On Target

As Mark 2 gained momentum, we began to focus more on our musicianship, style, image and material. Helen decided to leave the band in July 1981 to pursue her career, so we needed to recruit a new keyboardist. Steve Smith, our drummer, mentioned that there was an exceptional talent at his church - an 18 year old lad called Simon Elvin. We invited Simon to audition for us at our practice hall, and he impressed us with his keyboard skills. He also turned out to be a good vocalist and could play a number of other instruments, including guitar and woodwind. He was in!

We played a few more gigs together that year and then at a concert somewhere in the north of Devon, Sue and John Ritter, leaders of the full-time touring band The Reps, turned up in our audience. They were scouting. Afterwards they met with Paul and offered him a job playing bass guitar for their band. He agreed, and The Reps gained a new member, while Mark 2 were now left for the second time that year seeking a new band member.

I recruited an old roller skating buddy of mine, Steve Cooper, to take on the role of bassist. I knew he had a big heart for what Mark 2 were doing. He practiced hard, and then within a week we were playing our next gig at a school in Truro, Cornwall. Steve was very new to playing bass and I had really dropped him in the deep end, but he survived. His emerging playing style was reminiscent of heavy reggae and ska, so Simon and I wrote a few ska riffs and turned them into songs which suited Steve's playing style.

Things intensified, and with the band in greater demand, we started to play two or three gigs a week, and could also be on the road for an entire week, playing at festivals, doing radio appearances and touring. We began to expand our repertoire and wrote new material. Simon and I wrote as a team as well as separately, and one of our more memorable collaborations was a track called Contact, which originally emerged when we were sound checking before a gig at Dartmoor Prison. The finished song became a side two track on Mark 2's 1983 EP called On Target, released through Daylight Records/Broken Records. We recorded it along with 4 or 5 other tracks at the local radio studio, as session tracks for a 2 hour live special for Plymouth Sound radio, broadcast on hosted by DJ Chris Cole. The studio tracks sounded raw but interesting, and somehow captured our live performance energy, so I decided to release three of them on the EP.

On Target was released on April 23rd, 1983 when we played a packed nightclub in Plymouth's notorious Union Street, in support of the Barratt Band. Some trivia: The ethereal guitar riff at the start of Contact was chosen as the backing track for Westcountry TV's local events bulletin. You can listen to Contact below by clicking the red and white arrow.



Next time: Greenbelt and all that...

Previous posts in this series:

My first gig
Onwards and upwards
Dartmoor prison blues
Mark 2

Creative Commons License
On Target by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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