"Pretty Maids” 1982 - 1983
Released: Nov 1983 in the UK on Bullit records (UK) and Par Records in the US. Everywhere else on Licensed deals or import.
The album was in march 1984 re-released in a remixed version by CBS Records throughout Europe.
The first song ever written by PM was Shelly the Maid, written at the end of 1981 by Hammer and his then brother in law. Next song was City light, written in the summer of 82. In the autumn of that same year the songs, Victims of Power, Nowhere to Run, Spanish Midnight, Fantasy, Children of Tomorrow, Warchild and In the Night were all written and demoed during January 1983 at a local demo studio. The demo simply titled Heavy Metal was first send out to some small unindependent labels and immiedetly caught attention by a company from the Netherlands called Rave on records and a little English label called Bullit records. We decided on Bullit, since we believed that Britain and the british press were the turning point for heavy metal at the time being. Signing with Bullit was the first mistake among many, in the years to come.
Being the young and rather naive kids (around 17 and 18 years of age), we simply signed and gave away our copyrights/ publishing rights for the next 50 years or so. To be honest, none of us really knew or cared for the content of that first contract. We just wanted to make a record and take it on the road, the sooner the better!!! The 'mini' album was recorded with Tommy Hansen at his local studio in our hometown of Horsens during april 1983 now including one brand new song called Bad boys. Tommy was a well known local guy who made his first serious musical move in the beginning of the seventies with a band called The Old Man and the Sea, some kind of a Danish pendant to Bands like Deep Purple etc. and that's what caught our attention. Besides that he was a great keyboard player and had a good set of ears for grooves and melodies. We financed the recordings and photo sessions ourselves and the lay out of the front cover was up to Bullit records. Oh my god, were we disappointed when we first went down to the record store to buy a copy of our first album, YES WE WERE !!! (and we weren't even sent a free copy, believe it or not). The front cover was so lousy and cheap looking, that we couldn't believe our eyes. The picture of a women in stockings on a red background with no head to be seen, ha ha. The story goes that the bitch was so ugly that they had to remove her head from the cover, not to scare fans away from buying it. Now that's what I call Spinal Tap.
After the recordings and out of the blue, we had an offer to support Black Sabbath in Scandinavia on their first tour with Ian Gillan. That was in August '83 and we were so exited and almost shitting our pants commiting ourselves to this, we were absolutely first timers out on the road, but it was an overwhelming experience. The Sabbath guys and crew were very kind to us. The album was finally released in England in November '83 and Bullit records called for us to tour with the albums release. They said: Come on over, we'll treat you like stars, we've set up a 10 date tour and everything was taking care of. When we arrived in England, needles to say, there wasn't taken care of anything. Most of the gigs weren't even promoted. I remember we played a gig in Leeds and there were only to security guys and a waitress, but we played anyway. We were based in an emty house in Stoke with no facilities at all, besides 6 madrasses. We travelled around England in the back of a van sitting on top of our gear in our sleeping bags. We were getting paid three pounds a day and bassicly lived of baked beans and French fries for three weeks. We'll treat you like stars, MY ASS!!! However, nothing could spoil our good mood and spirit, we were young, hungry (or should I say thirsty) and ready to take on the world. While we were there we managed to get some good rewievs in Sounds Magazine among others and also recorded 4 songs with producer Tony Wilson for the Friday Night Rock Show on BBC. We were recommended to Wilson by Ian Gillan, who obviously had remembered us from the Short Sabbath stint in August.
When we returned to Denmark we made an interwiev with a Danish Rock/Pop mag about the tour and new album and we told them that we had sold around 50.000 units in three weeks, they actually printed that in the mag and some A&R guy on CBS records apparently fell for our little exaggeration (that's the only time we actually fooled CBS, since then they've been fooling us) They wanted to sign us right away. We then Remixed the whole album in a studio in DK, added a few backing vocals and the album was released in Europe in March '84. CBS records gave Bullit a little bag of money and we were out of a bad deal and directly entered a new one (read: bad deal)
Next stop: Red, Hot and Heavy