Three cassettes from Leicester’s Finest. This was quite an eBay find. Disclaimer: I didn’t first clock them, the link was sent to me. Less than a minute later and I had blagged them. £12, free postage, job’s a good ‘un.
And the cassettes aren’t bad either. Decent audio quality, and two and half cracking albums. Here we have the Shakespeare Alabama debut, the Flipped b-sides bits and bobs, and then the over-produced and career crushing Decency.
Someone should get round to writing a book about DPW and how such a talented band failed to ignite. That someone should probably be me. But I I’ll stick to hit and miss blog posts. A conservative estimate would suggest that I’ve seen the band 50+ times over the past three decades. My setlist collection backs this up.
I’ve got various versions of the Shakespeare debut: the original CD, the outtakes CD, a live CD and now a cassette. But oddly no vinyl.
It’s fitting that the cassette copy is now in my sweaty palms. The spring and summer of ’89 was spent racing around the rolling Wolds of South Nottinghamshire, pub to pub with DPW playing in a car cassette player. For an added bonus we had a couple of Forest Wembley motorway trips thrown in for fun.
This is an album that I forever associate with the onset of spring. It sounded particularly uplifting as I play tested the cassette this morning with the first buds starting to poke through on the wisteria.
Flipped is a little pants. It was a filler album to make some money for the Food label. A couple of years later and Blur came along to take care of that.
After the flop of Shakespeare Alabama, there was high expectations for Decency. It’s a great album with an 80’s production trying a little too hard to sound like a mid 60’s West Coast production.
But DPW were by now a band out of time. Even the City of Death Grebo scene had left them behind. Crazyhead were many things, but a polished West Coast retro band they most certain’y weren’t.
And that was pretty much it for mainstream DPW. The Vs the Corporate Waltz album was just that: a very personal and bitter collection of songs rallying against the music industry on an obscure indie label.
No one was listening. Apart from those South Notts slightly older pals. Pub to pub Friday night rampages were now scattered around the country; the Wembley Wembley days with Forest had dried up.
Thankfully DPW haven’t. The annual City of Death Christmas gigs have been on the back burner for the past couple of years. The Let It Melt album from 2019 was just about worth the price of a download. I can’t say that I’d fork out for a cassette version though, even if one existed.