Coventry Music Museum curator Pete Chambers BEM writes for the Observer.
MANAGE that!
Promotion, promotion, promotion, three key words that any person daft enough to be a band manager should try to live by.
Never miss an opportunity to plug your band, because if you don’t do it, there’s a strong chance that no one else will!
I say this as I was that manager, and if you allow me a spot of self-indulgence, I will try to explain just how it feels when you are committed to the success of a band that you fervently believe in.
Terminal Tears came from the ashes of Stoke Park School bands Wolf & Stoney Road and called themselves Wishful Thinking.
I came in circa 1984 and re-christened them Terminal Tears and gave them a new look.
Such was the trend of the time, image was important especially with the likes of King who were the big fishes then.
I chose a curly guitar lead motif for the guys and the dictums ‘The Hard Edge of Pop and Follow The Lead’.
The band consisted of Rob Home (vocals and guitar), Anthony Quinney (drums), Rich Piorkowski (guitar), Al Trickett (keyboards) and Nigel Kefford (bass) and roadie Greg Paprocki (sadly no longer with us).
A great bunch of lads who like many muso’s could either be extremely well focused or would want to behave like the average kindergarten class.
Thankfully the Kindi-moments were few and most of the time they would knuckle down to the matter at hand and rehearsals at the former Pitts Head in Far Gosford St were usually a fruitful affair.
Front-man Rob Home was a quality songwriter and singer and like myself he had a vision for the band but needed it to be defined by somebody (hence my involvement).
Rob could often make something mundane sound exciting and enigmatic, Terminal Tears used to do a song entitled ‘Towers of Silence’ and there’s one line in it that always blew me away and that was, ‘Who can picture what I’m thinking, when I think nothing at all’.
Simple maybe but also very effective.
Rich was a gifted blues guitarist and Anthony was the archetypal mad but brilliant drummer.
A demo was recorded at Cabin on the London Road we even did a jingle for Mercia Sound.
With my connections as a music journalist, I secured some meetings with a few A & R people I had got to know in London.
Let me tell you that a demo tape you have heard many times and always though sounded wonderful can suddenly sound the most awful thing when you are sharing it with an A&R man in the bowels of some big London record company.
So, OK the band never got signed, but that London trip will stay with me for the fun factor alone.
On the return undaunted we filmed a video and continued with a sort of a fanzine based fan club I called the Network.
I got out when I knew the band weren’t going anywhere, they split a few weeks later.
A new band called Car Party was promised, it never happened. Rich (my then son-in-law) and I formed the studio-based duo Exhibit A, got some good reviews from Paul Robinson of The Coventry Citizen (and he went on to be a producer at Radio One).
But I swore then that my band managing days were over.
