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.

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 band, 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 , ...

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and it 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, which included a bonus track of "Get It On (Bang A Gong)." When I eventually bought the album, I 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. At the time, though, all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the opening cut, "Baby Come Back," then proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another bef...

Garfield - Strange Streets

I'd seen this before in the bin, but kept flipping through the stacks. I'd see it a few more times, each time stopping to look at it a little more. There was something kind of cool about the cover where the stylized Celtic knot had the dotted yellow line - it was a strange street for sure. I pulled the record out of the jacket and I was struck by the centre image. There was the familiar Mercury label, the same one I'd seen a thousand times on BTO's Head On album. Well, I'd bought things based on odd associations before - like when I had to buy anything that Solid Rock Records released (this was generally a good thing) - so who knows, maybe this was a hidden gem. There weren't any real scratches or rash, just a lot of dirt and dust. It seemed to clean up okay, but we'll see how it goes. The album opens with the title track, and this wasn't straight-ahead pop or rock. It was leaning toward the progressive, but with a pop bent. Oddly enough, the vocals rem...

Old Enough to Forget

Search This Blog