Ian plays in Aberfeldy, a five-piece from Edinburgh who are signed to the Rough Trade label. Their first single “Heliopolis By Night”, a Single Of The Week in the NME, reached number 66 in the UK charts, and the album “Young Forever” has received much praise in the music press. The single “Love Is An Arrow” was issued in January 2005. More info can be found at the band’s website :
The animated video for Aberfeldy's "Love Is An Arrow" can be viewed at :
http://www.youtube.com/results?search=aberfeldy
Emanuel formed Yo Yo Honey after the demise of Win. Recording on Jive Records, they produced the album Voodoo Soul (on the Jive label, sometime in 1992), and offered up singles including “When The Music Takes You”, “Don’t Come To Leave”, “Supernova”, “Get It On”, and “Groove On” (one wonders if “Get It On” is yet another Win-related Bolan cover version).
After Win, Simon contributed to some (if not all) of Nectarine No.9’s output, playing guitars and keyboards. It’s not much of a description, but the Nectarines have put out a lot of albums, EPs, and singles since their inception back in the early 90s, so he’s been at the coalface!
William became part of Win in time for the “Freaky Trigger” album. William joined the Apples (along with Ian Stoddart) after Win (not to be confused with the American outfit Apples (In Stereo) who were originally known as The Apples). He also co-produced a couple of tracks on Russel Burn’s solo outing as Pie Finger, “A Dali Surprise”, where in the credits he’s named as Willy ‘Piesley’ Perry. Bizarrely, he is the cousin of Andy Stewart!
(… during my researchs, I came across some information that in 1993 one (or more) of the band released material under the name Agent Orange. Other than an American punk / thrash metal outfit, I can find no information about this possible band. Has anybody any info in this regard?)