Back
Price: £14.00
Neal X flew to Los Angeles a week early to supervise the programming of the new tracks.. Love Missile was being a huge hit everywhere and we didn't have the album ready ,time was getting out of control.. remember sputnik had no fat manager controlling everything/ making moves - we managed ourselves - or rather i managed the group taking in Degs instinctive sense of style and X's music and practical sense and all the while there was me and magenta with that instinct of what was rock and roll.. but really there was too much to do, i never stopped to breathe that year..
We all stayed at the Hyatt on Sunset the RIOT HOUSE we'd all read about in the Hammer of the Gods Zeppelin book.. there's something magical about that limo ride in from LAX to town listening to the American radio ..KROQ had been mad for Love Missile and were playing it all the time.. we hooked up with Pam Turbov and Matt Dike who was a big fan of the band.. they both came to the groups first rehearsals in LA some months later.. matt went on to produce a huge hit "do the wild thing" for Tone Loc in his bedroom studio. it was strange creating Sputniks neon nightmare in the sunshine of LA.. everything went really fast,, Moroder taught us about working strict hours in the studio and he had such great people working with him.. we met Sparks there and moroder was recording the Top gun soundtrack in the other studio..Moroder was freaked out that all the tracks on our album were the same speed! Sputnik perverseness.. he wanted to write a new song with us and after we'd made him listen to the suicide albums we started on ATARI BABY, me and Deg sitting outback on the dustbins in an LA sunset writing the lyrics.. we mixed our own versions of all the songs some of which later turned up on the Sci Fi Sex Stars ep..but now on our own release the ultimate collection(12" mixes)..we went to parties all over LA, i spent a lot of time hanging out with Penelope Spheris who was to make Waynes World.. she turned up at the hotel in a corvette playing metal at ear crushing volume. she's the ultimate rock Chick!.. i bought loads of Japanese toys in Japan town there which is where the sleeve design came from.. we flew home to leave Moroder to mix with a worried feeling, knowing he would try to make the tracks sound different! when the mixes came back i was freaked, they had all new stuff on them, no proper voice effects as everyone was scared of being sued, sampling was just starting and there were no rules then. moroders stuff was really creative, he's a genius but it wasn't how i heard the tracks, nothing like we were live either.. we had to go with it as time was so short, one day id remix the tracks the way i heard them (that day is now!)
Moroder remixes missile too with different voice samples... She's my man , a song of degs about the world of John Waters ,and was the first track we recorded on the Pro one was now completely different, how? all those days sitting in Magentas flat watching Devine, I went to his Birthday party that year at Andrew Logans house and gave him a babies bottle filled with champagne as a present, he walked about with it all nite...
Massive Retaliation was another Moroder idea, he recorded the backtrack himself, its at exactly half the speed of all the others... Magenta did the voices in her plummy home countys voice..
Teenage thunder was a title i saw in a fifties paperback and was one of the first 3 songs we ever wrote...the riff was she's my man backwards!..but thats what we loved!..see the album 1st generation to hear all the original demos!
There was a lot of pressure to put out Atari Baby as a single but i refused as i had this fixed idea of Sex Bomb Boogie as the third in the trilogy, it never lived up to the promise of the live feel.. its strange how u can look back now and see everything so clearly!
Next on the agenda was ADVERTISING!.. as the sound of television was part of the sound of the eighties i wanted to have an unbroken stream of music and Ad jingles on the disc.. it was like the Who did on their 60s album Who sell out. it proved of course hard to get major sponsors to be involved with a group glorifying violence like clockwork orange! Later versions of the album had these parts removed by EMI..i was power crazed by then and already onto the next scheme!.. i thought we could get advertisers to sponsor a single so it could be sold at next to nothing in the shops...i guess the Valium kicked in then...
...the album charted in the top 10 in the UK but the press had turned on us here.and got crucifying reviews..the dream was starting to come apart and we couldn't understand why.. its still a great record and nothing else came close then.. it was a Too much too soon? as my heroes the Dolls once said.. yet we sold 800,000 copies of the album worldwide which is really great.. strange the myth says that it didn't sell...