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Ghost Dance Discography : Recording Diaries
 The Grip Of Love
Released on Karbon 31st October 1986
Catalogue no. KAR 604T
Track listing:
- The Grip Of Love
- Last Train
- A Deeper Blue
- The Grip Of Love (a cheaper blues version)
The Grip Of Love saw another slight shift in the balance of power with Etch contributing to the songwriting for the first time and new guitarist Richard Steel featured.
Etch had come up with the musical framework for Grip and the legendary chorus bass riffs – I can remember us playing the song to death in the rehearsal room at Allathea in Wakefield one afternoon just alternating between that and Last Train with Dave Beer and his mate Lee Bennett sat pissing themselves listening to them over and over. Etch handed over the backing track for me to come up with some words – they were by far the most straight-forward I’d ever penned, just based on a couple I knew who had that Richard Burton, Liz Taylor type of attraction/repulsion. The song worked brilliantly live from the start and the lyric sort of came to represent the loyalty of the core following and that bond rather than any notion of romance or whatever.
Etch also had a hand in the writing of Last Train although he didn’t know it. When I’d first met him I’d conducted a sort of audition in the garden shed at my girlfriend’s parents house – I’d asked him to play bits and pieces that I’d got and then asked him if he had any songs himself. He’d played the usual assortment of prog-rock bollocks he liked but also a riff which sort of became the verse to Last Train through osmosis. I wrote the song at a later date without any reference to his idea, but found I’d used a similar progression so his little lick worked perfectly with it. I hadn’t knowingly ripped it off, if anything I was ripping myself off with obvious similarities between it and Celebrate. The lyric took shape over a period of time – we first played the song live in Coventry in January ’86. I was so chuffed with the music that I convinced Anne Marie to sing it with a lyric I was still finishing in the van on the way down.
I don’t remember all the lines but the opening was different: ‘all this talk is going nowhere, round in circles haven’t you heard, tomorrow’s calling…’ I much prefer the finished, ‘let the dust form and cover my tracks..’ Although the train/tracks imagery is used (and again there’s a hint of romance in the lyric on face value here and there) what I had in mind when I as writing the words was me and a group of mates going out when we were about 17, getting completely smashed and tearing up the back-roads in the villages around Hull surfing on the roof of a battered old mini doing 70 mph, hanging on for dear life. That feeling you get when you don’t give a shit what you do as long as the night and the feeling doesn’t have to end.
A Deeper Blue was one of the last of the ‘carry-overs’ from the Sisters. I had written a lyric to the tune which became Nine While Nine which started with the lines ‘the colours fade somewhere inside…’ I had the tune in my head long after and just finished it without a guitar while walking in Wakefield – it all happened very quickly, I was imagining the guitar hooks and coming up with the words at the same time. I always think of it as a Wakefield song. I went back to the guitar and figured out the riffs I’d been whistling and found they worked with roughly the same chords as Nine While Nine. This meant everything on the proposed 12” was built around D minor, hence the sub-title Suite In D Minor which was definitely a jokey reference to Etch’s prog and neo-classical leanings which thankfully only found their way out of the bag on Spin The Wheel.
I toyed with the idea of spelling it Sweet because of the glam rock back-beat to Grip (essentially it sounded like Blockbuster, Can The Can, and half of Gary Glitter’s back catalogue to my ears).
 We recorded it almost as soon as Heart Full Of Soul was released, again going to Woodlands. This time we took a seasoned producer in with us in the muscular shape of Richard Mazda who Nick Jones knew through various bands on the IRS label that Richard had worked with. He had worked with the Birthday Party among others which impressed me and Anne Marie– it was the more commercial stuff he’d done we had in mind at the time though, as we were pretty close to being signed by a major after the indie chart placings of River and the first week showings for H.F.O.S. and were keen to show our "cross-over potential". So keen were we that an hysterical version of Grip was almost demoed with an out and out pop producer called Nicky Graham (he had put together Bros and Ant and Dec and is still busy in the teen pop market). I say almost demoed, because Anne Marie skilfully managed to fake a black-out rather than have to sing to his re-worked backing track. I hope she still has the rough recording, it was pure pantomime.
Thankfully we didn’t go down that route and Richard Mazda’s treatment of the tunes is ok – I think he would have preferred a more organic line-up, certainly the drum machine sounds a bit lame on it now, but he brought a lot of energy to the studio. We asked him to play harmonica on Grip – he wasn’t wild about his performance but I thought it made for a good bonus track on the 12” and dubbed it ‘a cheaper blues version’ for fairly obvious reasons. Steely plays a little bit on the tracks but there isn’t really a full indication of what he had up his sleeve.
The cover got back to the no photos of the band principle, opting instead for a reproduction of an obscure painting from the 15th Century I found on another visit to Wakefield Library – it’s comic and a little unsettling at the same time (pretty much the band’s position in relation to the ongoing goth debate by this point). The wings were tidied up by a mate of Nick’s.
I still really like the sleeve although the yellow’s a bit naff.
Other diaries:
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