Sean Heaphy:

The recordings were owned by our producers, Tony Clark and Hayden Bendall. They paid for the recording out of their own pockets.

They were both in-house engineers and producers at Abbey Road, and had had some success as producers of the bands Camel and Sky. The recording of the album took about six months (maybe longer), in periods of a week here, a fortnight there.

The recordings of the singles and B-sides were either bought or leased by EMI for release on Parlophone.

We fell out with EMI after the failure of Eyes of Ice to reach the top 40.

What happened was… After the very near miss of 101 Dam-nations, EMI decided to pull out all the stops for Eyes of Ice. Without going into details, we had the backing of the entire company. For the first two or three weeks, we were getting some good radio play, lots of pop mag coverage and a couple of TV slots. We were lined up to appear on the Kenny Everett show (probably the best music slot on TV at that time) straight after the Top of the Pops , Thursday night - featured act - all that!

At the same time, EMI released Kajagoogoo’s first single - Too Shy - remember them?

Anyway, Limahl (the lead singer) was good mates with a top DJ at Radio One and he (the DJ) used his influence and got them some fantastic radio plays and the single started to take off. Good luck to them. Nice lads, deserved every bit of success that they got.

Unfortunately for us, EMI decided to change horses in the middle of the race and we were suddenly, second priority. The radio play dropped off, we were pulled out of the Kenny Everett show and Kajagoogoo were put on in our place and had a massive hit. Eyes of Ice only reached number 71.

You can imagine how pissed off we were. We rowed with EMI for months but we couldn’t work with them again after what they’d done.

( Mojo )


Micky Portman:

I played bass with Scarlet Party in their last year,they were my mates and the greatest live band I ever worked with,remember 101 Damnations? that song means even more now.. than then….

( BBC 6 Music )