Sometime in late 1988 just before going our first European tour with the mighty Instigators we got word from Ray Ahn of the Hard Ons that waterfront Records in Australia was putting together a Kiss tribute album; no promises, but if we recorded a song he’d do his best to get us on it.

Our latest drummer, John “Memphis J” Howie Jnr (a native of North carolina, USA and now lead singer for the very, very cool Two Dollar Pistols) had recently joined and thanks to his mad drum skillz we were most definitely ready to rock. Although he would leave soon after this recording and we’d go to Europe without him, Laurence Bell, was still lead singer and Paul and I were doing what Paul and I always did.

• Sink - Cold Gin (4.47MB)

We recorded this one evening at a studio in North London called Von’s (I think it was on Liverpool Road); Martin Hawkes (aka Marty Tuff from the Stupids) was the engineer. This was the middle of 3 sessions at Vons. The first produced what was going to be a flexi disk which never happened and is now generally referred to as The 1988 Demo and the 3rd session was the one where we recorded the songs that became our 2nd EP, On The Tracks, Feeling Blue.

Not sure why we decided on Cold Gin…maybe Laurence chose it? Anyway, it came out pretty well, especially since we’d only rehearsed it a couple of times and it was our first recording with John on drums. We did the obligatory speed-it-up bit in the section near the end and I suppose it sounds a bit weedy, but I like the way it goes back into the last chorus. This version was recorded off a dodgy old cassette so please excuse the odd wobble on the longer notes and a drop-out near the top.