Photo by GeorgeIain Glenn
It’s the day before Christmas Eve 1981. Young Scottish trio APB are on a train to London to record their first BBC session. It turns out to be the most exciting trip of their lives—in the worst way possible.
“It could have been the end of APB,†says drummer George Cheyne, and he’s not just talking about their career. “We were involved in a train crash,†he explains. “We were traveling down from Scotland. There was a train traveling north which was carrying some kind of industrial pipes. Apparently, some of them had been hanging off that train, and our train hit it. So, all the doors and windows were smashed down the whole side of the train. It was December, so it was freezing cold. And we sat in the middle of nowhere, north of Newcastle.â€
Alive, but somewhat worse for wear, the band eventually reached the legendary Maida Vale studios to make a giant step towards their musical destiny, as chronicled on The Radio 1 Sessions. “The cover of the Sessions CD is actually us at Kings Cross station feeling like shit after having been up all night,†reveals singer/bassist Iain Slater. “That’s us arriving at 10:00 in the morning. And I had a terrible cold as well—there’s a hanky in my hand from blowing my nose. I’m sure that the three or four hours we were stuck there didn’t help either. I managed to sing alright.â€
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But the three lads from the little village of Ellon in the county of Aberdeen would have to journey much further than London to find a crowd who’d enthusiastically embrace their music. Marrying funky grooves to punky guitar and pop-y sentiments, APB’s infectious sound eventually found a surprising haven: The New York suburbs of Long Island.
APB’s influences were very American. Slater and guitarist Glenn Roberts started playing together in high school in 1977 but with a different drummer. By the time Cheyne came aboard, they had found their sound. “When punk came along, that changed us from being heavy rockers,†explains Slater, “and then funk came along and changed us from being punkers.†But the biggest shift arrived when Slater and Roberts made a holiday trip to France. “There were all these DJs playing [funky] stuff,†remembers Slater, “and I came home and bought loads of Parliament albums and Funkadelic albums. We had just turned 19, and it became like an obsession for me and Glenn, and it rubbed off on George.â€
“It definitely did,†agrees Cheyne. “I remember hearing a funk track, might have been [1980 Zapp hit] ‘More Bounce to the Ounce,’ on a transistor radio, and thinking, ‘What’s that amazing music?’ I didn’t know it was even funk.†By that time, APB had already been approached by tiny Aberdeen label Oily (named for the county’s status as a major oil source), who released the band’s first single, the punky “Chain Reaction,†in January 1981. But APB’s big eureka moment came with the creation of a song that would change the course of their lives.
The band was deeply immersing itself in funk, with Cheyne onboarding the influences of James Brown and early Cameo, and Slater and Roberts soaking up the P-Funk sound of Bootsy Collins’s bass and his brother Catfish’s guitar. “That was how I wrote a lot of songs actually,†says Slater, “just playing along with their songs and, ‘Oh, that bassline might work.’ And obviously when we played that exact same bassline, because we couldn’t play it very well, it sounded completely different.â€
After finding their way to funk through trial and error, they eventually arrived at the thumb-popping groove and urgent assault of “Shoot You Down.†It signaled a fresh start. “With all these straight-ahead punky songs,†says Slater, “that one stood out. We enjoyed playing it more than the other ones, so we tried to write other ones like that one.†Next thing you know, Scotland had its own answer to the punk-funk fury of English iconoclasts Gang of Four—with one major variation.
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“I Loved Gang of Four,†states Slater. “But our thing was completely different.†Instead of Go4-style strident political statements, Roberts—the band’s wordsmith—started penning sweet love stories. “[Gang of Four] were more political, more angular, more angry. And we were a bit more poetic and lovey.â€
In July 1981, Oily released “Shoot You Down†as APB’s second single. It went to No. 6 in the British indie charts and snagged the attention of UK radio’s biggest tastemaker. “Me and Glenn were in a local hostelry in Ellon playing pool,†remembers Slater. “Somebody came round and said, ‘John Peel just played your record on the radio, and he says if anybody knows them, to tell them to give him a phone call,’ because he wanted to give us a session. We thought he was taking the piss. Then we went home, and the phone started ringing.†The increased exposure from the first of the five BBC sessions APB would record over the next three years helped them build up a busier UK gig schedule. But soon, their sound was bounding across the Atlantic.
In New York, hot club DJs like Ivan Ivan, Mark Kamins, and Mark Fotiadis became infatuated with “Shoot You Down†through Rockpool, an indie organization distributing records for club and radio play. Supply and demand played a part. “Oily probably didn’t have the wherewithal to actually mass produce [enough copies],†says Cheyne. “But I think, in a funny way, the fact that there weren’t that many copies of it was actually a good thing.†DJs clamored for extra copies of the single so they could create ad hoc dance mixes of it in NYC hotspots like Danceteria and The Mudd Club.
All this was happening unbeknownst to APB—until American manager/promoter Mark Beaven reached out. “Oily got a call out of the blue,†recalls Cheyne, “and it was Mark Beaven making contact to try and take us across [the pond].†Beaven brought the band over for their first U.S. tour around September of ‘82 and duly became their manager. By this time, singles like the dewy-eyed “Palace Filled with Love†and wistful “Rainy Day†had appeared, showing that APB could conjure multiple moods while maintaining fiercely funky grooves.
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But while a cabal of cool DJs were spinning APB for downtown NYC hipsters, something more intense and significant was happening about 40 miles east. Garden City’s WLIR, one of the only commercial stations in America devoted exclusively to New Wave, was quickly becoming a cultural force—and they latched on to APB. More than four decades later, the guys can still rattle off the names of supportive LIR DJs like they’re tallying first cousins. “People were telling us that [LIR] was playing us every hour,†says Slater. “We went, ‘Oh come on, that can’t be true. But apparently, it was true! No wonder it grew quite quickly.†Cheyne chimes in, “It was Larry the Duck, Malibu Sue, Donna Donna, Dennis McNamara—he played it first.â€
Next thing they knew, APB were making guest appearances at the station. The response was so overwhelming that LIR kept asking them back. “The phone lines would light up for hours on end,†remembers Slater. “They’d go, ‘People love you guys in Long Island!’†The acclaim quickly translated to a hardcore following for their Long Island shows. Slater spins out a litany of LI rock clubs where the band held sway. “We played them all,†he says, “starting with a place called Spit and a place called Spize, 007, Rumrunners, Heartbeat, Malibu—we played Hofstra University, Nassau Community College… At Malibu, we’d sell out, there were about a thousand people in that place; it was quite a big deal for us.â€
“The other thing is that WLIR had their record of the week,†Cheyne recounts, “Screamer of the Week, and we were fortunate that people had voted for a few of our singles, so that gave us a lot of airplay. And I guess although the transmitter power wasn’t that strong, the location of the transmitter meant that people in Connecticut could hear us, and people in New Jersey could hear us, and New York.†APB would play big NYC clubs like The Ritz and Danceteria and land in the rotation on college stations like WNYU, but Long Island remained their stronghold. “It just seemed to accelerate more in Long Island than it did in Manhattan,†says Slater.
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College radio play helped APB branch out into other American cities. Still, Cheyne observes, “I don’t think there were any other cities that we visited that appeared to have a station like LIR.†Slater adds that when the band toured around the country, “The New York gigs and Long Island gigs paid for all the rest of the trip.†APB’s renown in and around New York was enough to bring the big labels sniffing around. “I did sit down with [Sire Records founder] Seymour Stein one time,†says Slater. “And he said, ‘I’ll give you 15 grand to do an album now.’ So, I went outside and phoned our manager, and he said, ‘No way, we can get way more than that.’ So, we turned Seymour Stein down. I didn’t know the complete history… I didn’t know that he was the guru of all time when it comes to a lot of stuff.â€
“There were at least three other opportunities,†says Cheyne. There was Wendy [Goldstein] at RCA. I remember she wanted to sign us.â€
“[Atlantic Records co-founder] Ahmet Ertegun took us out,†adds Slater. “We were kind of courted by a lot of these people.â€
“And CBS, was it?†Cheyne asks Slater. “We were taken to the building in Manhattan and had a meeting with a guy who saw us in Covent Garden years before.â€
“We played a club called Heaven,†recalls the drummer, “and there was an extra show which we stayed maybe half a week longer to play, because of the interest from Atlantic. And there was a brownout. The place was just boiling. The PA wasn’t working fully because of the power being low. I had sneakers on which were a colored suede, and the color of the suede went into my socks. I felt like I might keel over from sweating so much.â€
“Because that label was there, we just went for it,†says Slater. “And I thought, ‘If they don’t like that, they’re not gonna like anything.’ I thought it was the best thing we’d ever done in our lives. They passed.†When the stars failed to align with the majors, manager Mark Beaven released the APB singles collection Something to Believe In through the label he co-ran, Link Records, following it with the band’s first album of new material, 1986’s Cure for the Blues. By this time, APB had expanded both its lineup and its sound, adopting a poppier sheen and a dash of disco and adding percussionist Mikey Craighead and keyboardist Neil Innes (not to be confused with the identically named Brit of The Rutles/Monty Python fame).
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By 1989, Cheyne was feeling the need for a change and left the band, which evolved into Loveless before Slater moved on to other projects. But in 2006, APB admirers Young American Recordings reissued Something to Believe in and released the original edition of Radio 1 Sessions. They also brought Slater, Cheyne, and Roberts back together for the first time in 17 years to play some New York shows. Cheyne recalls the return trip as “a bit like pinching yourself that it really happened after 17 years. You’ve got this memory of this fantastic experience, something that was totally unexpected in your life. When we played the Knitting Factory [in ‘06] we went out for something to eat, and when we came back, the support act was on. The room was full of people. I honestly remember looking down from the upstairs balcony at all these people, thinking to myself, ‘That must be a popular local band, and all these people are here to see them.’ And, of course, they weren’t.â€
“I knew something amazing happened in the ‘80s that you couldn’t plan, you could never make it happen, it just happened. I think it meant more to me because that was the only place it was happening for us to that extent, to have that following—people just showing up and wanting to see us and knowing the songs.â€
“Still when we go back, people turn up with 7-inches and t-shirts to get signed,†interjects Slater.
“I never envisaged we’d go to America,†Cheyne admits, “and never envisaged we’d go back to America so many times and have records of the week and so forth. I did honestly feel kind of at home [in Long Island].â€
To underscore the point, Slater fondly shows a fan letter he’s kept since 1985 from a WLIR listener. The hand-scrawled note reads, “‘Summer Love’ is on the radio right now. I love the heavy drums and bass with the high, poppy vocal, and the guitar solo is great… ‘Screamer of the Week’ no doubt!â€
