Vinyl, Abbey Road and Pieces of Gold

Pieces of Gold HQ Audio Download

With the current trend of bands returning to releasing vinyl records I’ve cast my mind back to 1990 and the making of Pieces of Gold.

With the original Pieces of Gold everything happen in the space of a couple of days. I remember I was getting over an operation I’d had on my back to fuse two vertebrae together and I had plenty of time to just write. So it was a Saturday evening and I wrote out the whole of the lyrics pretty much within an hour. I based the theme on the song on an article I’d read in that day’s newspaper about how the gap between rich and poor was getting greater each year. Then on the Sunday I sat down with my keyboard and came up with the simple riff and recorded it straight to tape. Within a week I’d got all the tracking done. My influences at the time were REM, INXS, Talking Heads and Roxy Music.

I had recorded & mixed four tracks in my studio at Warp Farm throughout January and February and then put them out on a cassette to see which two tracks would be the best for a single. Once everyone had chipped in with their thoughts we decided on Mandy is Missing and Pieces of Gold.

In June, I went down to Abbey Road studios in London to finish the mastering and cut the master lacquer. At the time Mandy is Missing was slated for the A side and Pieces of Gold the B side. I went down to observe and was very impressed by how much they were able to do. The mastering engineer had just finished working on MC Hammer’s latest single.

My songs were both over 4 mins 20 secs and therefore getting a bit on the long side. This meant that we couldn’t have the bass as “deep” as we would have liked. The options were: edit it down to 3 and a half mins, release it on 12 inch or leave it alone. We left it alone and I was still overjoyed at the end result.

When we passed around the test copy it soon became apparent that Pieces was going to be more instantly popular than Mandy. So, we put it out as a double A under our band name 1159. This set off a sequence of events. Firstly we got some good reviews in the music press which then got 5 record labels asking to meet up with us and the chance of a major deal. Secondly we got a letter from another band called 1159 threatening legal action if we continued to use the name. This led to me having to get the singles re-stickered that had already been manufactured. It was at this point I decided that I would always put stuff out under my own name since it is my belief that you can’t sue someone for using their own name.

Stuart

Below is the video of the new recording of “Pieces of Gold”, March 2018.

Pieces of Gold

I’ve seen them on the dark edge, seen them in the shadows

Watching all the fast cars, watching all the girls

And the cold wind cuts across hands, see the cold eyes of an hungry man

The rich girl she didn’t understand, dancing in her party land that goes on

And man up made the bomb, where’s he coming from

The man who pushes drugs, who gets his love

And the men who burn the trees, what they gonna leave

And the man who sells the guns, what’s he tell his sons

I don’t believe what I’ve been told

They’re killing the world for pieces of gold

And the man who pulls the trigger, I can’t figure

What’s he getting on, who’s right he’s wrong

And the men who want to lead us, my God they needs us

Cause the men they’re going to bleed that’s you and me

There’s nothing left we’re left in debt