reck'n'roll: July 2022

Gday, how ya going, it's been a minute or two hasn't it

SO, one day I walked into Utopia records in Martin Place in good ole Sydney town

and found, to my soon to be delight, Spiders first album, and from

then its fair to say I was hooked

Spider formed in 1976, consisted of four young men from Wallasey, including two brothers, none of whom had played in bands before.

After releasing "Children of the Street" on the Alien Record Label, Spider , not mucking around , were playing, on average 20 dates a month, which included a support slot on the Uriah Heep 1980 Winter Tour.

1982 proved to be the band's most lucrative year. It began in late 1981 when the band were contracted to record for BBC Radio 1 Friday Rock Show. The producer, Tony Wilson, introduced them to Maggi Farren, who set up a recording deal with Creole Records as well as getting the band a support slot on the 1981 Slade Winter Tour.

Spider released the single "Talkin' 'bout Rock 'n' Roll" with Creole, which featured as part of BBC Radio 1's play list. They then went into the studio to begin recording their first album Rock 'n' Roll Gypsies, to be released on the Creole label also. However RCA, who had made a late bid for the band, and after negotiations, Spider signed a six-year recording contract with the record label.

1982 continued with Spider packing out the Marquee Club once a month. They supported Alice Cooper on the British leg of his Special Forces Tour. They played at the Reading Festival on Sunday 29 August 1982, as well as securing a support slot on the mammoth Gillan Tour in coincidence with the release of their first album.

SPIDERSTORY

It’s December 14, 1981, and Colin Harkness, rhythm guitarist and frontman ,who was weaned on Slade, Eddie & The Hot Rods and Status Quo. For the past fortnight, he’s lived the dream as Spider opened Slade on a British tour. In Nottingham

Dave Hill is dispensed some advice. You don’t want to be too much like Status Quo, y’know – focus on the melodies.....however , these efforts went largely unnoticed and Spider were tagged unfairly as a poor mans Quo. Performing in every corner of the country, they racked up more than 2,000 shows during a 20-year lifespan.

Some outstanding Boogie tunes took Spider to main event at London’s Hammersmith Odeon. though, on the day they headlined there in March of 84, the attendance was decimated by a London Underground strike. And two years later, as lorries were due to deliver their third (and final) album to the shops, their record company went into liquidation.

“There’s no such thing as bad luck – you make your own,” shrugs bassist and co-frontman Brian Burrows now. “My belief is that we never really fitted in at all. Most heavy metal bands were riff-based. A thousand bands were copying Judas Priest and Iron Maiden. You can say that we sounded like Quo if you wish to, but there was them and us. We were a rock-a-boogie band, and it became trendy to knock us, especially to the press of that era.”

It all began in 1977 when Brian Burrows turned up on Colin Harkness’s doorstep enquiring about a bass guitar he’d heard was for sale. This led to a jam session with guitarist Dave Bryce – nicknamed ‘Sniffa’ for his interest in other people’s girlfriends – and Brian’s younger brother Rob E on drums.

According to Brian, the earliest goal was “just to get the hell out of unemployment-ridden Merseyside”. But before too long, Spider, as they named themselves, got serious. Back then, the band weren’t always hangover-free, and an embarrassed Harkness confesses to “sliding down the microphone, Sniffa running from the stage before he pissed his pants”, at the Grand Hotel in New Brighton. “In the end,” Brian explains, “we decided that alcohol wasn’t big or clever.”

Spider’s web soon spread further afield. Following a show at the Target Club in Reading and having been busted for signing on the dole and gigging, they simply decided not to return home.

Using a shared house in Middlesex as a base, a 35-foot converted coach known as Valhalla (home of the gods) carried Spider everywhere as they developed a raucous stage act that included throwing out sweets and ciggie papers to encourage crowd participation.

A nationwide tour in support of Uriah Heep in 1980 was a big step up. It was Heep’s Mick Box who christened them ‘rock’n’roll gypsies’.

“If we learned a lot from Heep, we also learned a lot from Samson – how not to be assholes,”

Following a string of independent singles, RCA Records stepped in to fund their debut album. 1982’s Rock ’N’ Roll Gypsies was simple but effective, though as Harkness now theorises: “We knew it would be impossible to sustain a career by banging out such albums. There’s only so many times you can fit the words ‘rock’n’roll’ into a song title

At the year’s end, Spider were invited to support Gillan on a whopping 41-date UK tour. This gave them an insider’s view of what proved to be a meltdown in the headliners’ camp, following the news that Ian Gillan was breaking up the band

RCA had begun pressuring the band to write hit singles. “When the guy that took us to RCA left the company, our daily contact was the bloke who’d signed Bucks Fizz,” recalls Brian. Spider jumped ship to A&M, but the same thing happened there.

Though Spider had favoured retaining Tony Wilson, producer of Radio 1’s Friday Rock Show and the man behind the desk for Rock ’N’ Roll Gypsies, A&M insisted on using a ‘name’ producer for its successor, 1984’s Rough Justice.

Fresh from producing Y&T’s Mean Streak, Chris Tsangarides encouraged the band to spread their wings. The album began with a judge sternly sentencing them to death for ‘the heinous and dastardly crime’ of ‘playing heavy metal rock’n’roll’.

Sounds magazine claimed Spider had “greased the stage” for their support act Terraplane (later to become Thunder) during a gig at London’s Lyceum, and although a retraction was printed, the damage was done. The previous summer the band ‘egged’ writers Mark Putterford and Xavier Russell at the 1983 Monsters Of Rock festival, leaving them stinking for the day in the backstage area. Brian claims to have irrefutable proof that the pair played a gameof pool during a Spider set in Leeds – a show both writers ‘reviewed’.

For four young men who’d never set foot outside the country, opening for UFO on their 1983 European tour was exciting. But it soon became apparent that the headliners were spiralling out of control. In certain territories, Spider were promoted to headliners after UFO vocalist Phil Mogg suffered a ‘nervous breakdown’ in Greece, causing the tour to be abandoned.

Meanwhile, back in the UK, the band’s frustration at meagre daytime airplay on Radio 1 boiled over into a song called Here We Go Rock ’N’ Roll (‘Have you heard the latest record/They’re plugging day and night/There’s lots of weird noises/An art student’s delight’). “We’d done our bit by writing these commercial songs, so why weren’t they being pushed by the record labels?” Harkness wonders quizzically. “We might as well not have bothered.”

In what Brian now recognises as a “last throw of the dice”, A&M presented a bought-in song called Breakaway and teamed Spider with a producer, Adrian Baker, who’d worked with the Beach Boys. When it stalled at No.92, the group were doubly devastated as, until last-minute scheduling issues, prior to the Breakaway experiment, Noddy Holder and Jim Lea had agreed to produce a more representative 45. “It was another nail in the coffin,” Rob E surmises.

The notion that Spider were just plain out of luck became more believable still when their new record label, PRT Records, went to the wall on March 10, 1986 – the same day their new album Raise The Banner was due to hit the racks. Though it wouldn’t be officially released until 2012 when their catalogue was revamped, all four members rate the Tony Wilson-produced album as a musical high point.

Behind the scenes, tension was growing as girlfriends entered the equation, and Harkness and Sniffa rebelled against the alcohol ban and was given the flick

Spider recruited Heretic guitarist Stuart Hurwood for some final shows, though his Edward Van Halen-esque style was a poor fit.

For the remaining originals, splitting up would cause a flood of emotions. “There was sadness, maybe some relief too,” recalls Brian. “After ten years together, things had run their course.”

“It felt like a death,” Harkness admits. “It knocked me sideways and I went off the rails for a bit. I didn’t regain my interest in rock music till about 2003.”

Curiously, none of their members resurfaced in other groups, and with the bassist and drummer moving to France and Australia respectively, a reconnection didn’t take place until this century. Spider played at a fan club gathering in 2015

Young, carefree and perhaps just a little too cocky for their own good, all four band members recall Spider as the best days of their lives. Ultimately, the cards refused to fall in their favour and in music, just like professional sport, fine margins can separate winners and losers.

There was some arrogance, sure,” Rob E Burrows admits. “And maybe you had to be in on our sense of humour to get it, but I’ve no regrets.”