{"id":102,"date":"2021-11-12T17:55:00","date_gmt":"2021-11-12T17:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsrainbow.com\/coventrygigs\/2021\/11\/12\/urge-part-2\/"},"modified":"2021-11-12T17:55:00","modified_gmt":"2021-11-12T17:55:00","slug":"urge-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsrainbow.com\/coventrygigs\/2021\/11\/12\/urge-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Urge – Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

 Urge – Part 2<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

By Pete Clemons<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n


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October 1980 \u2013 Source unknown<\/span><\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

(Stop Press – Nigel Mulvey is 99% sure that the article is from the NME, by Chris Salewicz who went with them to Barcelona with photographer Joe Stephen\u2019s.)<\/span>
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“Really we should have gone from Luton airport, but the only flight to Barcelona that night was from Heathrow. <\/p>\n

And so, two days before they were due to play a concert in a bloodstained bullring. The Specials and new Arista signing – Urge and all their aides-de-camp picked up 36 tickets from a Coventry travel agent…<\/p>\n

Urge is a group of many paradoxes. <\/span><\/p>\n

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A major Urge paradox is that their music consists of clear-visioned, witty pop songs. Yet Kevin himself, often as ascetically insecure onstage as only a Fripp-like guitar anti-hero may be, seems far more comfortable sitting at home in his Coventry council flat releasing the tapes he makes with his Revox and synthesizer. ‘New Eastern Electric’ is how Kevin waggishly describes what he is creating on such sound collages as \u2018On Earth 2\u2019. an NME Garageland featured cassette <\/p>\n

He denies, though, that he\u2019d prefer working on his own – his solo work, he claims, is just one of the elements that go towards making up the Urge sound. “Philip Glass meets The Kinks at the grassroots of. . whatever…” he succinctly sums up their music. “We\u2019re doing The Shangri-la\u2019s \u2018Past. Present And Future\u2019 on our first album” <\/p>\n

“I\u2019m very fond of the intertwining of fact and fiction,” continued Kevin as we sat in the back of the Spanish cab making drunken attempts to recall the name of our hotel. “For example, on our original record company biography we were listed as \u2018five former supermarket managers\u2019. And now Nigel Mulvey joins us on bass and that was what he really did once do.” <\/p>\n

Much of this makes more sense, of course. when you appreciate that our Kev is a former art student. After twelve months at Nuneaton Art School. Kevin applied for a course in communications at Leicester University. “They didn\u2019t seem to be able to handle it when they discovered my portfolio wasn\u2019t visual, but audio. It was made up entirely of tapes of sound.” <\/p>\n

So Illuminatus-fan Kevin went to work instead at British Leyland as a systems analyst, which maybe he was destined to do all along: Eighteen months ago, as a victim of cut-backs within the car firm, he picked up \u00a31,500 redundancy money and bought the Revox and synthesizer with which he makes his tapes <\/p>\n

Kevin Harrison, in fact, is a fully paid alumnus of the Coventry Scene: the last group he was in before Urge was Transposed Men<\/a>, which also featured Special John Bradbury, Selecter Desmond Brown and Selecter main man Neol Davies. It was Kevin\u2019s long-standing friend Neol Davies, in fact, who first brought Urge to my attention, playing me the group\u2019s tapes when I visited his home last summer. Although a different urge line-up was already established when Kevin joined in January of 79, he quickly became a central force and in September of that year, his wife Lynda was added to the group to share vocals with the less willful David Wankling, who writes the lyrics and founded the band <\/p>\n

Whimsically having decided in 1976 to quit his native Coventry, David had moved to Brighton where he quickly found he was combining his job of croupier (“Casinos don\u2019t have to be fixed: they always end up winning”) with singing in a punk band with flat-mate and guitarist John Shipley, later of the now defunct Swinging Cats<\/a>. <\/p>\n

The pair returned to their home-town in 1978 to form the first edition of Urge, which included the group\u2019s current drummer, rockabilly fan Billy Little, who\u2019d previously played behind Special Terry Hall in The Squad<\/a>. When Shipley departed for the Swinging Cats, it was Kevin who came in as replacement <\/p>\n

January of 1980 saw Urge releasing their first 45, \u2018Revolving Boy<\/a>\u2019, an independent single that the group is re-recording for release by Arista. Under the terms of their new deal, urge have already been in the studio with Dennis Bovell at the production helm. They have decided, though, against working with Bovell on their imminent album. “He\u2019s a helluva nice guy,” says Kevin, “but I think the problem is that half the time he\u2019s too stoned to actually get anything together. It’s his own studio and it’s not really fully equipped yet. It makes studio work very expensive.” <\/p>\n

At the same time as \u2018Revolving Boy\u2019 came out, Urge endured for their first national tour an ordeal by mutant gob when they supported The UK Subs. At the Marquee date on that tour Billy Little\u2019s kit was so covered in plastic beer glasses that had been chucked at the group that he was actually unable to make contact with his drum-skins <\/p>\n

Also, this Barcelona bash is not the first time that the group have trod the European boards. Picking up their passports in Coventry Post Office late last winter for a couple of Dutch dates, Lynda ran into Jerry Dammers. “Oh, come along to Germany with us when you\u2019re finished in Holland,” offered the generous Jerry, and urge ended up as support act to The Specials on their European tour. <\/p>\n

At least those dates were not as disaster-prone as this Spanish trip: perhaps it was something to do with the karma of attempting to put on a pop show in a place normally reserved for the unnecessary slaughtering of inoffensive animals. As Kevin remarked at one point “there’s an awful lot of bullshit about this gig.” <\/p>\n

Only 2.000 Spanish punkettas show up – which may have bean caused by rival promoter having taken a TV ad the previous evening to announce the concert had been cancelled! <\/p>\n

This left the German promoter, a man whose finances came from the buying and selling of exotic snuffs, to lose his shirt. and nearly his life – this particular bullring being apparently controlled by the Spanish mafia <\/p>\n

As Jerry Dammers and Urge manager Ian Foster were departing their hotel the next morning to travel back to London by road, the promoter suddenly appeared out of the shadows, to request a ride to the border. He\u2019d also been busted in Barcelona some days previously, and he only had one of his four passports left. Dammers and Foster made their excuses and left.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

 Urge – Part 2 By Pete Clemons October 1980 \u2013 Source unknown (Stop Press – Nigel Mulvey is 99% sure that the article is from the NME, by Chris Salewicz who went with them to Barcelona with photographer Joe Stephen\u2019s.) … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsrainbow.com\/coventrygigs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsrainbow.com\/coventrygigs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsrainbow.com\/coventrygigs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsrainbow.com\/coventrygigs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsrainbow.com\/coventrygigs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsrainbow.com\/coventrygigs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsrainbow.com\/coventrygigs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsrainbow.com\/coventrygigs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsrainbow.com\/coventrygigs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}