Feels So Good…

As part of a rather spo­radic and over­due reis­sue pro­gram the sec­ond ever release on my (and Paul Rose’s) Pro­peller label, The Spelling Mis­takes’ Feels So Good (or Feel So Good — as per the front cover — nobody is really sure which it was exactly) has been rere­leased by New York punk, pow­er­pop and post-punk label Sing Sing Records, who have gone the extra mile to ensure it sounds bet­ter than it ever has.

This was the sec­ond sin­gle from the band, the first being the noto­ri­ous Reena (although it came out after the sec­ond when the band had signed to Pro­peller), a song writ­ten about for­mer Bass Player Keith’s girl­friend Rachel, but changed at her under­stand­able request. Rena Owen  - then a boot-girl although later of course an actor of some note — offered her name instead and so it was there­after and forevermore.

The inter­net needs a extended decent bio of this band and one may be on the way shortly, how­ever this isn’t it.

Formed in early 1979, The Spelling Mis­takes drew from two ear­lier Auck­land sec­ond wave punk bands, Get Smart (from whence came broth­ers Nick (vocals) & Julian (drums)) and The Aliens (Keith Bacon on bass, and War­wick Fowler on gui­tar). Fowler and Julian Han­son were both song­writ­ers and their tunes made up about 60% of their reper­toire, with the bal­ance being var­i­ous covers.

Keith Bacon left a month or two later to form The Secret Agents and was replaced by a 17 year old Sel­wyn Col­lege stu­dent, Nigel Rus­sell, who’d been in a band called Retrox that nobody remembers.

As the orig­i­nal Zwines crowd dis­persed and the venue became mostly dom­i­nated by night­club tourists who’d heard of the venue via the media, The Spelling Mis­takes began to play venues that were  out­side the nar­row range Auck­land punk bands had played ear­lier — sub­ur­ban halls, pubs, under­age clubs etc.

Sadly the worst of the Zwines crowd —  the boot­boys — fol­lowed them and they were soon banned from just about every venue in Auck­land despite the decent con­tacts their man­ager, Larry Young (who also booked a bunch of venues and the hugely in-demand Toy Love), had.

That they also slagged off almost every band they played with, them­selves, Larry and just about every­body else in town on a series of increas­ingly hilar­i­ous posters (and even a small book­let or two) that were instantly col­lec­table, didn’t help (a few are on this page, oth­ers are here).

As far as most venue own­ers were con­cerned The Spelling Mis­takes were untouchable.

Enter the 1980 Easter Rock Quest at The Wind­sor Cas­tle Hotel in Par­nell. The venue was booked by Larry and the Spelling Mis­takes were thus entered in a two day bat­tle, fol­lowed by a final, which, given the num­ber of post-punk bands lin­ing up, was guar­an­teed to fill the place.

Three things fell into align­ment: The Spelling Mis­takes needed a record deal (although to be fair, just about every NZ band needed a record deal as there were round about none going in those pre-indie days), I’d just started a label to try and solve that prob­lem and The Spelling Mis­takes were on my short­list of two bands I wanted to launch with (the other was The Fea­tures), and the prize was a day’s record­ing at Hugh Lynn’s Mas­cot Stu­dios in Eden Terrace.

Rea­son­ably, given their pro­file and their songs, The Spelling Mis­takes were in with a chance. But chance wasn’t some­thing that either Larry or myself wanted to reply on, so the judg­ing panel was selected on their overt SM’s friend­li­ness. Over the three days there were five or six of us. I was on the panel each day, as was super­star radio and TV DJ Barry Jenkin, with Rip­per Records’ Bryan Staff and John Doe both putting in a day or two each, plus John Dix and Hugh Lynn.

By the end of the last day The Spelling Mis­takes were clear win­ners. There was one more band to go — from Welling­ton (the only band from Welling­ton to enter) came the oddly tagged The Ambi­tious Veg­eta­bles. They’d been late to the show and missed the pre­vi­ous two days of heats — they were slot­ted straight into the finals. And shit, oh dear, they were good. Really, really good.

How­ever, it wasn’t to be — we had too much invested in get­ting The Spelling Mis­takes into the stu­dio, and Larry quickly arrived at the judg­ing table with a tray of beer jugs. After some six hours of judg­ing with freeflow beer on hand that day, we were tee­ter­ing any­way. This pushed us well over the edge and The Spelling Mis­takes were declared win­ners. I have no idea whether the result was manip­u­lated or not, but that — I think — was the intent of those last few jugs.

The Ambi­tious Veg­eta­bles went back to Wellington, changed their name to The Mock­ers and all was well.

The Spelling Mis­takes entered Mas­cot a cou­ple of weeks later and — with Fane Flaws from The Croc­o­diles on the desk as pro­ducer (and Steve Crane as engi­neer) — they recorded (but didn’t mix) the Feels Good A side within the allot­ted day’s stu­dio time.

The next day Fane mixed the A side and mas­tered it, at the same time speed­ing it up a little.

We still had no B side, so the next day, with no more free time, I spoke to the stu­dio man­ager Pat Crowe, who agreed that he’d advance us a few hours. The band went back in the next night and with Barry Jenkin recorded two more tracks, I Hate The Spelling Mis­takes, and Hate Me Hate Me.

I left late in the evening think­ing it was done, but found out the next day that the band had reworked the tracks until the early hours.

Pick­ing up the mas­ter tapes later that day I was given an invoice for close to $1800 (the other sin­gle I’d recorded at the same time  - The Fea­tures’ City Scenes — had cost under half that with no free stu­dio time).

I’d taken Bryan Staff’s advice and cob­bled together a deal with Ode Records to man­u­fac­ture these for me and a cou­ple of weeks later had fin­ished copies — with the pub­lish­ing some­how cred­ited to Ode Music (!) and a huge scratch across the front sleeve — some­where between my place and the print­ers some­body had etched a line on the art, and you can see it to this day.

I sold the sin­gle in to retail­ers around Auck­land and — bang, with­out warn­ing — it entered the NZ chart at 29 the next week. It was a WTF moment, but I knew we’d sold the sin­gles — one record store had re-ordered three times in two days.

Within hours of the chart I was con­tacted by some­one at RIANZ, the folks who put together the charts, ask­ing if I’d done mali­cious things to the chart returns, which were man­u­ally com­pleted in those days and noto­ri­ously both inac­cu­rate and rigged. The prob­lem was that New Zealand records — inde­pen­dent NZ records with­out proper dis­trib­u­tors more-so — sim­ply didn’t chart at all back then, even those we now think of as clas­sics of their era.

Other retail­ers rang me, as they’d been called too. It was num­ber 10 in Auck­land (there were city charts in those pre-networked days)!

A cou­ple of days later I had a call from a guy at Phono­gram — would I be up for putting the sin­gle on the next vol­ume of Solid Gold Hits? They’d pay us $2000 upfront — and I instantly saw a way out of the stu­dio bill. The studio’s Pat Crowe, tall and large of girth, an impos­ing fig­ure who famously liked to cross-dress (and also man­aged their sis­ter secu­rity com­pany and Mojo’s, a Trans­ves­tite strip club), wanted his money and was ring­ing daily.

I’d taken to hid­ing out the back of the store when I thought I saw him coming.

I stood in the record shop I worked in — Taste Records — with the cheque for $2000 grin­ning. A hour later the Phono­gram per­son returned — they’d heard the record and hated it. I was handed back my mas­ter and the cheque was stripped from my hand.

The first press­ing of the sin­gle — 500 copies — sold out in the first week or so and I only had the money to cover another 250, thus it was deleted when we’d sold some 732 (the other 18 were band and my prom0s, plus one to Radio B).

We still owed the stu­dio about $1300 (I’d used the few dol­lars I had in hand from sales to pay a bit, plus my record store wages) and the band had almost no earn­ing power as they were banned from just about every­where. A few gigs out­side Auck­land, and the odd show in the city at punk-friendly venues like XS Cafe pretty much broke even.

To add insult, I went to Ode, who were han­dling most retailer invoic­ing. The deal I had under­stood (and to this day am still sure of) was that I would pay Ode 15% to cover their admin — I would then pay all costs. Instead I was given a 15% roy­alty (no idea where the pub­lish­ing went) and told thank you.

$160.

Thirty two years on, you can buy it at the above link (or most good record stores) and save your­self some US$250 on eBay (unless you really want an original)…

And a live ver­sion from the AK79 reunion gig in 2008:

And vis-a-vis noth­ing, an odd­ity I found today of Chris Knox doing Toy Love’s Pull Down The Shades with the SMs at a 2004 one-off reunion gig:

Tagged with: Chris Knox • propeller • Spelling Mistakes