Wednesday, October 8, 2008

The Bureau live at Jazz Cafe, tomorrow

The Bureau at the "Jazz Cafe"
Thursday 9 October

Jazz Cafe
5 Parkway
Camden Town London NW1 7

PG PUBLIC TRANSPORT
Buses: 29,134, 31,88
Tube: Camden Town(Northern Line)
Overground: Camden Road(Silverlink)

Doors 7pm
Reduced price tickets at £7.50 available for this show subject to availability when you book
here

Ex-Dexys Midnight Runners and Style Council founding members play from their new album.

After an explosive rupture with Dexys Midnight Runners, five visionary men created a fresh start, a powerful new band called The Bureau that immediately recruited two key players from The Upset and then enlisted a jazz trombonist. Blythe, Spooner, Stoker, Williams and Talbot, plus Brown, Jones and Taylor, rattled the rafters of a derelict night club with a battery of new songs and went howling through Holland in February 1981. By August they were touring the US with The Pretenders. Dealings with WEA were not smooth, and The Bureau's first album was easy to find in Australia and North America but unavailable in Britain. After a couple of other tours, financial treachery forced the band to stand down.

Late in 2002, Ian Jennings saw Archie Brown perform with his band, The Young Bucks. Being a great fan of The Bureau, he quizzed him about it over too much beer. Tracking down Taylor on the web, he got another thumbs-up, and began a trail of detection that led to a reunion in March 2003 at The Magnesia Bank in North Shields. Only Stoker, busy producing film music in California, was absent. In March 2005, WEA re-issued the long-lost album. There were two ecstatic launch gigs, at the Glee Club in Birmingham and Borderline in London. Crispin Taylor ably replaced Stoker on drums.

Nostalgia is one thing, but something else was stirred up by this re-creation. Defying geography, let alone history, The Bureau started to work on new songs, with Geoff Blythe flying from New York, and music and musicians flitting between London, Birmingham, Penzance and Newcastle.

In 2008 a brand new Bureau album was born, wryly dubbed "...And Another Thing". The old fire is still there, now colored and boosted with all the travails and travels of the intervening quarter of a century.
The Bureau:
Mick Talbot - Keyboards
Geoff Blythe - Sax
Pete Williams - Bass
Paul Taylor - Trombone
Crispin Taylor - Drums
Archie Brown - Vocal
Mr X - Guitar
*******
Jazz Café - Thursday 9 October - Doors 7pm
Buy tickets

No comments:

Post a Comment