I was and still am a great fan of Richie Lambert songs and the tight Dancing Bears performance. Good drummers seperated the average garage band from the excellent and the dancing drumming and driving bass from the bears was what leapt out of the cassette player in 1983.
The opening three tracks of Deadbeat 2 are "Dancing Beat", "She moves me" and "Lost in my mind". All three get the feet moving but pride of place goes to "Lost in my Mind". It's a song that creeps into every sunny day on Arran as I stroll along the beach or just coming home pissed during the festival. Stumbling along in the meadow's and the music to straighten me up and get me marching home in a zig zag formation.....
Nostalgic songs, "looking back on the days when we had such fun going out in the park in the warm summer sun", work well with every passing year and all the arthritis disappears as you move your feet to the drummers beat.
It always made me chuckle when we'd drive up to St Andrews for our annual golf weekend and Simon would say "Got any Dancing Bears" and boom it's on the cassette in the car. I kept that car until 2018 just so that I could keep playing the brilliant cassettes from an earlier era.
Their first demo was so fresh, nascent and naive, as Roy Terre would say.
The second demo would contain three songs. "I go where my baby goes", a Mick Jones type Clash song followed by "lucky Son" a surfer song for all you wave riders from Portobello. The happy vibe continues with "thousand miles".
It was good but not as stripped back as the first demo. The Bears were a live band and I think that first demo sounded like a one take wonder. I could picture the three of them looking at each other and thinking "is that it?, Done in 15 minutes and we've got the studio booked all day!"
Deadbeat 2 will be digitalised one day so if you've not got a copy just smile in that warm summer sun!
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