THE MOD FUN (HANGIN AROUND SINGLE)

This is my favorite record from the Mod Fun, It's a solid 60's influenced garage/psych/pop single. The Mod Fun started playing music together as childhood friends in early 1979, and initially called their band Rage. They counted a lot of FM radio rock and early punk among their influences, before their approach to music was revitalized when they discovered The Jam in 1982. Mod Fun wrote and recorded their first original songs in 1982-83 and released them on cassette only. Initially, there was a 4-track recording of four songs entitled "If You Are New" and later, a collection called Release For The Mates. The first collection "If You Are New" was produced by Steve Peer of the New York/New Jersey act TV Toy. During this time, Mod Fun also started performing frequently in the New York/New Jersey area. In fact they played their first club date on January 12, 1983 at the infamous "DIRT" club in Bloomfield, New Jersey. During the band's introduction that night, the club's owner, Johnny Dirt, made it a point to tell the crowd that the band members were only 15 years old.
In 1984 they released their first single, "I Am With You" b/w "Happy Feeling" on their own label, New Records. Playing frequently at such New York City clubs as CBGB, The Dive and R.T. Firefly, Mod Fun signed a record deal with NYC's Midnight Records. They released their first album, 90 Wardour Street in 1985. Their live shows were high energy (sometimes reckless) spectacles, which have been said to have influenced many people who saw them to start bands of their own.
On the strength of their first releases, Mod Fun set out on their first United States tour in spring 1985, playing concerts from New York City to Los Angeles to San Francisco. With the bulk of their performances taking place in California, the band carved a niche in the Paisley Underground scene popularized by bands such as The Bangles and The Three O'Clock. After returning from the tour, the band had a falling out with Midnight Records and released a three-song EP on their own Makin' Tyme label entitled "Hangin' Round". Shortly after the release of "Hangin' Round" they signed with New York City's Cryptovision Records. They recorded material for a single (Mary Goes 'Round b/w Grounded) and a second album, Dorothy's Dream.
In spring 1986, Mod Fun (who had taken to referring to themselves as The Mod Fun) set out for their second US tour, which brought them to many more cities than their previous tour. It was during that second tour that Dorothy's Dream was released. After returning from the second tour, Mod Fun played in the local area, including at a sold-out show at Maxwell's in Hoboken, New Jersey. They were featured in many local, national and international articles, and were in talks with local musicians/producers such as Richard Barone of The Bongos and Peter Zaremba of The Fleshtones about producing their next recordings. It has been said that Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth and Jello Biafra of Dead Kennedys were fans, and were interested in working with them.
In spring 1987, Mod Fun set out on a European tour that brought them to such places as Bern, Switzerland; Vienna, Austria; Rimini, Florence and San Marino, Italy and Hamburg and Berlin, Germany. Tensions caused the band to break up after their final show in Berlin. Soon thereafter, Mick and Bobby formed Crocodile Shop.
In 1995, Get Hip Records released a retrospective of most of the band's recorded output (omitting the Midnight Records recordings because of legal issues), called Past Forward. In 2004, Get Hip reissued the CD, and Mod Fun played a reunion show at The Saint in Asbury Park, New Jersey. This inspired Mod Fun to continue on where they left off. Since then, Mod Fun has played extensively in the New York/New Jersey area, as well as Philadelphia, Nashville, Baltimore and Chicago.
In 2007 the band released a new CD on their Makin' Tyme label called Now...and Again. A double-length CD with ten new original songs and ten re-recorded classics from their 1980s catalog, it also includes a live version of "I Believe" recorded at their July 2006 show at CBGB. As of 2009, Mod Fun was writing new material and playing extensively in the New York City area.
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REFERENCES - WIKIPEDIA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mod_Fun
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MAKING TYME RECORDS 1986
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1. I BELIEVE
2. YOU'VE BEEN HANGIN ROUND
3. ACTION TYME
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THE NEON HEARTS (REGULATIONS SINGLE)

Honestly,there's not much I can add to the legend of this record. You know how great it is by now I'm sure. A true punk classic!! "Enjoy" Just out of curiosity ?? The labels on my copy are switched, were they all this way?? The NEON HEARTS were formed in the spring of 1977 by saxophonist Steve Heart who had left SUBURBAN STUDS, following musical differences (the band feeling a saxophone player inappropriate in a punk band) and returned to Wolverhampton to form a new band. He’d already written several songs and soon began recruiting members. First recruit was his cousin, a bass player called Paul Raven. Then came drummer Keith Alien, another local musician and friend of Paul’s who was asked to join after Steve heard tapes of him playing.A guitarist was required. Keith knew someone, so dispensing with the idea of advertising, an audition was arranged in the attic bedroom of Keith’s house in Lower Street, Tettenhall. The guitarist was Martin Ratcliffe (later known as The Inferior Member’ on the bands first single). He was shown the songs and his playing fitted them perfectly.At the time, Keith was working in a town centre shop called Langdon’s Electric Music. His boss, Pete Langdon, allowed the band to rehearse in the empty flat above the shop. From then on an intensive rehearsal schedule was put into force with the band rehearsing for 3 hours every night, followed by a pint at the pub. After a few months rehearsing, the band had a considerable amount of material and entered Ginger studios to record the best of them. The result was the now legendary double A-side 'Regulations' and 'Venus eccentric', released in December 1977 on their own Neon hearts label. Packaged in an outrageous oversized 8" cover, a copy will now set you back £60.
The band established their own punk venue at the lord Raglan in Wolverhampton and gigged furiously nationwide, building a substantial following and reaching the attention of many labels.
Despite various options, NEON HEARTS made the wrong decision and signed to Satril. Immediatly things started to go wrong as the label tried to manipulate the band by rewriting their lyrics, allowing them no say in the production of the records and releasing singles without their consent.
Satril released two singles 'Answers' and 'Popular music'. Line-up changes followed and by the time the album - also titled 'Popular music' - was released in April 1979, the band dispirited, had already split.
There was a brief reformation before Tony joined Fashion, Paul raven joined Killing joke and later Prong and Steve formed 21c. Keith Allen and Martin Ratcliffe formed The Circles in 1979

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REFERENCES - THE MOD POP PUNK ARCHIVES http://punkmodpop.free.fr/neonhearts_pic.htm LAST.FM http://www.last.fm/music/Neon+Hearts

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NEON HEARTS RECORDS 1977

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1. REGULATIONS

2. VENUS ECCENTRIC

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NEW BOMB TURKS (SO COOL SO CLEAN SO SPARKLING CLEAR SINGLE)

With a distinct sound all their own The New Bomb Turks, from Columbus, Ohio have cranked out a ton of great reved up Punk & roll records over the years. I think this is their first record, but I'm not sure. The original was released on Datapanik Records in 1992. I have the Dog Meat version from 1994. They're one of the many bands I wish I could have seen live, I'll bet they really rip. It seems as though there less active but still around, so maybe I will one day. The founding members are Jim Weber, Eric Davidson, Bill Randt, and Matt Reber. Sam Brown replaced Bill Randt on drums in 1999. Guitarist Jim Weber, is now a 10th and 11th grade English teacher at Hilliard Davidson High School. If Jim happens to see this post I hope he doesn't correct all of my run on sentence's.
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REFERENCES - WIKIPEDIA - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Bomb_Turks GRUNNEN ROCKS http://www.grunnenrocks.nl/bands/n/newbombt.htm
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DOG MEAT RECORDS 1994
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1. CRYIN' INTO THE BEER OF A DRUNK MAN
2. JUST HEAD
3. LET'S DRESS UP THE NAKED TRUTH
4. DO THE POP
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THE VILETONES (SCREAMIN FIST SINGLE)

Excellent first single from The Viletones. I always liked the picture sleeve too. If your leafin through 7"s in 1977 and you come across this, you know it's headin to the counter with you. It screams punk!!! If your into these guys I recommend checking out Viletone.com. It's a cool site. The Viletones were from Toronto, led by Steven Leckie, a.k.a. "Nazi Dog" or "Dog" on vocals. Other members from the original line-up were Freddie Pompeii, (some sources list him as 'Frederick DePasquale') on guitar/vocals; Chris Paputts, a.k.a. "Chris Hate" on bass guitar/vocals and Mike Anderson, a.k.a. "Motor X" on the drums/vocals. They were active during the late 1970s and early 1980s.
For a while, They were quite infamous in punk circles. Leckie himself was infamous for cutting himself up on stage, à la Iggy Pop. Footage of such can be found at the CBC Archives. They appeared in magazines all over the world.
From July 7-10, 1977 the group joined The Diodes and Teenage Head at famed New York punk club CBGB at a showcase featuring "three outrageous punk bands from Toronto, Canada". Also that year, The Viletones released their first single, "Screamin (sic) Fist" b/w "Possibilities" and "Rebel" on their own Vile Records.
In 1978, they released Look Back In Anger, which featured the songs "Don't You Lie" and "Dirty Feeling", b/w "Back Door To Hell", "Swastika Girl" and "Danger Boy". The same year Pompeii, Hate and X abrubtly left The Viletones. The now former Viletones joined up with ex-Diode John Hamilton in The Secrets.
In 1983, a reunited Viletones released their first full-length album, Saturday Night/Sunday Morning, recorded live at Larry's Hideaway in Toronto. Later that decade, they released a U.S.-only release, Live At Max's. In 1994, a record label, Other Peoples Music, released a retrospective, A Taste Of Honey. In 1998, Leckie released the What It Feels Like To Kill album, which featured among its 18 songs the 1995 Nailed EP, under the Viletones name. He currently runs an art gallery in Toronto called Fleurs Du Mal and made a brief appearance in the film, American Psycho.
A reference to their song, "Screamin Fist", turned up in the pages of Neuromancer, a novel by William Gibson.
The Viletones 2007 line-up consists of Steven Leckie (vocals), Steve Scarlet/The Sinisters/Drunkula (guitar) and Jeff Zurba (drums.)
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REFERENCES - WIKIPEDIA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Viletones VILETONE.COM http://www.viletone.com/
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VILE RECORDS MEGA-MEDIA ARTISTS 1977
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1. SCREAMIN FIST
2. POSSIBILITIES
3. REBEL
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V2 (SPEED FREAK SINGLE)

This is the first offering from V2, a classic for sure. I borrowed this info from the excellent Bored teenagers site. Everything that has to do with Detour is usually first rate. V2, formed in December 1976 by Standely, who’d just left the RAF, and Wilks, the latter having attended the second Sex Pistols’ Lesser Free Trade Hall show, supported by the Dogs and Buzzcocks, in 1976. Both were veterans of Pips nightclub, where they’d bonded in the dedicated Bowie/Roxy room. They persuaded Stan to pick up the bass due to the fact that he was a fellow Bowie fan and had “good hair”. Ex-Panik and Warsaw drummer Steve Brotherdale met them on a bus, after asking him for directions to the Electric Circus, before inviting him to join the band after they got chatting.
They subsequently picked up supports to Slaughter, with whom Stan had struck up a long-standing friendship. Their second ever show was at a Dogs concert at the Middleton Hall, alongside Fast Breeder, featuring future members of the Durutti Column. V2 would also support Slaughter at the Marquee when they ventured to London – although by the time of the Dogs’ homecoming gig at the Wythenshawe Forum in 1978, tensions between the two bands had emerged – encouraged on the night by the fact that visiting London band the Plague had their equipment ‘misplaced’ by the headliners and V2 got the blame. Their debut single, ‘Speedfreak’ (“It was more of a double a-side with ‘Nothing To Do’, which was really popular live,” reckons Brotherdale) was the first song Standely ever wrote. It was released at the tail end of 1977 and immediately sold out of three separate pressings, despite a dismissive review from Tony Parsons in the NME, although pretty much everyone else seemed to like it. The distinctive wailing on the single, incidentally, came from “a real World War II siren”.
There was a recording hiatus until the end of 1978, by which time Brotherdale had convinced the others to bring his former Panik colleague Ian Nance on lead guitar. “They needed a proper lead guitarist,” he reckons, “and Nance was a great guitarist”. By now they were a capable live attraction. There was some support in the media too, not least from the fickle pen of Paul Morley, writing in the NME in June 1978: “V2 think about presentation. Their music is stripped, effective, trebly punk – anachronistic if you will. They vigorously project this with garish musical homage to the ironical nursery surrealism of Alice Cooper, and the non stop colour barrage of the Damned. Any irony is perhaps destroyed by the apparent seriousness of their intentions, but their show is very flash, and very imposing. Lots of smoke, lights, make-up, glam(punk)rock, potentially extremely popular.”
The combination of glam and punk didn’t please all the purists, but it was an honest derivation of both Slaughter and V2’s influences, and in many ways helped Manchester punk a more varied ‘sound’ than its London counterpart. As Mick Middles recalled in From Joy Division to New Order, “The bands adhered to no universal dress code. On the contrary, the genres were disparate and often clashed quite strikingly. One remembers Gorton glam rockers V2, for instance, slumped menacingly in one corner, clad in figure-hugging flame-red or marine-blue plastic, bleached hair and make-up, while at the next table sat the darkly-clad Bohemian jazz outfit, Ludus, whose inspiring and beautiful singer, Linder, would at all times be clad head to toe in regulation black.”
The 12-inch ‘Man In The Box’ followed for TJM Records, like ‘Speed Freak’ recorded at Arrow’s Studios on 25 October 1978, reaching the top of the alternative charts and sold 8,000 copies in three months. Their stage show was something to behold, even for the heady times. Flour would be thrown on audiences during encores, there were sporadic outbreaks of violence, a mock onstage electrocution (in order to diffuse said fights), while at one show in some northern backwater, Steve Brotherdale recalls the purpose-made floor collapsing and Stan falling halfway through, leaving only his shoulders and head visible, and his leg badly gashed. Only for a girl in the audience to leap on the stage, take a run at him and kick him square in the mouth. This was done because “she liked him”.
Despite a strong live following, including many women, who occasionally proffered chocolates at gigs as well as assaulting them physically, the group fell apart and drifted in various directions, calling a close on operations in 1980. The core of the group became the Earwigs with the addition of Toby Tolman of the Nosebleeds on drums and guitarist turned bass player Hugh O’Boyle of Victim. By a bizarre twist, V2’s former drummer Steve Brotherdale became their singer. “They asked Dave Wilks of V2 to sing,” Brotherdale told me, “but his voice didn’t fit. I was having a pint with Mark and he asked me to listen. Mark was singing and I just said let me have a go, I was only joking, and we did one of their songs, ‘Mr Greed’. We did that, and they wanted my voice. It was kind of a psychedelic thing. We played with Mood Six and the [WEA compilation album] ‘ A Splash Of Colour’ bands at Gossips in London, where I also drummed because our drummer had hepatitis, despite having a broken leg myself.” After the Earwigs, Ian Nance returned as lead vocalist, alongside Toby on drums, and they recorded an unreleased album, Enter The Reptile House, that never came out (from which some of the Overground V2 material is drawn). Brotherdale also recently unearthed further unreleased Earwigs recordings in his shed in 2002, which have now been cleaned up ready for release by Tosh Ryan.
V2 reformed first in 1985, the ‘Man In The Box’ line-up reappearing at the Boardwalk. “We didn’t think anyone would turn up, but it was packed,” Brotherdale recalls. And again in 1996 after the aforementioned Overground Records offered to release a compilation of the band’s back pages. That year they returned to the stage at the Holidays In The Sun punk festival at Blackpool’s Winter Gardens. However, during rehearsals Wilks was taken ill, and sadly died a months later, while Phil Pope stepped in to anchor the vocals. They also played a second set on the Sunday featuring guitarist Eddie Mooney, an old friend of Standely’s and another former veteran of TJM. Standely concurrently joined the reformed Drones on bass in 1997. When drummer Gavin Johns moved to Finland the following year, in stepped Chris Connelly, as V2 issued their first single in 19 years on the Data label (featuring a song that was originally scheduled to have been their second single for TJM). When Pope left to concentrate on his Doors tribute band, the Doorz, Mooney became the group’s new vocalist in 2001. Standely is also active in Pleasuredome.
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REFERENCES - BORED TEENAGERS http://www.boredteenagers.co.uk/V2.htm
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BENT RECORDS 1978
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1. SPEED FREAK
2. NOTHING TO DO
3. THAT'S IT
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THE WOGGLES (WAILIN WITH THE WOGGLES ! 10" EP)

I got to see these guys live a few times. They're a great live band, and very unpretentious nice guys. Drawing their inspiration from the raw nostalgia of '60s rock, the Woggles added their own hybrid of surf, R&B, rockabilly, and blues upon their 1987 formation. Based out of Athens, GA, the band eventually released a handful of EP's on Zontar, Estrus, and Lance Rock Records between 1990 through 1993, Estrus Records packaged the bands first full-length, Teen Dance Party, in 1993. Following the Zontar Sessions album a year later on Estrus, Telstar Records put out the Woggles third full-length, Get Tough!, in 1997, amongst another batch of 7"s in between. The mini-album Wailin' with the Woggles came out on One Louder Records the following year.
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REFERENCES - ALL MUSIC http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11:aifwxq9hld0e OFFICIAL SITE http://www.thewoggles.com/html/news.html MYSPACE http://www.myspace.com/thewoggles.
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ONE LOUDER RECORDS 1997
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