Drummer Wally Aylott from The Movers replaced Trev and we became White Flag. The highlight with White Flag was when we hired the Scunthorpe Library Theatre showing the cult movie Slaughterhouse 5 while we played. This proved to be a great success both musically and financially.

 

Negatives In Colour was formed because we wanted a new sound. Steve had gone to America by this time so Ray Wells joined us on keyboards with Pete Fenwick replacing Wally. We went to Strawberry Studios in Manchester and recorded our first single "Caught In Possession". It got some Radio 1 airplay by Andy Kershaw who described it as a real thriller! Looking for a different sound, I bought a Roland synth (just liked the name) and the first song we wrote was "Images On The Skyline". We demoed it and the following week we were down in London going round the record labels.

 

Quite bizarrely, sitting over a cup of tea in a cafe in Portland place I overheard two guys talking. It was obvious they were from Radio 1 , so I went over, introduced myself, told them what we were doing and asked them if they would take our demo. They said they got hundreds of tapes a week, however it turned out one of the guys was Peter Powell's producer and before I had got back from London he had contacted me at home and left a message for me to ring him. His exact words were "I have one problem, do I put you on the programme with Ultravox or Duran Duran".

 

 

 

RR: I recently got a lot of tracks put onto CD, some that I've not heard for twenty years. What is interesting is listening to the same song recorded in different studios. I think our best days work was when we recorded three songs in one day with Claire on cello at Ric Rac in Leeds. We put down "Ultimate Solution", "Spades" and "Can't Explain" all featuring Claire. That's what got us the deal with Beggars.

 

 

RR: There seemed to be a lot more bands doing their own stuff back then, covers bands tended to do the working mens clubs. There may be a lot of young original bands without an outlet now, I don't know, but what is impressive is that the live music scene is very healthy from a venues point of view. What I did like back then was the variety of the music, I used to wonder who their influences were but the band who stood out for me were The Bowsun Brothers, three very talented guys. Dennis Sheldrick, sadly no longer with us, did the artwork for Negatives In Colour's record label design.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We went on to have a video shoot for The Oxford Roadshow with 15 million viewers and a Radio 1 session with a fantastic producer and engineer. We also made a bit of history by being featurd on Channel 4's very first "The Tube" as an unsigned band. We had some label interest but nothing came of it.

 

So another name change, line-up and more of a guitar orientated sound gave us the new start we needed. Lulu Kiss Me Dead was formed with myself, Mick, Kev, Andy Figliuzzi (Figgy - now in Bootleg) on drums and Hux Davies on keyboard.

 

By this time we were constantly in London getting to know A & R men and publishers. Calvin Hayes, son of Mickey Most and who later went on to be in Johnny Hates Jazz was now an A& R man with a record company. He set up some showcase gigs for us after which we finally got some interest from Situation 2, a Beggars Banquet indie label. Other bands on the label were The Cult, Cocteau Twins, Nick Cave, Gary Numan and The Mighty Wah to name a few. The best thing out of it was that we were told John Leckie wanted to work with us - we knew of his work with Be Bop Deluxe and Smple Minds. We got a publishing deal with Spartar Florida