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Ghost Dance Discography : Recording Diaries
 River Of No Return
Released on Karbon 18th April 1986
Catalogue no. KAR 602T
Track listing:
- River Of No Return
- Celebrate
- Yesterday Again
- Both Ends Burning
A flawed but fantastic first record, featuring ‘Celebrate’, one of the perennials of the live set and the song which (in its re-worked, re-released form) is often cited as the final straw in the great Chrysalis sell-out debate. Ultimately the most ironic of song titles imaginable seeing as it capsized the good ship Ghost Dance and left us somewhere south of shit creek without a plectrum.
Back then it was all very different as the slender vessel cut its way majestically through the water.
The songs and the recording came about fairly quickly and Anne Marie and Etch pretty much stepped into ideas I carried over from the Sisters.
The lineage is fairly evident in the songs and the packaging.
I had the ideas for the original songs mostly in place by the Summer of 85 - I came up with the riff which features in the middle section of River sitting in the reception area in Strawberry Studios during the first phase of recording for First And Last And Always. At the time I thought it would form the main part of a new track, but I played around with some variations and came up with the bass line which is the real focus for the verses in River.
The chorus guitar line is pure Sisters (‘ ..all on one string and job’s a good un’ as Choque from Salvation was keen to point out). The way the riff steps up a string halfway through the verse was also something we did on the early Sisters stuff - Floorshow, Alice, Good Things…kind of a nod to bands like the Cramps who we all loved.
The Sisters minus Eldritch had actually recorded a version of the song which became Yesterday Again in Strawberry. It was originally titled Frail And Torn and Wayne sang my half finished lyric one afternoon along with the first draft of the Mission’s Garden Of Delight. We used to refer to Frail And Torn jokingly as a potential Christmas single for the Sisters.
Celebrate was sort of written in my head on my birthday while out in the Black Swan in Wakefield. My birthday was the same day as the Sisters’ Royal Albert Hall Show, recorded for posterity on the Wake video. I was going to play the gig and then didn’t (far too hideous a tale to go into here). I knew by then it was going to mark the end of the Sisters as a real band and knew a good many of the crew and the following who would be at the gig and the emotion surrounding the evening – Celebrate was sort of a song for and about the event I wasn’t taking part in. I viewed it fairly positively – it wasn’t meant to be a rant by the injured party or anything.
Lines like ‘and on this hallowed ground..’ were really about the reverence the venue and the occasion seemed to invite and a sort of mental picture I had of the human pyramids, arms aloft and the smoke reaching up into the dome.
I probably wrote the first verse separately at a later date after I’d sobered up.
The decision to do Both Ends Burning may have been mine as well. Certainly I knew the song better than the others as I’d picked up a copy of the sheet music for 10p in a charity shop somewhere on my travels and I really loved Roxy Music.
I liked the mix of sentiments and moods of the four songs and thought ‘We’re going down to the river of no return..’ was an appropriate opening shot – a sort of statement of intent. There was no abiding principle governing the direction we might take, we were just seeing were the wind carried us as the first line spells out.
We decided to call the whole thing River of No Return even though it wasn’t a single as such. I knew there was a Marilyn Monroe film and a song from it with the same title but I liked that reference. Robert Mitchum and Marilyn – me and Anne Marie (Wakefield and Keighley taking on Hollywood).
The actual recording was done with Steve Allen in Leeds in the freezing cold winter of 85-86. He had originally had a tiny studio in a rehearsal complex off Armley Road where I’d been with Wayne to record some new demos with him singing. We attempted the track which became Cruel Light but never finished it. I got on well with Steve and worked with him when he moved his gear into a room in his house and then into the location Etch and Anne Marie grew to know as home for a brief time. His desk had taken a bit of a hammering with the various moves and I think we had a maximum of thirteen channels working at any given time during the sessions.
It became pretty apparent when we cut the 12” single and had the test pressings back that the actual sound quality was awful with an unpleasant distortion across all the tracks. We pondered for a while whether to pull the intended release but a collective vote of ’fuck it’ one afternoon at Gobber’s place in Bradford ensured it came out as planned mid April ‘86.
The artwork followed the formula the Sisters had used to some extent with the famed Lady Of Shallot unceremoniously nicked and planted on the front cover. The back featured the wings logo I’d drawn based on a picture I’d seen in a book about American architecture (the full photograph formed the cover for Gathering Dust).
The whole sleeve design is a steal from the Carpenters Greatest hits – same colours, same layout on the reverse. There was even a song called Yesterday Once More on it which helped to confirm that Frail and Torn would have to change its name by deed poll. The album was just something I had to hand and again I liked the humour of inviting comparisons between myself and Anne Marie to Richard and Karen Carpenter – goth easy listening kinda tickled me.
It sounds mad listening back to it all now – River is too fast, the vocals are buried on Celebrate and Yesterday Again in particular and my drum programming, (I’d love to be able to blame Etch, but I’m pretty sure it’s me) is shite. None of that matters of course – it’s one of the great things about the band that we were never guilty of being overly precious about stuff like that.
Other diaries:
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