John Stuart - Summer Breeze

At the height of their success, Sheffield band Chakk had two singers, Jake Harries and John Stuart. Harries had the gritty voice, Stuart the soulful croon. According to Burl Veneer's Music Blog:

Richard Hawley is currently riding a wave of popularity in the UK as the "Sheffield Sinatra," but in 1987 he played guitar behind velvet-voiced ex-Chakk singer John Stuart on Stuart's only solo single, a cover of Seals and Crofts' "Summer Breeze." You will never hear a lusher version. (There's that unmistakable Designers Republic graphic style again.) Rounding out the backing band, billed as The Heavenly Music Corporation, are Dee Boyle (drums, also from Chakk), Darrell de Silva (sax), Jon Quarmby (keyboards), Justin Bennett (percussion), and Heather Allen (backing vocals), with production by Rob Gordon. Alas, that was all from The Heavenly Music Corporation as such. Stuart would go on to be a member of the Lovebirds (with Hawley) and Magic Bullets. He now lives in Barcelona and continues making lovely music as one-half of Forgetting, and on his own as, once again, The Heavenly Music Corporation.

Presented here is "Summer Breeze" and the B-side, "Black and Blue (Parts 1 and 2)"; get the vinyl rip here or here. (Please let me know if the Rapidshare caps downloads at 10 grabs; I am not happy about this new limitation and am looking for workarounds.)

Chakk - 10 Days In An Elevator

Chakk, the industrial funk outfit from Sheffield, only released a single album, 10 Days In An Elevator, on MCA in 1986. They got signed to MCA on the strength of their singles on the Doublevision on FON labels (and presumably some demos), got a huge advance, spent it building FON Studios, and proceeded to record the album. However, somewhere they lost the special ingredient that made their singles so spectacular (available here), and 10 Days is a bit of a sprawling mess of funky basslines, tape manipulations, sax riffs, and shouted slogans that never quite comes together. On the plus side, there's plenty of it: packaged with the 8-song album was a bonus 4-track EP. It's far from terrible, in fact I quite enjoyed listening to it again to prepare this post. In advance of the album's release, "Imagination (Who Needs a Better Life)" was released as a single, with three different mixes on the 12". But with no clear followup single* the album stiffed and Chakk were dropped from MCA. They posted a strong return to form, once again on the FON label, with the "Timebomb" single (also available on my first Chakk post), but without enough success to keep the band together. Here, then (or here) is the entire 10 Days album plus the EP, and all three mixes from the Imagination 12", which exhausts my Chakk collection until I get ahold of the legendary Clocks and Babies cassette. Anyone?

* I stand corrected (said the man in the orthopedic shoes): a quick search on GEMM reveals that "Big Hot Blues" was the followup single, then the album sank. It also shows a 12" single of "Brain" with album track "Years I Worked" as the B-side, released on FON, presumably after being dropped by MCA but before Timebomb. There's another one to track down...

Abstract Magazine 6: Audio/Visual

The late Rob Deacon's Sweatbox Records was another top UK label of the 80s, not in terms of sales but in terms of assembling a roster of cutting-edge postpunk bands. He started out publishing Abstract Magazine, which had the bonus of having an LP attached to it with songs by the bands covered in the magazine (often exclusive tracks or remixes), the LPs giving birth to Sweatbox. I've had a request for Abstract 6, Audio/Visual (1986), and as I had it handy from ripping the Chakk Theme, I've done up the whole thing in 192k mp3. It's a great collection focused on Sheffield and Manchester bands, my personal favorites being the industrial funk of Workforce, Chakk, and Hula:

A1 In The Nursery Breach Birth (Blockade Mix)
A2 Workforce Skin Scraped Back (Remix)
A3 Xymox Moscoviet Musquito (Remix)
A4 Blurt Gravespit (Live)
A5 Clair Obscur Smurf In The Goulag
B1 A Certain Ratio Sounds Like Something Dirty
B2 Anti Group, The Ha (Remix)
B3 Chakk Theme
B4 Hula Motor City Nightmare
B5 A Primary Industry They're Biting

Get it here. For a better view of the cover art and packaging, see discogs.com.

Chakk indie label singles

This blog is going to be harder than I thought. I planned on sharing many of the vinyl rips that I've made for myself over the years, but as I get ready to upload an album I keep finding that another blogger has already done it. Eric Random's fantastic Ishmael mini-LP? No Longer Forgotten Music posted it last August. Mekanik Kommando's It would be quiet in the woods...? Mutant Sounds posted it last May. Belfegore's A Dog Is Born? Mutant Sounds again. Phoenix Hairpins and New Romantic Rules likewise cover a lot of material I have. Still, I have a few rips that I haven't seen elsewhere, and I have some more in the pipeline. Here's a collection of Chakk's independent-label 12" singles, i.e. before and after their one-album association with MCA. Chakk was the funkiest of the 80s Sheffield bands and should have made it big. Included here are:

Pre-MCA:
Out of the Flesh 12" (Doublevision, three mixes)
You 12" (the first release on FON, two mixes of "You" and two of "They Say"),
Chakk Theme from Abstract Magazine 6 (Audio/Visual) on Sweatbox

Post-MCA:
Timebomb 12" (FON, three mixes)
Bloodsport 12" (FON, three mixes, as backing band for South African band the Swanhunters; sounds just like Chakk, though)

14 tracks in all, mp3@128, 70.2 M.

According to discogs.com, Chakk put out an album-length cassette in 1982 called Clocks and Babies. If anyone could hook me up with a copy (or a rip) of that, I would be eternally grateful!

New links: Get zip file here or here.
Chakk on MySpace.