"Jump the Gun" / "In Santas Claws" 1987 – 1990
"Jump the Gun" / "In Santas Claws" 1987 – 1990
In November '87 we booked ourselves into some studio and rehearsal facilities in northern Denmark, called the Stuk Ranch. We were determined to do a quick follow up to Future World or at least that was our intention. We had no ideas at all so we literally had to start from scratch. We spend a good week there but most of the time we fooled around with some foolish cover song, making a joke about one of our roadies. However we got one song written while we were there. It was Over and Out and I guess a little bit of Attention, but bad luck already started to rear its ugly head. One night we went into a bar/discotheque in a nearby city to clear our heads (with alcohol naturally). During the night most of us left and went back to the farm, but Phil and Alan decided to stay there. Phil obviously got into some fight with one of the local rednecks and ended up with a broken arm. So he had to record the demo we did for Over and Out with one arm in a sling and we went home. On the way back we passed by the newly rebuild Puk Studios to check out their new facilities, Judas Priest were there recording their Ram It Down album and we were amazed with what we saw. The rest of the year we didn't do much mostly because of Phil's broken arm.
We started '88 off with a one of gig in Denmark in late January. That was the last gig with Angel Schleifer. Angel had an offer from German rockers Bonfire who at the time was doing pretty well. Angel who lived in Munich found it a little easier for himself to team up with Bonfire for logistic reasons. And besides that I don't think he ever learned to cope with our sense of humor, which I guess we can't blame him for, he he. So we went on as a five piece once again and for the first time, I guess we felt like we hit the wall as far as songwriting goes. We literally didn't know how to move on after the success of Future World, and were maybe just a little scared of not being able to deliver the goods one more time. What so ever it was up the hill during the spring of '88 all we got written was Partners in Crime and Youngblood (a left over from the Future World sessions, originally called Too Much Too Fast and then Radar For Love). Late spring we were contacted by our old friend and once manager (in the early days). He'd met a guy in Copenhagen who was really up for the job as second guitarist. He's name was Ricky Marx; he was Danish but had actually lived in Geneva, Switzerland for the most of his life. We called him up for an audition and we learned very quickly that his Danish grammar was pretty fucked up and on top of that with a French accent, we saw many possibilities for a good laugh. And that we had! Besides that he was a great guy to be with, shared our sense of humor and was a good guitarist. We hired him and he moved up to Denmark to settle down permanently.
During the summer we did set up our own studio equipment in our rehearsal room, made basically for demo purposes. Phil, who was a technology freak, had during the years build his own 24 channel mixing console and was so to speak the mastermind behind all this. That resulted in some really good demos of the new songs that were being written at the time being. Because suddenly the inspiration and the ideas came up to the surface and songs like Attention, Lethal Heroes, Headlines and Savage Heart were all written in the late summer of '88. We also wrote a song called Dancing on Fire but didn't find it good enough to go on the album at the time. Both Kenny and I have frequently searched for it since that but has never been able to find the tape of that song. As I remember it definitely had its good moments, maybe some of the old members have a copy or it's just lost in the gems. We now felt we were about to have the right balance of songs for a new album and started looking for a producer. In September we went to Copenhagen to see Deep Purple and after the show we had a chat with Roger Glover and handed him the demos of the new songs for him to check out. He wasn't uninterested and we agreed that he'd give us some feedback when he returned back home to the states. Shortly after we had a call from Roger who really seemed to like the material and In particular one song draw his attention and that was Savage Heart. Rog was convinced it could be a big hit and during the recordings the following year we did so many takes of that particular song just to get it absolutely perfect, that at the end of the day I guess no one could tell the difference anyway. As we waited for Roger to finish of his touring commitments with Purple we didn't really do much for the remaining part of '88 apart from a one off gig under a pseudonym name in our hometown, Horsens, where we mainly played cover songs and maybe one or two of our own songs In late January '89 Hammer, Owen and I went to America to do pre-production for the upcoming album and to look for a suitable place to record it. We were installed on a great and historic hotel called the Showboat in Greenwich Village, Connecticut, close to where Roger lived among the rich and famous. Everyday we went out to Rogers house where we worked on the material in his studio in the basement and when we didn't work we'd either play snooker, smoke a little spliff, drink a couple of beers and listen to Roger telling jokes. Roger would have a joke or a good story to every occasion and for us being old Purple freaks since we were kids, it was like heaven with all the stories and rock folklore we were being fed with. I mean we were sitting there in this enormous house with I don't know how many bed rooms. The walls were plastered with Platinum and gold discs of some of our favorite albums. On top of that Roger was an extremely nice and warm person, a gentleman in every sense and a really easygoing guy to work with. To this day we still meet occasionally whenever he's around. Rogers first intention was to record the basic tracks for the album more or less live in the studio or with a mobile recording set up, as he used to do with Purple, so we went down to the Bearsville studios where we recorded Future World to check out the locations once again.
Finally we all decided to record the album at the high profile Puk Studios in northern Denmark. Artists such as George Michael, Depeche Mode and recently Elton John had all been there. Back then Puk studios and all the facilities that followed was among the best in the world and it was naturally a very expensive choice too, but we didn't worry about that, at least not back then. We started the recordings in march '89 and continued until sometime in May, where Roger were called back to the states to audition a new singer for Purple, since they had fired Ian Gillan. The first week in Puk we spent trying to do a new version of Fantasy from the first album. We experimented for a while with programmed drums and samples but it seemed to take forever and then we dumped the whole lot and started from scratch. For some reason, everything we did on these sessions seemed to take ages since we wanted to make everything just perfect. We (the band) were really into Def Leppard's Hysteria at the time, but we were NOT Def Leppard and Rog wasn't Mutt Lange so at the end of it all Jump the Gun became much to polished and overproduced and lost a lot of the nerve and energy that the original demos in fact possessed. In hindsight we should have followed Roger's ideas about a mobile set up but I guess good ol' Rog got a little carried away during the process as well. On top of that I guess we the band also used our stay at Puk as some sort of a holiday resort and probably spent too much time dazzling around in the pool/jacuzzi area. As usual we also had our fair share of partying during these sessions, I mean we were out there on a field in the middle of fucking nowhere and after a while we were getting bored to death so we had to entertain ourselves one way or another and believe me, we were always pretty good at that. We also had our own chef in the studio serving all sorts of delicious food from around the world, mostly chili dishes, which caused some serious ring of fire in the mornings. On other occasions we dined and drank together with Scottish chart toppers Wet Wet Wet who was in the studio next door, they occasionally had food flown in from their favorite restaurant back home in Scotland. Who said MONEY?
The sessions did take a dramatic turn though on some Sunday afternoon. Phil Moreheed had just left the studio to go back to visit his family for a day when he shortly after his departure got involved in a serious car crash on his way home. We had a call from his girlfriend who told us about the accident and went straight out to the scene of the crash which wasn't far from the studio. When we saw the totally smashed up car we knew it was a miracle that he had survived. His hips were seriously injured and he had to undergo a big operation where a lot of metal parts were inserted into his hip, to give him back his capability to walk. When we visited him on the hospital, his mood and sense of humor was at least intact and we all agreed that our biggest concern now was how we could get him through costums in the airports with all the metal he now had in his body. We still needed some drum tracks to be laid down and with Phil out of the picture for at least 6 month or so, we had to get someone to finish it off, which was okay with Phil. Roger suggested that he called up Ian Paice to finish the job and since we had to get a stand in I guess that Paice wasn't such a bad choice. Paice agreed to do it and flew in from London and played on the track Youngblood and the intro for Rock the House. We actually filmed the occasion and there we were sitting, watching this legendary drummer playing on our record, in such a gentle an easygoing way. Fantastic. During June and July we did a few overdubs in either Puk Studios or Werner Studios in Copenhagen which was another great studio at the time. And finally we were done with the recordings. Roger suggested that we took the whole thing back to New York and mixed the album with an engineer that he had recently worked with, a guy called Mike Clink. We'd never heard about the guy before but he had in the past worked with such bands as Hall and Oates and was supposed to be a good man behind the mixing console. So we did put our faith in Roger and booked ourselves into the Hit Factory Studios in Manhattan. So in August '89 Hammer and I flew to New York and suddenly found ourselves in this great studio compartment which contained 4 studios in all. And we were in extremely good company there, Billy Joel was in one studio, Michael Bolton in another and Joan Jett and the Blackhearts occupied the last. Besides that, the atmosphere in the studio were pretty cold and boring, and so were the mixes we got done. Everything seemed to take forever and we weren't really going anywhere. The standard procedure during the mixing session was that Roger and Mike would spend all day coming up with a mix and Hammer and I would be called in late in the evening or early night to come up with our views on it and most of the time we decided to take a listen the next day with fresh ears.
One night we were sitting in the studio watching The Towering Inferno on the telly and since there would be nothing to listen to that night we decided to go back to our hotel. On the way back we passed an Irish pub and naturally had to check it out. Inside we met this woman who said she worked for playgirl magazine and she actually asked us to appear in the mag. To begin with we thought she was kidding us and we had a great laugh but as the night went on and the pitchers of Guinness were hammered down she became more and more serious and eventually offered us a flat fee right there on the spot. We thought it was a great joke, but she gave us her card so we told her we would give it some thought and staggered back to our hotel, totally shitfaced.At six in the morning just after falling asleep the fire alarm went on. I rushed out of the bed and went to look out of the window to find out there were fire engines all over the place 22 floors down under. Hammer was up too and with The Towering Inferno a little too fresh in mind, we hurried out to the elevators just to find there were not functional. We ran down the 22 floors to get the hell out of there and when we hit the reception we were told that it was in the building next door there'd been a fire call. And to make things worse we were told that the elevators wouldn't be turned on before noon so we had to climb up the fucking 22 floors again, with massive headaches and hangovers. Another night Bruce Payne (our then co-manager) offered us some VIP tickets for a baseball game, The NY Yankees against the Boston Red Socks at Yankee stadium up in the Bronx. I wasn't really into American sports as such, but Hammer was really up for it and I thought it would be fun to catch the spirit of it anyway. So we were brought up there in a Limo but were told to take care of our own transportation back to Manhattan which was okay. We saw the match and had a couple of beers and the occasional hotdogs. When the game was over we got out of the stadium and tried to catch a cab but that was totally impossible and after an hour or so we decided to start walking back towards Manhattan and see if we could catch one along the way. But there were no cabs to be found and we kept walking and suddenly everything started to remind a little too much of the American movies that we regularly saw, there were street gang type of guys staring viciously at us everywhere, pimps and hookers and you name it. People standing around these barrels on fire just to catch some heat and I did in fact expect to be mugged at anytime. It was pretty obvious that we didn't belong there and I guess none of us were in particular too proud of the situation. However we jumped on a bus just to get out of that area and later on finally cached a cab and we were safely back on Manhattan.
One day, Billy Joel, who was in one of the other studios, had the New Jersey mass quire in for a session. Mostly famed and known for their appearance on Foreigners mega hit I Wanna Know What Love Is. We talked about the idea of having them to sing on Savage Heart and everyone was up for the idea. So we approached them and they were in for it and naturally were paid well for their efforts. But that was a great experience to be a part of, I mean they were all more or less lead singers in the Aretha Franklin/Whitney Houston kind of league and never had we seen so much talent In one room, Amazing. But unfortunately that quire was all we got out of our three week stay in the big apple. When we returned to Denmark we took a short rest and then took another listen to the mixes we just had done in NY and nobody was pleased with it just sounded daft and did quite simply not come out of the speakers so we sacked the whole lot. THAT was a very expensive experience. During our three week stay in NY we spent around 150.000 euro and that was a lot of money back then and I suppose still is. We stayed on the highly fashionable Warwick hotel and booked ourselves into one of the most expensive studios for weeks with no result at all, apart from the mass quire. But money didn't matter as Bruce Payne said back then if we had a hit record. We didn't! Back home in September, we booked ourselves into Warner's Recording Studios and started all over again with a guy named Henrik Nillson behind the desk, a guy we had confidence in. So Roger came over and we mixed the album in two weeks and this time the result was satisfying. One night, during this mixing session Alan Owen, (who we brought along since he always had a good set of ears) suddenly disappeared. The day after we found out that he'd decided to leave the band as a permanent member. Quite a surprise! At the time being we were never given any sort of explanation for his decision. Later we found out that he didn't feel comfortable with the stylistic and visual part of being in a band, and the fact that he was born with a serious eye disease and was more or less born half blind didn't help the situation, I guess. What so ever, I always considered Alan a very essential part of the original line up, so it was a kind of a blow to me that he left back then. Next thing that happened was that CBS Records decided to postpone the release of the album until the spring of '90. Fed up with studios and the CBS decision we took the rest of the year off and as I remember did nothing at all.
In the beginning of '90 a group of Japanese record company representatives and journalists came over to do a big feature on the band for the Japanese magazines and radio/TV. The album was having a great reception in the Far East and our first encounter with a Japanese audience seemed to be within reach. In March/April the album was finally released throughout the world to rather mixed reviews. Overall it had a reasonable reception, but it wasn't maybe quite as good as people had hoped for after the long 3 year gap since Future World. And besides that the music scene had changed quite a lot, since it was now the sleaze bands such as Guns 'n' Roses who was the center of attention and heroes of the day. In our home country of Denmark the album was slaughtered, we're talking MURDER here. To begin with we did some in stores in various CD shops and some smart guy in the marketing department of CBS (now SONY) had the idea that the album should be promoted as the most expensive in Danish rock history. So SONY Denmark put a full page add in the biggest news papers in Denmark saying something like listen to the most expensive record ever in DK. Come and touch the guys. Come and touch the guys, MY ASS! I mean in a country where we have an unwritten law that says you're not supposed to think you are anything at all, you just don't do that kind of shit and the response came right away and like a boomerang. In honesty, the bad reviews in Denmark actually did hurt us quite a lot back then, we really thought we had a killer of an album and had put a lot of effort into it, but fortunately the reviews were mostly pretty okay everywhere else.
After some promotional trips around Europe during the spring, we set out for our first real European tour as headliners. We kicked off in Stuttgart (DE) in May and toured through Europe until something like late June where we finished of somewhere in France. We brought another SONY act called Johnny Crash with us as support and they actually kicked some serious ass. It was a kind of crazy tour, we really brought out the party animals to the max on that stunt and the Johnny Crash guys weren't any better, so it was a deadly or should I say wet combination. As far as I'm concerned, I actually have a pretty strong memory, but I must admit that there are quite a few black spots in it during that particular tour. Before the tour we teamed up with an English keyboarder named Dominique Gale who happenedto live in Denmark with his Danish girlfriend. He was a good and professional session player and we'd use him for several years to come, mainly for live activities. When we got back home we played the Roskilde Festival and a few others in Scandinavia and straight after embarked on a tour of the Swedish folk parks opening for Alice Cooper. In September we went to the land of the rising sun on our first ever Japanese tour. We touched down in Osaka and when we had checked through the customs and got out in the arrival hall I guess we were more or less blown away by the reception we had. There were hundreds of fans waiting for us (mostly girls), with flowers and all sorts of gifts. The same situation took place when we got to the famous Grand Hotel where loads of fans were waiting outside and inside the lobby. The Grand Hotel was the place where Deep Purple recorded most of their classic Made in Japan. Jump the Gun was a big success in Japan and more or less some kind of a break through over there. It was a sold out tour and a great experience for all of us. Everything was so different there compared to what we were used to in other parts of the world, the culture and their mentality, The Japanese were/are very friendly and seemed to be very dedicated to our music, they knew or wanted to know everything about us and our background and the country we came from. I remember that before going there for the first time we filled out some questions for some fan mag. One of the questions was something like: what would you prefer as a favorite gift and my answer was obviously a Carlsberg beer, since I actually thought it was a joke, but it wasn't. During our stay there almost every fan that did approach me brought me a six pack of Carlsberg and when I checked out of my hotel in Tokyo to go back home a quarter of the room were filled up with Carlsberg beers (am I exaggerating here? okay maybe a little). It almost brought a tear to my eye to leave all those cans behind. I also promised myself that if I ever was given the opportunity to fill out one of these questions regarding my preferable gift again, I'd write a Ferrari.
When we returned to Denmark we decided to go back into the studio and record a Christmas single to accompany a couple of weeks of touring in Nov/Dec that had already been set up. We wrote the song In Santas Claws and decided to make a cover of a song released back in '78 by a band called The Greedies called A Merry Jingle as a B- side. The Greedies was a band that consisted of Thin Lizzy and Sex Pistols members back then. We booked ourselves into the Werner Studios once again to work with engineer Henrik Nilsson. One night during the recordings we heard that Ian Gillan was in town doing a gig with his new band. So we went in to check it out and say hello. We met in a bar next to the venue and had a few drinks, we told him we were doing this Christmas song and invited him and his guitarist out in the studio for a listen. We got to the studio, got hold of a lot of booze and partied on throughout the night. At some point someone suggested that Ian should have a go at singing A Merry Jingle and he was surprisingly more than willing to do so. As drunk as a skunk (as we all were) he staggered into the vocal booth and gave it a full blast. That was a seriously funny session. In Santas Claws was released in November. Backed up by A Merry Jingle and three live tracks from that year's Roskilde Festival, as far as I remember the whole concert was recorded live and broadcasted live on Danish radio as well. We also set out on a mini tour of Scandinavia and a string of dates in Germany. And as fate would have, it would be the last tour with the eighties line up. There was an overall bad vibe in the band during that tour. I guess everybody was a little disappointed with the whole Jump the Gun situation. Times had changed and the people at SONY that originally had signed us up and been behind us were not there anymore. It was the same situation in America. The album was released as Lethal Heroes but there was no support behind it and it died pretty quick. We weren't too pleased with our management either and if it wasn't for the success that we'd gained in Japan, it had been a rather disappointing year for all of us. Not that Jump the Gun by any means was a flop but I just guess the expectations that were build up during the three years of writing and recording it were way too high. Personally I was fed up with the whole situation not the guys in the band but the management and the record company. So I mentioned to the others that I considered leaving and would think about it during the Christmas holidays. Shortly after Allan Delong decided to leave, he'd found a girlfriend and I guess she got pregnant and that was it for his part. Ricky Marx moved back to Switzerland with his girlfriend and we slowly lost contact with him. Phil Moreheed who had his own company producing amplifiers also left at the end of the day to put all his efforts into his own business. A few weeks into the new year I had a call from Hammer, we had a little chat on the phone and agreed to team up again and see if we could get some new stuff together.
It was like a new beginning really, and that's the foundation for the next chapter.
Comments
Posted On
Apr 30, 2010Posted By
WardeeJump the gun had such a melodic, yet focused intensity that to this day, it remains one of the best melodic rock albums I own. Thanks you.
Posted On
Jun 21, 2010Posted By
DragoGuys,JUMP THE GUN is a CLASSIC album,thanks for the inspiration!!!!!!!!
Posted On
Aug 13, 2010Posted By
SteveFor me, Jtg is a real classic. Full of melodies. Only Killers, no fillers.
Maybe with a harder edged production it received more success.
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