- Introduction
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- The Bollweevils story
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- A Gigging
Band
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- The Record
Deal
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- It starts to go
slightly wrong
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- It goes very, very
wrong
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- Aftermath
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- ***
- Press
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- Recordings
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- ***
- Downloads
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- Shape Up and Dance with The
Bollweevils, cassette, 1986
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- Formation
- The
Bollweevils were formed in the United Kingdom in
November 1985 when Mark Johnson and Ray Russell met at
Sheffield University. The two came from rather different
musical backgrounds: Mark (from Norwich) was a devotee of
the new American bands of the time like REM and Husker
Du, and Ray (from Sussex) was previously a member of a
fey art band The Trug Concept, and a fan of
Toyah.
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- They
started writing and recording songs on a four-track tape
recorder and the results of their first year together
were offered up on the mercifully rare C-60 cassette,
Shape Up and Dance with The
Bollweevils. Crossing many genres and showing the
influence of various contemporary indie bands, a few
songs emerged from the low-fi pandemonium to gain notice,
including "Mind in Mindless Movie" (on the first properly
recorded Bollweevils demo a few years later) and
"Oracle of the Dead" (which became a live
favourite.)
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- The
song-writing matured in their second year together,
spurred-on in part by having airplay for their tapes on
BBC Radio Sheffield's The Hard
Stuff. A new song, "Talk to Me", in a very
rough mix, impressed locally and thought was given to
turning bedroom song-writing into a live band. Ray,
however, had only ever been the lyricist and was unable
to sing in tune or master either rhythm or bass
guitar.
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- The
song-writing was going well, though: "Yesterday's
Tomorrow", "Tuesday", "It Cheers Me Considerably" and
other songs were attracting the attention of various
people in the local music scene.
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- Next page: A
Gigging Band
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