As they ready new LP ‘Silver/Lead,’ Colin Newman and Graham Lewis look back on how they remade rock with landmark albums like ‘Pink Flag’
“…In the meantime, they put out a dancey, New Wave–inflected full-length, The Ideal Copy (1987), and decided they were finally ready to do a proper tour of the U.S. The thing is, though, that they didn’t want to play any of their older material…
“The idea was that if we played older songs, it would slow us down,” Lewis says. “Our manager at the time told us that if we were going to do that, we’d spend nearly all of the time explaining why we weren’t doing older stuff. So we went to New York and did press to explain it. One of the last interviews we did was with Jim DeRogatis, who has since become something of a legend in his own right. When the interview was done, he told us he had a band called the Ex-Lion Tamers that played Pink Flag. And I was like, ‘Oh, really.’ Bruce and I had been joking about how brilliant it would be if we had a cover band that played the first three albums, so I told him and our manager about it. It turned out Jim and his bandmates wanted to see America so they took their vacations and did the whole tour. Every night, we played [Modern Lovers’] ‘Roadrunner’ with them as an act of solidarity. It was just a great accident.”
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Audio/oral history version
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I’d heard about this mystery cover band that opened for Wire for years. It was such a brilliant idea, and I’ve been fascinated with the way it subverts ideas of authenticity and “folk music” within “punk”. But I didn’t know it was Jim DeRogatis’s band! Dude already had my respect for being the only mainstream music critic to regularly call out R. Kelly’s predatory bullshit for decades, but now this. I may not always agree with his music taste on NPR, but dude will have my undying respect (which no one cares about anyway).
