Good evening pop pickers and welcome to the first blog entry in an occasional series about records that brought me great joy at various times in my life.
Doing some research on this record led me to find something useful on MySpace (hard to believe I know, but true nonetheless).
Today's record is The Shapes EP, released on Sofa Records in 1979. This was 7" of vinyl delight featuring four tracks, my favourite tracks being "Wots For Lunch Mum (Not Beans Again)" and "Batman In The Launderette". Delightfully daft, with crappy vocals over shambolic accompaniment, I heard it on the John Peel Show and loved it immediately.
I used to drive my friends mad playing this record. They couldn't see the attraction, poor misguided fools...
The band were fronted by the man with one of the best ever punk names, Seymour Bybuss and also featured Brian Helicopter on bass. Due in large part to Peel's patronage the EP make it to number two in the indie singles chart, however the group were unable to follow up this 'success' and folded soon after. The manner of their passing has been described hilariously as "The group ended their career on-stage soon after as ridiculously as they began. At the start of their gig at London's Marquee, Bybuss attempted to make a grand entrance by leaping onto the stage. Unfortunately, he misjudged his jump and landed smack in the middle of a stunned audience, who immediately crowd-surfed him out of the band room and onto Wardour Street. From there, he just kept on going and that was the end of the show, and the Shapes themselves, or so the story goes."
Thanks to Mr Helicopter's, rather sparse, MySpace site today's web surfers can once again frug along to the pure pop noise that is "Batman In The Launderette". Go on, treat yourself.
Link : The Shapes on MySpace
2 comments:
The EP was great, but the Peel session was even better - oh, too hear it again...
Who knows Dave, it might be out there somewhere...
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