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Mr Murray hitches up with Mark
"Marky" Millin, ex of the "jazz"/big band/covers
outfit we quit at the time of "Return to Malibu".
The Hamptons are, in the end, power pop -
some of the catchiest stuff, even to this day, appears on "Ba Ba Ba
Ba Ba". Singing inanities during choruses is, fortunately or
unfortunately, one of the easiest ways of attracting the attention of
human beings and making things stick in their heads - so Ba Ba, Na Na,
La La - that's what it was. Ask your kids...
This album was entirely
home-produced - OK, don’t say it shows -
one day we'll re-mix this seminal work!
However, a good song will
always shine through and there is some good stuff on this album. It also
marked the appearance on bass of Kevin Duncan, who also contributed a
bit on the songwriting front (and in fact was a latter day bass player
in the "jazz etc" band).
This album was "promoted" by
some Scottish dude in Surrey. The music bizz is full of people who will take a bit of money off you and claim to be
able to make you rich and famous - young innocents beware! We had a
giggle listening to all his grandiose schemes about
"scale-outs" with W H Smith and the like! Needless to say, he
achieved nothing, other than, it seems, shovelling the spare copies of
the album around such that they later, curiously, appeared in such
august places as Stratford Market where a punter once bought one and
called the "Hamptons hotline" (printed on the reverse of the
album) several times for more!
By this stage, we'd picked up a
forty-odd year old woman stalker from Welwyn Garden City who seemed to
be a Neil Diamond fan and got confused! She did, however send in a
twelve page account of the day she went to a Neil Diamond concert which
began "Wake up Claude, said dad - it's the big day" (shiver…)
- she also had a little eight year old friend called Aiden…. (Jesus)…..
Other features of 1995 included
scouting around for an additional guitar player to reel off a few of the
solos on this album. We alighted on "the big Swede" - one Mike
Johannesen. He claimed to be able to play in "many styles",
"no worries" - but it always seemed to amount to a load of
long blond-haired Norse metal widdling - his fingers sure moved fast…
(he never contributed a note to a CD, but was the scrota de chien
live). Like most Swedes he probably bought a second home
by the lakes and drank himself to death in Winter. Back to
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