The Bridge House E16

Paul Balance ,Paul Jeffreys. Miltom Reame-James and Maciej Hrybowicz. The guys came to see me and asked if they could be considered for the next live album we planned to do. I said maybe, but the trouble is you are not compatible with any of the other bands. Paul Balance, as quick as ever said 'you mean we are too original'. I said, you could put it that way… and the argument went on and on.

They gave me a good account of what they wanted to record, and i liked Sticky Jack best. I told them I had ordered the mobile recording unit for next week, but we were booked up gig wise for that week. When Colin Barton came in (it was his mobile) , he was to be the producer for me. I put the idea to him and he said, 'I will be here all day so why don't we record them in the bar during the day. My reply, what a good idea. I said if the recordings are good I will put you on the next album.

After we recorded the tracks we played them back, but with no audience for the live recording they did not sound very good. Milton who was also producing for the band, said 'lets now take them to a studio and get them right.' We were using the Pathway Studio where we had edited the Week at the Bridge album. So we booked a day and they came out with the finshed product.

Arthur Brown, who had a smash hit with Fire in the sixties was very supportive, he owned the studio and gave some good ideas, if you listen carefully you can silently here him shouting 'fire' in the background.

The tracks did not go out on an album, we put them out as our first single on Bridge House Records instead. We have got a great radio interview with the band on tape. It's quite sad when we listen back and hear Paul Jeffreys talking, because he is no longer with us. He was on the Lockerbie plane crash with his new wife when the bomb went of, killing all passengers and crew. He was a great guy and is sadly missed.

Rebel, continued to play for us at the Bridge House for some time. I like their songs. We recorded and signed them to Bridge House Records and Music ltd for a single release. Drift Away and Rocka Shocka were the two titles. Rocka Shocka became the theme tune broadcast on Capital radio on a saturday night, on Nicky Horne's mummy's weekly show. The band used to play live with Wild Willy Barrett.

The band were into racing and they had a car racing tournament. it was for small Citroen cars racing at Quarry Farm in Wiltshire. It was called 2CV Cross Citroen and Total Oil were the sponsors for a while. When they withdrew their sponsorship the band had a music and motors gig to raise some cash to keep them going. John Waggle, the British champion, was the main man. Tim Purcell interviewed him.

This record BHS 2 was our second single produced by Colin Barton and was arranged by Rebel.

Rebel are Les Burgess (vocals), Schmeely (bass, vocals), Pete Goodey (guitar, vocals), John Smith (drums, vocals).

This was their first and last single although they did have 2 tracks on the Live at the Roxy album prior to this.

John McGeady ,Andy and Ken Scott was the 3 man line up. They wanted to be and thought they were a punk band. I had given them a couple of gigs at the bridge because they were all local boys.

After the single came out they broke the band up. John came to work for me in the office, helping to book the bands and run the record company. He was a big help to me, I was very sorry when he died, he was about 35 years old. He died a rock and roller. Ken and Andy joined with Darren Murphy and they formed the band Wasted Youth.

Street Talking Man, was the single we chose from Gerry McAvoy's album. A really strong single about Gerry's life in Belfast in the sixties before he met up with Rory Gallagher and joined his band.

Gerry's album also on Bridge House Records was called 'Back to Bassics'. Gerry played the bass and sang vocals on Streetalk. On the other side of the single we wanted to show off the musical talent of Dave Edwards, who had helped Gerry by playing guitar and backing vocals on the album. Dave has such a tremendous voice,we thought he would also get some radio play, so the single was like a double A side. We chose Many Rivers to Cross and Dave sang it beautifully. Dave was also lead guitar and vocalist with Remus Down Boulevard, a bridge house favorite.

This single was the biggest surprise for everyone. Darren had only just formed the band, I had heard them rehearsing in the cellar at the Bridge House and they sounded terrible. They played a lot of punky type tunes, thrashing their guitars, I thought, that's the last time I will let them rehearse with a PA system.

One day Darren comes to my office and says can you book us in a recording studio, I said no, you got to do it yourself. He said, will you pay for the session, it would be about £50. I said okay and they came back with the tape. It cost me £77 and it was amazing, Jealousy and Baby. They had used a small 8-track recording studio in Plaistow called the Ram Studio. I took it to our publishers who were equally delighted. It should definetly have been a big hit, Noel Edmonds played every sunday morning for a month. It was on radio one's round table and good old John Peel played it a few times.

If a modern day artist were to record this song it would still be a hit today. One of the lines, 'if your not bleeding how do you know you've been cut. Your jealousy is killing me'. A great song.

Robin Blanchflower who was head of Ariola Records, a big company at the time, played this song in his office and all the pluggers, A&R men, and everone said this would be a number one single. Robin himself came down to the bridge house and offered £20,000 for the single and album we had recorded. The album was called Low Dives for High Balls.

The band all of a sudden had a big time manager who turned the deal down, saying he could get more money. The deal with Robin fell through and the new manager never got a deal on the album. Although he placed it in a couple of territories, for peanuts.

To be beside the sea side. This is where we must have been when we made this record and we should have been thrown in because we have no trace whatsoever on this record.

If anyone can help us, please contact us.

We pressed and released this single for our publishers Martin & Coulter. They were top publishers and song writers, they wrote many hit songs, including Sandy Shaw's Puppet on a String and Cliff Richards hit Congratulations.

It's a Shay Heally presentation, a mimic of Paul McCartney's trip to tokyo when he got busted for drugs. The song goes, 'here i am in tokyo not a thing to smoke you know'. It sounds very much like Paul's singing. Shay also wrote 'What Another Year', the Europian song contest winner by Jonny Logan.

My son Glen Murphy, of the well known tv series Londons Burning, wrote and produced this single for his boxing club Repton. He got all the boxers in the studio with musical director Barry Hart. Glen and Barry wrote the song and although it never sold, it did get a lot of tv and radio coverage.

Glen was a international boxer at the time, acting was in the future, perhaps this record gave him some ideas about his future in the entertainment business. It was a great first try.

Wasted Youth's second single produced by Peter Perrit lead singer with the Only Ones. Peter had a lot of success with his band and wanted to get into production. Wasted supported the Only Ones on a tour of England and they became friends. We got him and his band to do a gig at the Bridge House and he agreed to produce this single, he even did backing vocals on it.

It got a lot of independent radio play but not much BBC radio, which you must have for a hit single. It was in the independent charts for many months.

The B side is called My Friends Are Dead, perhaps I should have listened to what was going on, there was a lot of drug related deaths around this time. We survived though.

Johnny Holliday and my son Glen co-wrote these tracks. I thought it was going to be a hit. A really funny story you are the power, but also very eerie. John played regularly for us in a few different bands the last being the Escape Club, who after forming and doing their first gig at the Bridge House, left for America and had a number one hit record.

John was also a good producer, he produced Wasted Youth's single and album. A local man from Hornchurch. We should have seen more of him, but thats showbiz.

This was a true ghost story, even the cover pictures were ghostly. You've got to see this genuine picture, we even had the News of the World come to the Bridge House to check the story out. They took away the negatives and put them in the laboratory with experts and said they were real not fakes. The photographer, Alison, retired and never took another picture she was so frightened.

This song was produced by Martin Hannett, he of the Joy Division and Factory Records sounds.

Wasted Youth's 4th single, BHS 13. Well it is was not unlucky 13, because this was a really good single and charted for almost a year. It was also picked up to be the theme tune for a play that was produced by a top writer.

It was also the second cover concept of Carl Max who had also done the cover for Rebeccas Room, he won an award for it.

Reach out was produced by Adam Sieff whose family owned Harrods at the time. He did a really good job on a bad set up. The band had lost interest in releasing singles, the cry was they were an album band.

The single caused a lot of arguments from publishers, who thought it was Diana Ross song, of course it sounded nothing like the original, apart from the title.

The B side song Chris Thompson had produced as a demo over a year before got more radio play. The band did not write a new song for the B side so we used Gone Midnight.

In the singles list we had intentionally left this one out. We thought we had covered our tracks and no one would notice. But with the Bridge house web site becoming more popular and with more visitors than ever, it was only a matter of time before someone found us out. Thanks to Timothy Charge for pointing out our omission and sending photos in of the rare single.

Tom Lucy is currently a top stunt arranger for many top films and TV shows and has worked as a stunt double for stars such as Sean Connery. Tom is also first cousin to Darren, the bass player with Wasted Youth and this is the secret behind this release.

Wasted Youth were a great live Band and they could of had many hit singles, some of the lyrics are marvellous, poetic stories. But because of the band name and reputation they were not getting the radio play they deserved.

John Peel was the only BBC DJ who was playing their songs regularly at the time and through our publishers, Martin and Coulter, it had been confirmed that the band were indeed blacklisted.

To see if this theory was true it was agreed to release the single under an assumed name. It was decided to put the single out under the name of Tom Lucy because as well as being Darren's cousin he was in the studio every day with the band and contributed to the recording and production of the single.

When this single got almost daily radio play it seemed the fears were proved correct. Although pressure was applied on the band by music industry bigwigs to change their name and style but they would not sell out.

After Wasted Youth had broken up, Darren bumped into Ken. They had a beer and started talking about the old days, well they was 21. They wrote a song or two and went into the studio and recorded them. We called in a nice lady singer, Mich Michell who sang Stormy Weather for us on the B side. We also got some help from a rockabilly band, their drummer played on the single and it was his dad's studio, but the old magic had gone, great lyrics but it did not work.

Chris Thompson was a regular performer for us at the Bridge House. His full time job was lead singer with Manfreds Mann band, remember Blinded by the Light? Well we needed a single to promote the film Tank Malling and I was determined to get my favourite singer to do it. The director of the film wanted Tony Bennet's version. I said no way, Chris Thompson's going to sing it. So where's Chris? In New Zealand. Another old friend from the Bridge Bill Christian had a studio, so he and Chris go and do the single for me. Money was never mentioned, they just did it.

The B side was performed by another great singer Maggie Reilly. See You in Paradise was written by Rick Fenn and performed by him and Nick Mason, the drummer from Pink Floyd. They also wrote the soundtrack to the film together.

Taken from the British movie Tank Malling starring Ray Winstone, available in the shop.

This band played for us and were okay, they were not from London so they never pulled much of a crowd. They were however a bit different from the norm. So I agreed to release this single on our label, it was our first and only 7" ep.

'arrods dont sell 'em was about Harrods not selling condoms, a gimmicky record that I thought might work. We arranged to play it one saturday morning outside Harrods, the band were meant to set up on the back of a lorry, with a generator for their power. I got all the press and tv channels interested and they were all there outside Harrods, this was going to be a really big coup to publicize the single. What happens is, the band don't show up, we were all there from 8am until 2pm waiting. They said the lorry broke down but I know they had a late night on the friday, got drunk and frightened themselves into thinking they might be arrested and locked up in jail. Why didn't they tell me? We could have all had a lay-in on the Saturday.

A special limited edition, one-sided single, recorded at Wasted Youths final gig at The Venue in London on 6.12.82 and given away free with copies of Wasted Youth's album The Beginning of The End. Only 5000 copies were made of this single.

A great rock and roll song, we should have released it as a proper single, it would have been a hit.