“Our Songs Are About The Human Condition”: The Sound Discuss Their Classic Albums

Remarkably, The Sound actually recorded Jeopardy in its entirety during a week’s worth of feverish activity before they’d even signed a record deal.

“The album was kind of ready-made for Korova,” Mike Dudley comments. “Steve put up the cash for it, and we went into what was then the old Elephant Studios, in Wapping, and did Jeopardy in a little eight-track facility upstairs, in this kind of old, ruined warehouse, with canvas strung across the drum booth, so the rain didn’t come through the roof and hit me while I was drumming.”

“In those days, Elephant was little more than a hole in the wall,” Bailey adds. “Half of it was like a building site, and they also had this little room with the studio in it. I’ll never forget it – it had a leaky roof and they had polythene sheeting all the way across the ceiling, with a balloon in the middle that collected the water when it rained. When the balloon was full, they took it down and emptied it.”

Despite the precarious state of the amenities, The Sound still recall the Jeopardy sessions – and its skilful engineer Nick Robbins – with fondness.

“Nick was just so easy to work with,” Bailey enthuses. “He would break any rules or try any experiments we wanted, like recording the snare drum with loads of tape distortion. He wouldn’t question us, he’d just do it. We were recording in this little eight-track studio, but using it like a 12- or 16-track studio. When it came to the mix, literally all of us had something to do on the board, so it was great that Nick was so hands-on. He was a natural extension of what the band was about, and we’re still in contact with him now. Making that record really was a lot of fun.”

Soon after finishing Jeopardy, The Sound bagged a deal with Warner offshoot Korova Records. Already home to Echo And The Bunnymen, Korova was set up by the future chairman of Warner Music UK, Rob Dickins, and A&R man Greg Penny, who signed The Sound after witnessing one of the band’s powerful early live shows at The Moonlight Club in West Hampstead, London.

“They were a hoot, actually,” Bailey recalls of the label bosses. “Rob Dickins had a great sense of humour. He credited the Jeopardy sleeve to Howard Hughes, when he was actually behind it himself. Rob was a really good bloke, even though we probably pissed him off a bit.”

He adds: “The whole attitude back then was that you didn’t trust major labels, they were going to rip you off. Well, guess what? The only label that treated us well was Warner. In fact, I’m still getting regular royalty statements to this day, so I’m delighted they’re reissuing these records now.”

Bailey and Dudley are equally enamoured of the way their debut album turned out. Undoubtedly the most adrenaline-fuelled record of their career, Jeopardy contains a number of The Sound’s most-loved tracks, such as Heartland, the epic Missiles and the edgy I Can’t Escape Myself, which has amassed an impressive 6.8 million plays (and counting) on YouTube.

“The two albums of ours I really like the best are the ones book-ending our career – Jeopardy and Thunder Up,” Dudley says. “A lot of people tend to favour From The Lions Mouth, and I can understand that because it’s a very well-produced and professional-sounding album, but I love the energy of Jeopardy. The songs are a lot fiercer, and they all still stand up to scrutiny today. Things like Heartland and Heyday, they’re all songs about the human condition, so they’ve got a universal appeal.”

“I think Missiles is one of the best tracks of all time, and it’s really fun to play live,” Bailey says. I remember us playing a really wild version of it at [Holland’s] massive No Nukes Festival, in 1982, and I still feel the same way about the song’s sentiments now – as I’m sure Adrian would. I have no problem with nuclear energy – that will save humanity. But nuclear weapons? Why? Why are we making them if we really don’t want to kill each other? It’s completely pointless.”

‘From The Lions Mouth’: “Adrian started to come into his own”

Following the release of Jeopardy, The Sound began touring in earnest, making the first of the countless European treks they would embark on over the next seven years. During this period, they performed at Dutch venues such as Amsterdam’s Paradiso and Groningen’s Club Vera, both of which would almost become homes from home for the group. Looking back, however, Dudley and Bailey are astonished by the devotion they inspired in Europe, and the Netherlands in particular.

“I still can’t really explain why they liked us so much over there,” Dudley admits. “Except that the UK music culture was much more tribal back then, and it was largely governed by which cultural gang you belonged to, whereas in Holland they didn’t care if you were a goth or a New Romantic or whatever. When we played festivals over there, we saw funk acts, extreme art bands and groups like us who were broadly post-punk, and the audiences enjoyed all of it.”

“We actually didn’t like playing in England at all, apart from The Marquee, in London, which was our stomping ground and always great,” Bailey furthers. “Most of the UK audiences were generally apathetic towards us, and I don’t really know why. I just know we got a much better reception whenever we played in Holland and Germany – and also Spain and Italy.”

Nonetheless, The Sound recorded much bigger, more majestic-sounding music for their second album, From The Lions Mouth, which should have impacted on a global scale. Firstly, though, they underwent an important change of personnel, with Colvin “Max” Meyers replacing Bi Marshall on keyboards. Meyers, who died from an AIDS-related illness in 1993, had been playing with an early line-up of the venerable London art-pop outfit Cardiacs, but his departure from that band handily coincided with Marshall leaving The Sound.

As Dudley remembers it, Meyers “came over for a rehearsal and it was great. After about 20 minutes, we asked him if he’d like to join, and he agreed. It was all very simple. He was a really good keyboard player and he had a good imagination, plus he played a bit of guitar and could sing on stage, so he was pretty much a multi-instrumental genius.”

With their classic line-up in place, The Sound ventured to Rockfield Studios, in South Wales. to record their second album, From The Lions Mouth, with Hugh Jones, who had made a name for himself producing Echo And The Bunnymen’s Crocodiles and Heaven Up Here albums.

From The Lions Mouth contains acknowledged Sound classics such as Winning, Sense Of Purpose and Silent Air, but while Bailey and Dudley both acknowledge that Adrian Borland was making giant strides as a songwriter (“Lions Mouth is more or less all Adrian, and that’s when he started to come into his own,” says Dudley), neither bassist nor drummer recall the rural Rockfield experience with much enthusiasm.

“It didn’t really suit us at all, because everything we’d previously done came from slightly grubby London studios; it was full of tension and energy, and you can hear that on Jeopardy and the Physical World EP,” Dudley says. “Hugh was a very talented producer and, in retrospect, the album sounds great on a good hi-fi, so it’s churlish for me to complain in that sense. But while Lions Mouth was beautifully produced, it lacks the grit of our live sound.”

Bailey adds: “It didn’t capture the essence of The Sound. If you listen to the versions of the Lions Mouth songs, like Winning and Sense Of Purpose, that are on our live album, In The Hothouse, then you hear what they should sound like. From The Lions Mouth just didn’t have that feeling – though, on balance, it contains many of our best songs. Why they weren’t considered commercial, I don’t know.”

Released in November 1981, From The Lions Mouth received excellent reviews in the rock press. NME drew comparisons with Joy Division’s masterpiece, Closer, and Melody Maker’s Steve Sutherland even concluded that the album could mark the end of the line for him and rock records because “it’s that good”. Yet while The Sound again toured the record aggressively – and appeared on BBC TV’s The Old Grey Whistle Test – the album fell short of commercial expectations, putting the group in a difficult position when it came to making their next album.

‘All Fall Down’: “It was my favourite album of ours to work on”

“Our relationship with Korova did sour when Lions Mouth failed to take off,” Dudley says. “In fairness, we weren’t the easiest band to manage, and it never gelled because of the lack of communication between us and the record company. That’s borne out by what happened next, because after Lions Mouth bombed, they suggested we write more commercial songs like Duran Duran. But that was never going to happen!”

Instead, while The Sound’s third album, All Fall Down, contained some of their most resonant songs in Party Of The Mind, the towering Monument and the glorious, dreamy We Could Go Far, it also found the band pursuing a radically different direction – albeit one partly dictated by circumstances.

Contracted to make an album every year, but exhausted from lengthy periods on the road, The Sound had scant new songs ready to go when they started recording All Fall Down. Turning to material that Borland and Bailey had earmarked for a Second Layer album, the band hybridised these starker and more electronic-based songs to suit The Sound.

“All Fall Down sounds like the follow-up to Second Layer’s [1981 debut] World Of Rubber combined with a Sound album, hence all the experimentation with the drum machine and the synths,” Bailey explains. “Again, we ended up working with Nick Robbins as our co-producer, at Virgin’s studio, The Manor, which – in my opinion – was the best studio we ever worked in.

“We also had Flood [U2, Nick Cave, Depeche Mode] as the engineer,” he adds, laughing. “When we first walked into the studio, we were carrying these two lengths of metal. One was 12 feet long and the other 16. We told him these would provide the percussion on the song Glass And Smoke, and Flood just looked at us in awe. You could see he was thinking, Oh my God, what am I dealing with here?”

Bailey’s and Dudley’s views on the album differ. Bailey calls it his favourite of The Sound’s records, though Dudley is a little more ambivalent. “It’s a bit of a curate’s egg, that one,” he says. “It does have some decent stuff on it. Monument, Party Of The Mind and We Could Go Far are all really good songs, and Glass And Smoke I like, too. It’s very jagged and atmospheric, and I like the metronomic beat I added to it.”

In fact, All Fall Down has divided opinion ever since Warner first released it, in October 1982. “I think even when we were making it, [Warner] were thinking of letting us go,” Dudley says. Yet with the benefit of hindsight, Bailey notes, “We weren’t selling many records, and we’d created one which obviously wasn’t going to sell millions. But so what? It’s not easy listening, but I love it. It was my favourite album of ours to work on.”

The Sound’s legacy: “Adrian’s songs make such a personal connection”

Divorced from the hubris of the times, All Fall Down – like Jeopardy and From The Lions Mouth before it – sounds like an innovative, envelope-pushing record by a singular post-punk band deserving of considerably more recognition. After this initial stage in their career, the group went on to record more excellent titles for different labels, before Adrian Borland’s mental-health struggles contributed to The Sound’s split in late 1987. In retrospect, though, it’s clear the band had already accrued an enviable body of work before they left Warner – and it can now be celebrated all over again thanks to the vinyl reissues of these three landmark titles.

“Does it surprise me that we’re still talking about The Sound now?” Mike Dudley says. “No, not really, because Adrian wrote great songs, and it’s great music. The Walking In The Opposite Direction documentary also reawakened a lot of interest in the band. And, of course, the internet has helped to bring us to the attention of new fans, and that’s such a great thing.

“Also, from a personal point of view,” he adds, “I still have imaginary conversations with Adrian, even to this day. And I’m 73 now. So that’s clearly an indication that the eight years I spent with the band were really the most important years of my life.”

“I think Adrian’s songs make such a personal connection that when you listen to the words, you feel like he’s singing directly to you,” Bailey adds. “And a lot of people pick up on that.

“But also,” he concludes, “each album was always a new project for us, and we never wanted it to sound like the one before. If you play any track from Jeopardy and follow it with one from All Fall Down, you probably wouldn’t think it was the same band. Perhaps that’s why the music still sounds so strong today.”

Buy The Sound’s first three albums on coloured vinyl.