The Pukka Orchestra - A Palace with My Memories

The Pukka Orchestra were Graeme Williamson (who sadly passed away a few years ago), and guitarists Neil Chapman and Tony Duggan-Smith. Neil in particular became a pen pal of sorts over the years, and remains one of my favourite guitar players.

The image to the left was sent to me by a friend (Jeff, my friend Jeff) who lives in Illinois who has impeccable taste. I sent him the album because he'd never heard the band, and when I found a used copy (which is in far better shape than mine, since all I have left is the vinyl after the jacket was damaged and lost) I boxed it up and sent it to him because he was missing out and needed to hear why I kept fussing about these guys.

Back in 1984 I was old enough to drink and party, but didn't do either. Instead I tended to geek out to records in my basement. Apparently Eastern Canada played "Listen to the Radio" but where I lived on the wet West Coast the song I heard and fell in love with was "Might as Well be on Mars" a song that still gives me a gut punch whenever I hear it and the guitar solo makes the fuzzy hairs on the back of my neck go all prickly. So based on that one listen I was determined to find the album.

Eventually I found it, and I played it in one sitting. I can't recall my exact reaction but I remember being somewhat bewildered. It was awesome. It was angry. It was cool. It was funny. It was also kind of weird, and a bit different. I guess I didn't quite know what alternative was, although I had a lot of it. I tended to have only two categories for music: Love it. Hate it. I loved it, and it just kept growing on me. I still remember driving my car with the windows rolled down, my sunroof open and my head sticking out the top of my car (I'm pretty tall so I just tilted the seat up straight) yelling along to the chorus of "A Wonderful Time to Be Young." It was indeed a wonderful time.

I waited for a follow up. I'd scan the bins looking, but nothing ever showed up. I never found anything else. Many years later I got super stoked when I found a CD copy, and then felt bad reading how the band had lost their master tapes, and that the CD was cut from a pristine vinyl copy. I may have that wrong, but it makes for a good story.

Years later I wrote Neil about one of his solo efforts, the 2002 release Hope in Hell. He wrote back and mentioned there was other stuff out there. An EP called Palace of Memory, which I managed to find a few months back, and a CD called Dear Harry - I hope to find it one day.

I kind of knew Palace of Memory existed because I saw a video once in the mid 80s that sounded like The Pukka Orchestra, and this was confirmed by a caption that appears in the middle of the song: "Graffiti wishes ... He was in the PUKKA ORCHESTRA" (I was able to confirm this as the video is on YouTube). Sadly subsequent hunting through record stores didn't cough up anything at the time. I'd have to wait over 30 years.

When I did find it I felt like an excited kid sitting on the floor with the album cover in my hands listening to the 4 songs on the record. It seemed like the guys were just getting warmed up and that big things were around the corner. Sadly Graeme's health took a turn and that was all there was.

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and was one of the albums I really wanted to get back after a basement flood wiped out my vinyl collection in the 90s (when no one really gave a shit about records, and my insurance gave me a couple hundred bucks for an appraised $10,000 collection). Way back in 1984 my (dearly departed, and greatly missed) buddy Dave let me borrow his cassette copy that had a bonus track of " Get It On (Bang A Gong)" that when I bought the album didn't know it was a bonus track, or even what a bonus track was. If that sentence was hard to read just go back and skim it, I'm sure you'll get the gist. I'd find out later Billy was an off and on again member of Nazareth and wrote some absolutely killer songs for them. However, at the time all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the first cut "Baby Come Back" and proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another and closed out the album (sans any...

Styx - Paradise Theater

Styx was hands down one of my favourite bands as a kid. They were a strange band, even back then. They were a hard rock, almost progressive at times who had a penchant for sucky ballads. I know there's a tendency for people to zero in on "Babe" as the song that killed the band's credibility. The roots go way back to almost the beginning when Styx released "Lady" on their second album. It showed a side to the band that needed to be kept in check, and for the most part the band kept things on a pretty tight leash. The band had been setting a gruelling pace, releasing an album a year (two in 1972) and by the time they released Paradise Theater (if I end up writing theatre later it's because that's how we spell it here) in 1981 they'd dropped ten albums in less than a decade. I snapped this up as soon as I saw it, and it became a fixture on my turntable. Like the band had announced on "Borrowed Time" from 1979's Cornerstone , "Don...

Lighthouse - Sunny Days

Bin diving at my local record store where there were more than a few choices to make. After picking out a half dozen treasures, I figured I'd stop looking and leave before I caused myself trouble at home. Lighthouse was one of those ridiculously large bands in the early 70s I didn't understand. I mean really, BTO was just four guys, The James Gang was three, until they weren't, what in the world do you do with a dozen guys in a band? Of course I had a radio — it was the first significant purchase I made with my money from cutting lawns. I think at the time it cost about 35 bucks, and had FM and other high frequency things I never got to use living out in the suburbs away from the reach of the big city FM signal. "Sunny Days" was a great song. I remember thinking it was cool and didn't switch to the other AM station when it came on. A few years later, when I got my first record player, the obligatory K-Tel anthologies would feature a myriad of cut up and edited...

Old Enough to Forget

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