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Ghost Dance Discography : Recording Diaries
 Heart Full Of Soul
Released on Karbon 25th July 1986
Catalogue no. KAR 606T
Track listing:
- Heart Full Of Soul
- Can The Can
- Radar Love
A record which it’s fair to say was shaped by legal manoeuvring as much as any artistic considerations.
I was still caught up in contractual battles with the Sisters and, as the main writer in Ghost Dance, wanted to avoid any new songs (and money) being swallowed up in the process. Songs like When I Call and Last Train which were released further down the track were already well established in the live set so there was no shortage of original material.
Rather than lose momentum we decided to move quickly to follow up Rivers’ success and the covers EP seemed a good stop-gap.
Again the tracks were all things I knew and loved. I was a sucker for the simple three note guitar riff on the Yardbirds’ Heart Full Of Soul. I also loved its football terrace (oh oh oh oh oh) backing vocals which were a feature that would keep cropping up on later Ghost Dance songs like Blood Still Flows and Down To The Wire.
Can The Can and Radar Love were good choices because they actually allowed Anne Marie to sing higher up her range, part of the reason she got so into them live. The early songs I’d written for her were often pitched way down in her boots – as dumb as it sounds I hadn’t actually realised that there was a difference between male and female singing voices (particularly mine and hers).
 Anne Marie’s bigger role, coupled with the fact that they weren’t my songs and the fact we had become a band (with Steve Smith helping us out live for the first half of ‘86) made this more of a collective record than River. Etch had programmed the drums this time round and both he and Steve were more musical than I was. They could quite happily listen to a record and work out how it went because that was how they’d started playing, I had more or less played my first note on guitar when the Sisters made the Damage Done. The drums are far more like actual drumming than the first single with Etch putting in flams and stuff to get as close as he could to what was happening on the original records, (this might have been part of the reason we started to consider getting a real drummer soon after). Likewise Steve was keen to include more faithful renderings of the Suzi Quatro riffs – I just wanted the energy of the tracks and the broad strokes of the tunes same as the Sisters’ approach to covering things like Jolene and Sister Ray. It didn’t much matter to me who had played what in 1973.
It was really as a second vocalist that Steve was invaluable on this record. He had a much more rounded voice than me (I’d sung the outro backing vocals on River of No Return) and it helped warm up the sound of Anne Marie’s when she was singing at her top end.
We already knew Steve had decided to leave the band to concentrate on his own project Riprize before we had finished recording the tunes – it had always been sort of understood that he was just doing us a favour and that his own band took priority. The Heart Full Of Soul recordings and a Janice Long BBC session show a little of what he brought to the group.
We recorded the songs over two or three days in mid May at Woodlands in Castleford – the experience with the sound quality of River had forced us to upgrade to a more established studio. The surroundings were more like a normal mid priced studio and the record reflects that – it’s less adventurous but more consistent than its predecessor.
It must have been a slightly weird time because we had a bunch of gigs with Steve (including his emotional farewell in Wolverhampton) in between random days in the studio and we had also auditioned new guitarists and taken on Steely who was frantically learning the tunes to play his first gig on the 27th May.
The record stood up well on its release and sounded surprisingly fresh (if completely lacking in bottom end) when I heard it played recently at Chris Pugh’s 40th birthday.
I think apart from the legal issues the single’s other job was to point the way forward to the songs like Grip Of Love and Born To Be Your Slave which were less po-faced than the first batch of songs – more traditional rock at times but above all more fun.
The cover art broke with the established pattern on the front with a shot of Anne Marie photographed backstage before the London gig supporting New Model Army in February of ’86 by Jane Simon. It was a good photograph and given that she was more central to the success of the record I thought it was appropriate. We threw the logo on the front as well so that there was something for Anne Marie to be staring up at. It was clear that my drawing looked pretty ropey when it was enlarged – the more observant among you will notice it was re-vamped for the next release. You will probably also know that the 12” is available in two slightly different sleeves. The first pressing had to go out with a number of errors on the sleeve – no spine, the logo too near the top, the photo background visible, the name too small, the border lines stopping short of the edge… Nothing to lose sleep over but the second pressing was more like the sleeve was intended (although by that point we had all gone off the photo idea and wished we had followed the River format more closely).
Other diaries:
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