Episode #19 - Siblings

Heart, Little Queen (1977) | Raven, Rock Until You Drop (1981) | Rock Goddess, Rock Goddess (1983)

Now, we all know that by and large, when you’re a kid, siblings are a total pain in the arse. And it doesn’t matter which sibling you are, either - older, younger or middle, it’s all the same.

If you’re the eldest then life is generally a relentlessly soulless daily slog of fighting doggedly with your parents to get simple privileges like staying out until 9pm when you’re 14, only for your 11-year-old brother or sister to be automatically rewarded with the same privileges even though they’re two and a half years younger and barely able to form a coherent sentence.

And your reward for being the human snowplough that clears all of life’s unfair shit from their path? Being thrown under the parental bus when they somehow managed to spot you chain-smoking your way through a ten pack of Embassy No. 6* behind the electricity sub-station.

And if you’re the youngest, life is generally a relentlessly soulless slog of watching Big Bro or Big Sis being allowed to do things that, by rights and all reasonable logic, you should be allowed to do, too. Which is obviously unfair.

And the only way to get your own back is to rat them out to Mum and Dad after your binoculars caught a glimpse of them smoking behind the electricity sub-station. And just for good measure, you rub salt into the wound by stealing the confiscated pack of Embassy No. 6 because you know Mum threw them in the dustbin.

Yeah, having siblings is a drag when you’re in your teens.

But in this episode of the pod, the boys manage to find three rare creatures indeed: three sets of siblings who got on so well as kids that they decided to form a band together and spend even more time in each other’s company. How mad is that?

This episode cropped up as the lads were busy organising a chat with Jody and Julie Turner from Rock Goddess, so having already decided the girls’ 1983 self-titled debut would be one of the trio of platters coming under the microscope, the boys asked Jody and Julie to decide which two albums they’d be up against ...

Heart - Little Queen (1977)

By the time Santa put on his big red coat and set off on his sleigh on Christmas Eve 1985, it was almost impossible for anyone to be unaware of the existence of the Wilson sisters who were at the heart of, well, Heart. Their self-titled release earlier that year saw veteran producer Ron Nevison transform Ann and Nancy from the butter-wouldn’t-melt willowy folk rock muses of the 70s and early 80s into bonafide power rock titans.

But nearly a decade earlier Heart had swanned into the public consciousness aboard the Dreamboat Annie brandishing a broad canvas of rock/blues/folk songsmithery that had critics falling over their own hyperbole to hail the band as ‘the female Led Zeppelin’, something that at the time, if not now, must have seemed crushingly dismissive of the contribution made by the other - unapologetically male - members of the band.

If you ignore the release of Magazine - an unauthorised pressing by their label Mushroom Records that ignited a wildfire of conflict between band and record company that ultimately consumed their partnership - then Little Queen is cast into the role of sophomore release: that follow-up record that can often prove the undoing of otherwise more than decent outfits.

Not so, in this case, it transpires. The cover hints at the romanticism of gypsy life. There are trees. There’s a Romany caravan. There's a sense of wood nymphs and fairies. And there’s also a sense that there are only two people that really matter in this vignette, and that being the case the still unapologetically male members of the band are cast into the shadows of the album’s cover art, bit-part players in the virtuoso performance of a two-act play.

But whilst the visuals may scream dandelion coronets and buttercup wristbands, this is a record that also had bite - as the Sadmen were about to discover.

Raven - Rock Until You Drop (1981)

Ha’way an’ shite, man! The boys are up in the North East of England for the second album of the podcast, dropping in on the Gallagher brothers to check out Raven’s debut, which hit the shops towards the end of the two-year heyday of the NWOBHM movement.

While Raven is unlikely ever to be among the first dozen band names out of any metalhead’s mouth when asked to list the most important bands in heavy metal’s early history, it’s certainly fair to say that the Tyne and Wear three piece have their place in the movement’s genesis.

Brothers John (lead vocals and bass) and Mark (guitars) were joined by Rob Hunter on drums for a release of organised banging and clanging that owes much to the punk roots of metal. It was banging and clanging of sufficient scale and ambition that the band attracted the attention of home town indie record label Neat, who would also later boast fellow Tynesiders Venom and Tygers of Pan Tang, among others, in its stable.

The banging and clanging eventually coalesced into Rock Until You Drop, which became the label’s inaugural studio album, with the catalogue number 1001 (#1000 had gone to a long-since forgotten compilation called Lead Weight - though Raven’s tune Inquisitor was the opening track on that, meaning that, if nothing else, the band still has the honour of being the first band to ever appear on a Neat-released album)

The big question for the lads, though, was whether the quality of the assorted banging and clanging matched its ambition …

Rock Goddess - Rock Goddess (1983)

And so to the siblings who quickly became the darlings of the music press. We’ll mention Girlschool in this episode guide only once - and that’s simply to say that whilst journos at the time were quick to draw parallels and concoct rivalries between the two bands at the time (two all-girl bands, both from Wandsworth … good lord, will the similarities never end? And how can they possibly expect to co-exist in the same all-girl microverse?) we won’t be.

There was a time when you couldn’t open a copy of Sounds or Kerrang! without stumbling across Jody or Julie Turner’s fizzogs. And for good reason, because this is a band that quickly built a reputation for hard graft, honest live shows, huge riffs and superior songwriting.

And as the column inches continued to grow - stop sniggering at the back there - so did the noise, both on stage and off it. While too many of those column inches concerned Julie Turner’s age (just 16 at the time) or the sisters’ relationship with that other ‘girl band’, there was sufficient focus on the band’s incendiary live shows and growing London following to secure them a slot opening the bill for Iron Maiden at the Reading Festival in 1982.

By the time they hit the stage that day, with original member and long-time schoolfriend Tracey Lamb on bass, they were still long on stage time and short on a record deal. Their set that day solved the problem. The issue for the Sadmen to get to grips with was whether what A&M Records saw and heard that August day translated into the album that followed just eight months later.

*Yes, kids - back in the day, cigarettes were sold in packs of ten as well as in packs of 20. Though if you were lucky enough to live near a tobacconist who wasn’t averse to selling his stock to under 16s, you might also have been able to pick up a single Sobrani Cocktail or a single More for a few pence. Admittedly you’d spend the first ten minutes looking like you were dragging on a garden cane, but hey - when you’re 15 and short on cash, a smoke’s a smoke, right?