Business Controlled is the name I gave myself when I did live performances and recording. Basically they were my songs performed by me, with some cover songs thrown in to the set list. When I took these songs and played with other musicians it stopped being Business Controlled, and it became "Frenzy", "Nightmares in a Damaged Brain", "Havana Affair" etc. When I was not in any band I went back to being Business Controlled.
The name I took because that is what I felt like at the time, we were all controlled by business, from the pen and paper I used to write my songs to the clothes I wore, the leather jackets and the drink I drank, in short Capitalism. The music I wrote was anti-establishment but it was still controlled by business men. The punk bands that were anti-system, “Crass” for example, were still going through the system to get their music out through distribution outlets. We could not escape it, it was/is all around us.
It is fair to say the songs I wrote started life not in a band but in this solo project, I wrote them mainly on acoustic guitar and Business Controlled performed with an acoustic guitar, perhaps once or twice I used an electric guitar. I was unlucky to be around the same time as Billy Bragg, he was doing his solo performances and often I would get calls from the audience “New England” once at The Wheel, I started to play it as a skit, to the hecklers amusement, then I stopped it after a few seconds and I told them to “fuck off”. It was nerve racking going out of stage solo, to stand up in front of a critical crowd with an acoustic guitar and sing songs that you have performed only in your bedroom or while busking. The picking was never right, the sound was never right, and the vocals were all over the place. But I did it...we did it.
I did my first recordings on a 2 track “Reel to Reel” player; it was recorded by a man I did not really know, he was the boy friend of girl from Trinity called, Julie Thwaite. We did the recording at their home, I played the acoustic and then sang over it on a different track. I recorded 4 songs. One of the songs there is a break in the guitar and the vocals is left floating…don’t ask me why?
Years later, I did a youtube video of one of the songs with a lot of photos; it is like a collage of images to the backdrop of music. I performed the song “Pravda” with the group Frenzy, but this recording I did by myself on my 4 track Marintz recorder so it is really a Business Controlled recording. I am playing all instruments, except the drum machine! There is a rhythm guitar and a lead guitar, bass and vocals. “Pravda” is a Russian word meaning “truth”. I had been studying Russian language and I used the word for the title. It is one of the first songs I ever wrote, and it was inspired by the Sex Pistols’s “Anarchy in the UK”. The music is using the original chords and ideas.
Some of the songs that were written for Business Controlled, and performed by other bands:
A Day in a Million (Nightmares in a Damaged Brain, Havana Affair)
A Man of your Screams (Hadrian's Ward)
A Slow One (Nightmares in a Damaged Brain, Havana Affair)
All Pigeons Have Flown Away
Black Pigs (Frenzy)
Bristol (Frenzy)
Britain for All (Frenzy)
CND (Frenzy)
Emotions (Porcelain Dolls)
Fools or Heroes? (Frenzy)
I am Lost (International Dole Cheques)
I have Found a Dream
Job Prospects (Frenzy)
Life (Frenzy)
Mentor (Nightmares in a Damaged Brain, Havana Affair)
Mr. Time
Pravda (Frenzy)
Solidarity
Take Away the Pedestal
The Hole (International Dole Cheques)
The Island (Hadrian's Ward)
The Master Race (Frenzy, Hadrian's Ward)
Trust a Friend
You Can See Why?
Youth Explosion (Me, Kate and Susan)
War Child (Me, Kate and Susan)
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