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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pioneers of CCM: Parchment

Image
Keith, Sue and John in 1972 I have told this story before, but it bears repeating. I came to faith in early September 1973 after a day at the Bromyard Folk Festival where I heard a folk-rock trio called Parchment play. I can still remember the rich aroma of the trampled grass that had been baking all day under the warm canvas, as the hot late summer sun beat down upon the large marquee we were sat in. The stage was small, and rather make-shift, but the sound system was powerful, and the microphones on their stands glinted silver. Parchment came onto the stage, looking a little dishevelled and Bohemian, and also quite hairy - and performed a short set that included several of their new songs, but also the CCM classic Light Up The Fire. It was this song that hit me like a ton of bricks. The classic chorus is still sung in schools and churches all over the world today: 'Light up the fire, and let the flame burn. Open the door let Jesus return, take seeds of His Spirit and l...
Read more

Dartmoor prison blues

Image
This is continuation of my short series of posts about how I became involved with Contemporary Christian Music. Previous posts are listed and linked at the foot of this post. Me c 1980 I met Roger Lenk while we were both at Marjons in Plymouth (then a teacher education college). I soon discovered that Roger identified as a 'Messianic Jew' - someone who had been born into the Jewish tradition, but had accepted Yeshua (Jesus) as his mashiach (Messiah). We actually first met during a journey up to Dartmoor Prison where we were both billed to play at an event organised by Youth for Christ. It was a daunting trip for me, because Dartmoor Prison can be a forbidding place at the best of times, and we arrived at Princetown that autumnal evening as an eery fog was drifting in over the moors and the sun had already set. The granite walls of the prison stared at us gauntly, and the sodium lamps cast a sickly yellow hue over the stonework. As the large gates of Dartmoor slammed sono...
Read more

Just Vinyl

Image
I've spent a lot of time in the studio over the last week or so, recording programmes for my new show which will air this Autumn on CrossRhythms radio  (see dates below!) The show is called Just Vinyl, and it features classic Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) tracks, drawn largely from the 1970s and 1980s. I'm playing exclusively vinyl because it has a particular quality and although there are a few clicks and pops every now and then, I think this just adds to the beauty of the medium. Many of the artists I'm featuring are giants of the genre, pioneers of CCM when it was in its infancy, when very few of the musicians were full-time. Today, Christian music is big business - there are radio stations, record labels and management/touring companies dedicated fully to promoting it. Back in the day, very little of this existed, and those who were involved in pioneering CCM had to forge their own pathways. It was not easy to finance ventures into Christian music - most musi...
Read more