Stories From the War – Ten Ten

Yeah, I know. Sometimes I get in a groove as far as blogging goes and try to relate a new post to what I said a few days ago.

Such is the case today, where I'm going to talk about a Richmond, Virginia band called Ten Ten, whom I first encountered back in the summer of 1986 while I was working at U-68, the TV station airing music videos all over the New York City area.

Back then, there was talk of Richmond becoming the next Athens, Ga., or Austin. Besides this group of guys, who had just been signed to the more than respectable Chrysalis Records, there was the "can't miss" band Suzy Saxon & the Anglos.

Well, they did indeed miss. And so did Ten Ten. And I think I know why in the latter case.

Ten Ten was one of the many bands promoting itself during New Music Seminar week that July. The members stopped into the convention room we had rented to conduct interviews and talked about themselves. They considered themselves part of the whole "big music" movement led by bands such as U2, Big Country and the Waterboys.

Being a huge fan of this kind of music, as you might know from my previous posts, I couldn't wait to catch them live that night at the Ritz. I wasn't disappointed. Just a few years removed from seeing U2 and Big Country perform live at fairly intimate venues like the Ritz. I saw a band that had the makings of that kind of power. They played big sweeping songs that connected with the audience (or at least me) in ways that most groups couldn't. I was particularly impressed by their song "When It Rains."

I couldn't wait to hear their album.

A few weeks later, it arrived at the TV station. And I pounced on it.

Listening to it, though, I was profoundly disappointed. The production was way too clean and crisp. The drums sounded programmed, rather than organic. As a result, all the energy that I had witnessed at the live show almost disappeared. It was a profoundly discouraging experience. I thought I had seen the makings of the next big thing. And, of course, I hadn't.

Ten Ten never did hit it big. Their album Walk On (1986) got a few spins because of their cover of the Plimsouls' "Million Miles Away" (a little too straightforward for my taste). But it wasn't too long before it started showing up in cutout bins.

A sidenote: Now that I've seen the South Park episode where Cartman forms a Christian rock band and snaps that ridiculous cover photograph, I am profoundly amused by Ten Ten's cover, which resembles it way too much.

Having just listened to the album again after 20-plus years, I'll admit my judgment was a little harsh. "When It Rains" is really quite a nice song. However, here's where I circle back to what I was talking about earlier this week: How much better would this record have been if Steve Lillywhite had been brought in to produce it? This was a band that definitely could have benefited from the sonic clamor of his technique. This is a band that needed to sound big. And Lillywhite definitely would have been the man for the job.

Oh, well.

Anyway, here's the song. Enjoy it. And imagine what could have been.

Play "When It Rains" by Ten Ten

Stories From the War – Thinkman

Yes, I was once a victim of one of the 80's great musical hoaxes.

My first job out of college in the summer of 1986 was as a production assistant at U-68 in Newark, New Jersey. Those who lived around the New York City area at the time might remember the channel. For a brief amount of time, it was an over-the-air equivalent of what was then MTV: Wall-to-Wall music videos, flanked every once in a while by newscasts that were light on the news and heavy on the entertainment. (Steve Leeds, my boss, would in fact go on to become a bigtime executive at MTV)

To bolster our news content, we took over a conference room at that summer's New Music Seminar and started filming interviews with whatever artists happened to stop by. I'll share some of the stories about those visits in later posts, but today I wanted to talk about Thinkman.


Thinkman was the creation of Rupert Hine, who had recently hit it big as the producer of the Fixx, Tina Turner, Howard Jones and Chris DeBurgh. He had also just scored the Savage Steve Holland/John Cusack film Better Off Dead, with one track on the soundtrack credited to Hine's new band called Thinkman.

At NMS, Hine was with his bandmates promoting their first album called The Formula. The first single, a catchy bit of synth-pop called "Best Adventures," was accompanied by a lavish, futuristic video. I sat down with Hine and the band's drummer Joe McArthur.


Download Best Adventures by Thinkman

It wasn't a terribly memorable interview, I have to say. I talked to both of them about making the album, Hine about his recent success as a producer and why he now wanted to make his own music. I think I even posed a few questions to McArthur about his drumming. In the above picture, he's the babyfaced kid standing in the center back behind Hine.

The one thing that stood out for me was Hine's comments about how he wanted the band to be as proficient at making videos as it was with making music. Thus, he planned to have a video filmed for every song on the album.

I remembered those comments when I learned something several years later after the interview: Thinkman never really existed. The Formula was actually a Hine solo album with him playing all the instruments with the exception of Stewart Copeland contributing some drum tracks and Fixx guitarist Jamie West-Oram playing some riffs. The other "members" of the band – McArthur, Andy Paris, Leo Hurll – were actors hired by Hine, who wanted to try something different after his first two critically acclaimed solo albums had flopped.

The actors weren't even using their real names: McArthur was actually Greg Crutwell, Paris was played by Andy Baker and Hurll was portrayed by Julian Clary. If you've ever watched the 1997 movie George of the Jungle, you've seen Crutwell. He played the sidekick of Lyle van de Groot (Thomas Haden Church).

Hine would go on to record three albums under the Thinkman moniker, none of them terribly successful commercially. Eventually, he admitted the whole truth about Thinkman.

But not before pulling the wool over the eyes of some kid who had just graduated from college.

Back to the 80's: The Unforgiven

In the wake of the early 80s success of both Big Country and U2, labels were on the lookout for another guitar-heavy alternative band that would be the next big thing.

For a while at least, the Unforgiven were thought to be one of those up and comers. Landed by Elektra after a fierce bidding war, the band had already composed what would become its only semi-hit, "I Hear the Call," an anthem that stakes the group's territory as the United States' answer to The Alarm. It appears on their self-titled debut album, which was released in 1986.

Download "I Hear The Call"

The band, which took its name from a John Huston western, had the obvious western motif going for them. Which led their agency to allegedly send a copy of their album to Clint Eastwood, hoping he would direct their first music video. No reply.

Fast forward to a few years later. The band had all but broken up. All of a sudden, Eastwood releases a movie in 1992 called "Unforgiven" and, according to at least some band members, the font on the promotional poster is almost identical to what was used on the band's only album.

Let's take a look:

Here's the album

and here is the movie poster.

Pretty similar if you ask me though my wife (who is a former magazine editor) says the fonts are completely different. So I'll trust her.

You can learn more about the band at this web site, which has music downloads, streaming videos and interviews with former members of the band. Guitarist John Hickman went on to become one of the founding members of Cracker.

Unfortunately, that's the way things happen in the music business: Sometimes, you win an Oscar. And sometimes you get sent to the cutout bin.