This is the second part of the Unreleased Chocolate Album post. The first part can be found here and is worth checking out if you haven’t already. These 4 tracks were recorded slightly earlier than the other 8 and were also the final recording by Chocolate as a proper band instead of a non-gigging project entity. The line-up for these four songs was:

Clive Watling - Lead vocals and guitar
Ed Wenn - Backing vox and guitar
Andrew Ruscoe - Bass
Pete Walkden - Drums

I’m not sure how many gigs we played with this line-up, but it was probably something like 5 over a 6 month period. John had quit after the Sale Copy Only recording to move back to London and play guitar in Mover, so ex-Elmerhassel drummer, Pete Walkden, took over from him and did a fine job while it lasted. The photo on this page was taken before John left the band so it doesn’t feature Pete.

This session was recorded at Gemini studio in Ipswich. A fine studio to be sure, but not cheap and we couldn’t afford an engineer as well as the day rates so studio owner, Pat Grueber, offered to record it for us as part of the price. He was a half-decent engineer and he wanted the practice. In the event the half-decent engineer did a half-decent job and to be fair to him, my plan was always to remix these songs with Roop at some point, but we just never got round to it. So here you have the original mixes done with Pat at Gemini sometime in 1997.

Evening Star - 4.2MB
Kittredge - 6.3MB
Bigger Prisons - 4.2MB
Pathetic - 5.3MB

Behind The Songs:
Evening Star
This appeared on the very first Chocolate release Substitute For Sex back in 1993. I liked the way Clive sang it though so we re-recorded it. To be honest I’m not sure if this session was supposed to be anything other than a demo. It seems really weird that 2 of the 4 songs were re-recording from other releases…maybe I fancied releasing a decent poppy punk 7″ and that’s why we re-did Evening Star and Kittredge. Can’t remember now. For those not in the know The Evening Star is a local newspaper in Ipswich and the Ken mentioned in the songs was a long-time street vendor for said august organ. He always seemed to be around no matter how long you stayed away. You’d end up back in Ipswich after an absence of months or years and he’d still be there, selling the Star and paying for beer in Manning’s with piles of loose change. Binman was another legendary local character who also seemed to go on and on.

Kittredge
As alluded to above, this is another re-recording, also from the 1993 release Substitute For Sex. The spoken bit at the front is taken from the 1985 film The Falcon and the Snowman. It seemed a suitable choice given the subject matter of the song which was inspired by the fantastic Noman Mailer book Harlot’s Ghost. Kittregde is the femme fatale in that story. Unfortunately, Pete never quite got the hang of this one so the drumming’s a bit off in the breakdown section.

Bigger Prisons
This one was ‘inspired by’ (read ’stolen from’) Back Against The Wall by the migh

Looking back on it, maybe the Peel session was the best thing BDS ever did. It’s all subjective I suppose, but Cynical Smile and Life’s Demand sound great and it’s hands-down the best version of Never So Funny that we recorded. Also, Nick’s vocals sound wonderful. I never thought of him a singer per se, but there’s no question that he steps up on these songs and does a really great job.

What kind of freaks me out about the whole BDS thing is how little I remember about any of it. It’s just a blur. Shame really, but then it was long time ago. This lot were recorded on 24th Feb 1987. Hope you like ‘em:

• John Peel intro - 628kb
• Need To Love - 4.4MB
• Life’s Demand - 5.2MB
• Always Away - 4.5MB
• Cynical Smile - 5.6MB
• Never So Funny - 3.3MB

One thing I do remember clearly about this session was that I didn’t have a proper guitar amp at that point so I took along my 12W Marshal practice amp and essentially used it as a distortion pedal by plugging the guitar into it and then taking a line out of the back and sticking it into a 100W H&H bass combo that we’d scrounged from somewhere. The result was pretty good. Definitely more fizzy than any guitar sound I’ve had since, but the Beeb techies certainly did a good job in making it sound dense and powerful. Also, because the 12W is a tranny amp it has a bit of a Husker Du sound to it and it holds the individual notes really well.

BTW, while I have the floor, I’d like to thank John Hannon for giving me the “Grandfather of UK Emo” tag. Wasn’t sure how I felt about it the first time he said it, but listening back to these tracks the Embrace/One Last Wish influence is pretty obvious and I don’t think anyone else was doing that in 1986-87, so maybe he’s right. Interestingly enough I think Squirrelbait was at least as much (if not more) of an biggest influence on BDS than the DC lot, but you only have to compare Always Away with anything from Squirrelbait’s sublime Skag Heaven album to see just how far I was from the mark. It didn’t help that I could hardly play guitar, but even so, it is pretty basic. talking of which, that song and Need To Love are the two here that I can’t really listen to 20 years later. A bit basic, a bit embarassing. I was growing up in public as a songwriter that’s for sure. One minute you’re sitting in your room, writing a bunch of stupid songs about your ex-gurlfriend…next thing you know it, they’re being broadcast to a national radio audience by the best DJ in the world ever. And the funny thing is that I only just realised how weird that was. 20 years on and it finally strikes me as a bit strange.