Un-American Broadcastings : A Complete List of (Both) Win Albums
“Uh! Tears Baby (A Trash Icon)”
Format :LP / Cassette / CD
Label :London
Serial No :LONLP 31 / LONC 31 / 828047-2
Date Of Release :April 1987
Track Listing :
1. Super Popoid Groove
2. Shampoo Tears
3. Binding Love Spell
4. Un-American Broadcasting - but see below
5. Hollywood Baby Too
6. Empty Holsters
7. You’ve Got The Power
8. Charms Of Powerful Troubles
9. It May Be A Beautiful Sky Tonight But It’s Only A Shelter For A World At Risk
10. Charms (Reprise)
11. Baby Cutting
12. You’ve Got The Power (12” Mix) – cassette and CD only
13. Shampoo Tears (12” Mix) – cassette and CD only
Info :
- Produced and arranged by David Motion; engineered by Brad Davis and Trigger; all mixed by Michael Brauer except 13. which was remixed by Mark Berry.
- The personnel are listed as : “WIN are DAVID HENDERSON / RUSSELL BURN / IAN STODDART. And EMANUEL SHONIWA / SIMON SMEETON”. This implies that Shoniwa and Smeeton were possibly more than hired help but not quite full members of the band, though they would be by the time of the next album. A quote in Blitz 05/85 mentions that the original threesome were “… being assisted by Manny but his available time is shared between the group and looking after his baby”, so I assume that this ‘Manny’ is Emanuel Shoniwa.
- It is the CD version of “Uh! Tears Baby (A Trash Icon)” that is the ultimate Win rarity, being as rare as rocking-horse plop. Good luck-ski in tracking one down! They rarely come up on Ebay and go for insane money – in late 2004 one went for £75. In July 2005, one reached the £165 barrier and another straight after made £155!
- Is this album actually called “Uh! Tears Baby (A Trash Icon)”? The spine of the LP says that it is, but from the front cover the impression is given that it is “…Uh! Tears Baby”, with a faint grey circular stamp reading “…A Trash Icon” sitting behind the iconoclastic photographic pictures. Searching the web reveals the majority of mentions being the “Uh! Tears Baby” variant. The spine of the cassette could give the impression that band could be called Win (A Trash Icon), and the actual CD dispels all myths : Uh! Tears Baby (A Trash Icon).
- Ex-Fire Engine Murray Slade, Postcard Records head honcho Alan Horne, and Pop : Aural label’s grand fromage Bob Last all get a mention in the ‘Thanks to…’ on the back sleeve credits.
- I can’t help but think that a less impenetrable title might have aided the sales of the album. Here’s Davey on the origins of the moniker : “when we were programming the album, we found a function called ‘a trash icon’. It’s computer jargon for a dumping machine, it bins anything that you don’t want. It’s got all the connotations of disposability, and it’s got the religious metaphors, which we dig. When we found it, I just sat back and “Uh! Tears baby””.
- The version of “Un-American Broadcasting” varies between the three formats – on the LP, it is listed as simply “Un-American Broadcasting”, whereas on the cassette and CD the track is a longer one and is listed as “Un-American Broadcasting (Extended)”, which has an extra prechorus instrumental section about halfway through the song. Both the LP and cassette / CD versions have been rerecorded and are much more polished than the various vinyl single versions. Note how the minor spelling change between the 3 format’s “Un-American Broadcasting” and the earlier singles “Unamerican Broadcasting”. And on a final, pedantic note, the cassette insert has the track as “Un-American Broadcasting (Ext)”
- The actual cassette has all the tracks printed on it, including the two bonus tracks, but neither they nor “Un-American Broadcasting (Extended)” have their mix variants printed in brackets.
- Rumanian violin virtuoso and composer Alexander Balenescu plays on this album. The leader of the Balenescu Quartet, he has worked with artists as diverse as David Byrne, Elvis Costello, Pet Shop Boys, Michael Nyman, Spiritulised, Kate Bush, Kraftwerk, and To Rococo Rot.
- Certain copies of the vinyl LP came with a one-sided A1-sized poster, of the album cover. There is also a circular sticker which reads : LONLP 31 includes FREE Poster
- The album entered the national charts on April 25th 1987, straight in at number 51, and stayed on the chart for a single week.
- Asked why the album did not sell as well as been expected, Davey answered : “I don’t know. We were very optimistic at the time. You always feel optimistic at the start of something. It’s only when you look back that you realise that you were never close to making it, and you were unlikely to get close. At London (Records), we came in through the back door – we were on a subsidiary label that folded and, as they already had us, they decided to keep us. But there was never loads of enthusiasm, the enthusiasm they’d have had if they’d specifically gone out to sign us up”.
- Check out these JPEGs of adverts on Ebay in 01/06 of an LP copy of this album. Note how the LP sleeves have a bluey background colour compared to the normal white one. I’ve seen one other such example of a blue-coloured sleeve before on Ebay, which at the time I put down to some kind of erroneous filter coming into play when the digital still was first taken. There’s no apparent signs of Photoshop trickery – check out also how the posters are a clear white in hue, negating the same problem as with the other example seen. No idea what happened here – maybe there was a printing error with the sleeves.
- DH on the album’s songs : “There’s no point sitting down and saying ‘This song is about ’this and nothing else, and that one is about that and nothing else’. There’s a general anti-totalitarian mood, but, hopefully, the real strength comes from the images within the context of the songs, not from preaching in interviews”.
Reviews for “Uh! Tears Baby (A Trash Icon)” :
Record Mirror – “If there’s one thing more annoying than smart arse popsters who make bad dance records, it’s smart arse popsters who get it right. Win are just such an outfit, the new technology sweeping ‘boring old guitars’ into the wilderness and David/Davey Henderson’s 10 variations on a single classic pop hook booming out of every chorus. Win haven’t really progressed much since “UnAmerican Broadcasting” or “You’ve Got The Power”, and at times the sense of musical déjà vu is almost overpowering. Still, they are taking up where the likes of Heaven 17’s “Fascist Groove Thing” left off, with the addition of a distinctive secondhand American flavour as opposed to, say, Matt Johnson’s English blues. Win are far closer to being chart fodder than they’d care to admit, though I’m sure that secretly they’d kill for a top 10 hit. “Hollywood Baby Two” is pure Buggles meets “All The Young Dudes”. While Davey Henderson and chums pretend they’re not going to play the pop game, they’ll remain a classy, well kept secret. Get them on the “Saturday Superstore” pop panel, however, and the world could be their winkle within days”. 4 out of 5.
…… a good review, and sadly the line that “…they’ll remain a classy, well kept secret” was all too prescient. Good shout on the similarity of the misnamed “Hollywood Baby Two” to the Bowie-penned “All The Young Dudes”.
Melody Maker - voted by the writers as the 29th best album of 1987.
“Freaky Trigger”
Format :LP / Cassette / CD
Label :Virgin
Serial No :V 2571 / TCV 2571 / CDV 2571
Date Of Release :March 1989
Track Listing :
1. What’ll You Do Til’ Sunday Baby
2. Taboo
3. Love Units
4. Rainbow
5. Truckee River
6. How Do You Do
7. What’s Love If You Can Kill For Chocolate
8. Mind the Gravy
9. Dusty Heartfelt
10. We Could Cover Up The ‘C’
11. Love Units (12” Mix) – CD only
12. What’s Love If You Can Kill For Chocolate (12” Mix) – CD only
Info :
- Produced by Zeus B. Held; mixed by Stephen Chase and Bryan “Chuck” New; engineered by Stephen Chase; tape operator-ed by Andy Bradfield.
- Just who was the Hellenically-monikered Zeus B. Held that produced this album? In the sleevenotes to ‘Modern Art’, a best-of by ex-Ultravox vocalist John Foxx, the writer (Record Collector’s Daryl Easlea) refers to Foxx “… running with some very ubiquitous studio hands of this period …(including) Fashion’s Zeus B. Held”. Zeus applied his talents to some B-sides to Foxx’s singles off his 2nd album ‘The Garden’, as well as some (or possibly all) of the songs on the following two albums ‘The Golden Section’ and ‘In Mysterious Ways’. …… here we go : Zeus (real name Bernd Held, born 24/8/50) was a keyboardist with various German outfits, and has knocked out at least one solo album. He has produced albums by Fashion (‘Fabrique’) and Spear Of Destiny, and done remixes for the likes of Gary Numan, Dead Or Alive, Erasure, Simple Minds, and The Fall (on “Hit The North”).
- The CD version of “Freaky Trigger” is difficult to track down (though not the recreational impossibility that the acquisition of the first album on CD is), but well worth it because of the excellent CD-only bonus track “What’s Love If You Can Kill For Chocolate (12” Mix)” which is not available on any other format.
- If you use an iPod then you will be pleased to hear that some good soul has added the song titles to the Gracenote CDDB database so you don’t have to type them in!
- Some (or possibly all) copies of the vinyl came with a free poster – see the Binding Love Spells section below for more info.
- Pedal guitar genius BJ Cole plies his trade on the last track “We Could Cover Up The ‘C’” and “What’s Love If You Can Kill For Chocolate”. Though playing an ostensibly country and western instrument, in recent years he has mainly cooperated with dance artists such as Groove Armada, Alabama 3, Billy Ray Martin, and Luke Vibert.
- The lyrics for the quixotically-entitled “We Could Cover Up The ‘C’” show the ‘C’ to actually mean ‘sea’, a conceit Davey Henderson used on a Nectarine No.9 album called ‘’A Sea With Three Stars” with its infamous C*** cover.
- As with the first album, the album title has more than one interpretation. The front of the album spells the title with some randomised block capitals, thus : “fReaKY TrIGgeR”, though elsewhere on the sleeves and CD / vinyl / cassette it is spelt conventionally : “Freaky Trigger”. David Bowie did something similar with his 1995 album “Earthling” – also known as “EAR THL I NG” – and his previous outing “Outside” had a second, more impenetrable title a la “Uh! Tears Baby (A Trash Icon)”, namely : “No.1 Outside : a gothic hyper-cycle”. Good old ‘Bromley Dave’ – always pushing that envelope!
- Davey Henderson on “What’s Love If You Can Kill For Chocolate” : “I saw that on a T-shirt in New York City. I thought ‘that sums it all up, baby’. You’re standing in New York, somewhere you thought you’d never see in your whole life and you see this T-shirt which says ‘I’d Kill For Chocolate’. Well, Christ, I’m here, I’ve landed. I’d kill for chocolate! Isn’t that fantastic? Doesn’t that say a lot to you? ………… It means something when you put it in the context of a song and you put ‘What’s love?’ before it. It’s an extension of ‘Un-American Broadcasting’ and the ‘civilised savage’ idea, which was taken from a Mary Quant advert. When you put that sort of thing in the context of a song, it sounds dynamically profound and colourful and buzzing all over the place. To me, it’s brilliant. But remember, we just ripped it off”. In answer to a point that chocolate triggers the same chemical reactions in the brain as being in love, Davey says : “There’s all those connotations. Happy accidents always happen and then you know you’re in touch with what’s going on – the scheme of things, as people like to call it, Radio Love God. But chocolate’s chocolate. Especially when you get a little Orson Welles speech with it : cuckoo clocks and chocolate” – referring there to the speech by Welles given in the film The Third Man, about what 500 years of brotherly love in Switzerland had ever produced.
- … and here’s an interesting quote from DH, made in May ’87, concerning this ‘chocolate’ influence, made at a time before the creation of “Freaky Trigger” : “What we really obsessed with at the moment is this slogan we say in America, “I’d kill for chocolate”. Just think, killing for chocolate, that’s another one to go on the tee-shirt. Do you know that, when you eat chocolate, it gives off the same drug in your brain that you get when you’re in love? We’re very heavily into chocolate at the moment , so I’m sure most of it will be cropping up on our next record”.
- “Mind The Gravy” is about one Albino Luciani who was made Pope John Paul I and who planned radical plans about the church’s attitude towards contraception and a redistribution of the wealth of the Catholic church. Thirty-three days after his ascendancy, he died in mysterious circumstances. Here’s Henderson speaking on this subject : “I’ve got my opinions. Like John Paul I and the Poor Church. Here was a Pope who wanted to get rid of all the Vatican’s wealth and give it to the poor then, before you know it, he’s been bumped off. It’s a frightening world we live in when people with ideals like that are seen as being dangerous enough to kill”. In another interview, the lead singer spoke of the origin of one of the song’s lines, spotted on a condom machine in their local pub! “They were the best condoms ever. There was a great slogan on the machine and that’s where we got the words to the song – ‘there’s a range of plastic that prevents the pit-a-pit-a-pat and the wedding ring’”.
- “Truckee River” is another track that deals with conspiracy theories. Truckee River was the setting for the film River Of No Return, which featured Robert Mitchum and Marilyn Monroe. Research revealed that Truckee River was a coded cry for help which Marilyn would send to Charlie Chaplin Jr (Charlie’s son) - he had once said to Marilyn, “Any time you need help, just phone me up and say “Truckee”, and I’ll know what you mean”. This relationship was because some time beforehand, Monroe had had an affair with Chaplain Jr, during which she became pregnant. The pregnancy was aborted but Monroe and Chaplain remained friends – he received some of her last, desperate calls before her mystery-surrounded death. Her plight is woven into “Truckee River” : “After all, it’s just a call, from a second-rate degenerate Barbie Doll, with a passion for regurgitating Seconal … come and join me, darling, in a cry for help”. Monroe also famously had links to the Kennedys, but they were to crop up in another Win song, that of “Dusty Heartfelt”. Davey : “Aye, they should have been in “Truckee River” but I put them in “Dusty” instead. I just use the Kennedys for scale, an icon – as a device to say how big one’s love was for whoever. There’s a wee dig there as well”.
- Questioned whether “Truckee River” was also about his own loneliness, Henderson revealed, “it’s not personal loneliness, but the loneliness of the whole planet. It’s quite a desperate song. I don’t like it too much. But sometime we feel disturbed and we write these things down, and they’re worth communicating, I think”. In answer to whether he sung the song against his will, Davey said, “Sort of. We all have a dark side. The song disturbs me, but I sing it because I wasn’t the only one who wrote it, so I don’t have the only say in whether we do it on stage”.
- Davey on “How Do You Do” : “”How do You Do” is about Shangri-La. It’s about heaven, beauty, and death and it shows. There’s a bit of Prince in it – I mean it does mention Sheila E, who’s our goddess – but it certainly couldn’t be him”. Russel on the same track : “It’s also about finding new sounds on a keyboard and that kind of thing makes you think of Prince”.
- An interesting quote from the Freaky Trigger forums from 2001 concerning Stuart Maconie's review in the NME of the second album : "Stuart Maconie once went on about how great Win's 'Freaky Trigger' and I believe the NME did a football special in the early 90s in which some indie-inclined footballer (not Pat Nevin) was interviewed and told Maconie that he bought 'Freaky Trigger' on the strength of his review. I always meant to do the same, but other people have subsequently warned me that it is quite dreadful so I am now inclined to stand up to the double-head Ewing-Maconie monster and die having never heard the thing". Elsewhere on the site it also said : "Freaky Trigger got a review from Stuart Maconie, he gave it 0 and 10 (sort of)". As of February 2008, you can find a scan of this article in the Trigger Happy section - many thanks to Alex Kerr for this scan!
Reviews for “Freaky Trigger” :
NME – “Freaky Trigger is a pop artifact of surpassing brilliance … a tale of theft, madness, and genius”. 10 out of 10. It made 28th in the NME’s 1989 end of year critic list.
Offbeat – “When the world takes stock of its treasured record collection … There’s certain to be a WIN album. And this is the one”.
Record Mirror (i) – “If you’ve ever wanted to know what’s been going on in pop music for the last twenty years, step this way … a perfect record”. 5 out of 5.
Record Mirror (ii) – “… an album that’s certain to flummox all spectators of the game of pop – it’s just too brash, too bright, too modern”.
Sounds – “Win’s second album works on every level intended and a few others besides … a work of breathtaking gloss and cheek”. 4 and a half stars.
Melody Maker (i) – “(“Freaky Trigger”) … sees Win following the path of most resistance, growing slicker and glossier even as the rest of “credible music” drifts further away from the pure-pop fulcrum. The songs on the LP are as accessible as ad jingles – a Win song has been used as a jingle, to Davey’s pride – a direction that’s as radical, in it’s own way, as anything you’ll read about in this paper. If Davey were going to be a complete pop tart, he’d go for the classic SAW lyric, too, but he hasn’t reached that level of primal release, so we still hear a Win song and ask : “What’s he on about? Marilyn and the Pope? What?””
Melody Maker (ii) – “So, a song about Dusty Springfield. How timely. But Davey Henderson is perhaps the only one of her supplicants to have divined the Dusty beneath the glam and mascara and written a song about her blighted, gothic allure. The song, “Dusty Heartfelt” is built upon a chorus that’s pure pop meringue, and it’s quite perfect. And therein lies Win’s problem. On paper the Win precis – weird unpoppy lyrics plus commercial poppifunk melodies that’d make the collective SAW blood pressure soar in teeth-gnashing envy – looks unassailably brilliant. Intelligent pop, pop for people who dig tunefulness but have a complex about buying “lowbrow” things like Robin Beck. “Freaky Trigger” is full of catchy, instantly bubblegum tunes and disjointed couplets about Marilyn M and drugs (“Truckee River”), seafood (the metaphorically-smutty “How Do You Do”) and God knows what else (mostly, it’s impossible to infer what Henderson is on about). As I said, conceptually it’s masterful; on vinyl though, it’s an illustration of the reason SAW do so well and “alternative” popsters like Win rarely get a sniff of “Tip Of The Pops”. Davey Henderson is so bright and articulate and cynical that he’s more or less classed himself out of his market. He sounds, in fact, as though he’d almost be happier doing abstract, egghead stuff with some like David Byrne, except that, to his surprise he’s got this leftfield talent for writing great pop melodies, and a genuine love of kitsch. We, the audience, sense that Henderson is a lot smarter than we are. We don’t get this uncomfortable sensation when listening to Kylie, hence Win’s and Kylie’s respective positions in the pop-success scheme of things. But it’s hardly Davey’s fault that we’re too dim to appreciate him. This is a stunningly accomplished record on every level, and it’s yours to revel in now”.
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