It was exciting to be able to hear the individual tracks again after 40 years. I had always had the tapes, but didn’t think I’d be able to get them baked and transferred successfully, as the format was odd: 2 reels that were synced up during recording, so I knew there would be some drift between the tapes. The chances of the 2 machines they had at this small project studio in Elyria Ohio in 1983/4 being perfectly calibrated and running at the same exact speed weren’t super high, but there wasn’t too much nudging we had to do. The engineer I worked with there at the time was professional and knew his stuff. He was literally the adult in the room. It was just he and I, except the day Fraser recorded his vocals. One thing I remember about that day was that he had to get them all done, as he was leaving for the Army the next day.

We were high schoolers that were already in bands playing in Cleveland bars despite our ages, though we still lived in a relatively suburban area. Fraser’s mom was from Scotland, so he had visited the UK and brought back incredible records a couple years prior to this project. It was a combination of this plus what we heard on college radio at the time that went into the musical direction, and Fraser’s lyrics were somewhat tailored to fit this sort of thing, but some were short stories and poems he had written the past few years. “Betrayal In Three Acts” is about a breakup he went through, even though I sing lead on that one. He was a fully developed and mature writer at 15 when we met.

The style I was writing in was drawing on music that was released 2-3 years prior in the UK mostly, though one was a Chrome type thing, which was San Francisco. We were definitely 2 of 3 or 4 kids in our school that were aware of Siouxsie, Chameleons, Killing Joke, or Chrome.

It’s hard to say, because I know where the songs come from, or what we were sort of trying to sound like. I guess in these songs resulting from digesting those influences, they became their own thing. “Decade Of The Worm” to me probably is the most sophisticated thing I’d written up to then, and I dig the chord progressions of that and “Lurker On The Threshold”. Lyrically, I think “Betrayal” is timeless, and anyone today would do well to be able to write bitter breakup lyrics as good and as pithy as those.

There are more GbV albums on the horizon, I’m working on solo things, and one of the projects I recorded with Scarcity Of Tanks’ Matthew Wascovitch, band name Flowers Destroy, has an album called Hawks Listen that is being released right now. It’s Matt on vocals, Jonny Bell on bass, Raul Morales drumming, and Norm Westberg and I on guitars. We recorded it during the first years of the pandemic, and it’s on Total Life Society records.