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Toy Love on CD

After 25 years

By Michael Jones

June 2005

 

It's been 25 years but at last the collected works of Toy Love are available on CD. Formed in 1979 out of the remains of Dunedin-based band The Enemy, Toy Love quickly became both a popular and important band in New Zealand. They released two singles, moved to Australia and recorded an album, then broke up back in New Zealand. It was 18 months from beginning to end.

Until now there was little of Toy Love available on CD. One song appeared on the EnZed compilation It's Bigger Than Both Of Us and three demos on the CD release of the AK79 album, but that was it. My copies of their two singles and album seemed increasingly valuable.

Last year I met up with long-term AudioEnz reader Chris Knox, singer in Toy Love all those years ago. Inevitably, the "when will Toy Love be out on CD" question arose. Chris indicated that something was in the works, something more than a straight issue of the singles and album.

And here it is. Titled Cuts , the double CD collects together all of the released recordings of Toy Love, plus many demos.

The first CD is the one that I will play the most. On this CD are Toy Love's singles and album in chronological order. First up are the two singles, Rebel and Squeeze (though curiously in reverse order), Don't Ask Me and Sheep . The fifteen album tracks are next, followed by the two songs from the b-side of the Bride of Frankenstein single, Amputee Song and Good Old Joe .

The second CD is titled Ceiling With Knives , apparently a possible title for the 1980 album. Two of the tracks ( Squeeze and Toy Love Song - different versions to the recordings on the first CD) had been previously released on the AK79 album. A third, Frogs , was released on the expanded edition of AK79 released on CD.

The remaining 16 tracks are demo recordings made in Auckland in July and November 1979, many of which never made it on to a released record.

It's no secret that the band hated the sound of the Toy Love album and were determined to "make it sound better" before its CD release. Dale Cotton, tasked with mastering the Cuts release, did an astonishing job of remastering the tracks, fixing the worst anomalies without fiddling with quarter of a century of memories of how Toy Love's music sounded.

The first track from the Toy Love album, I Don't Mind , serves as an example. Paul Kean's bass guitar is no longer a weedy excuse for a rhythm instrument. Instead the bass guitar has some weight and presence. Overall the album tracks have lost the thin, undernourished sound that the band hated about the album. Compared to my 7" singles, the first four single tracks have gained a bit more body to the sound as well.

The intelligent mastering decisions extend to the b-side tracks from the Bride of Frankenstein single. The master tapes for these two songs are long gone, possibly destroyed in a fire in Sydney, leading to these tracks being taken from a 7" single. There are computer audio plugins that can remove various forms of vinyl ticks and pops. Unfortunately, when used with some zeal they can also rob the life and guts from a recording. Listen closely to Amputee Song and Good Old Joe and you can hear traces of record noise, but they have been cleaned up gently so that the life remains in the recordings.

So, 25 years on we finally have Toy Love on CD. And it's been magnificently compiled and mastered. This is an excellent CD that deserves to be purchased.

An interview with Chris Knox

After some 25 years of Toy Love material being unavailable, why release a CD now? What was the thinking behind the CD?

Since the dawn of CD there had been great demand among retailers for a polycarb edition of the Toy Love releases. None of us were too enthusiastic about just shoving the album - as it sounded on vinyl - into the marketplace and spent some time trying to find the 24-track masters with remixing in mind.  

Flying Nun started pressuring for some sort of release in about 1991 and some ancient, crumbling demos were transferred to 1/4" tape for a proposed a non-album release to be called Ceiling With Knives. But impetus declined, eventually dwindling away to nothing... Later in the '90s, a Toy Love project was actually given a catalogue number but, again, it all seemed too hard. Finally, three years ago, a hard and fast deadline was given. Several extensions later, the thing actually came out.

We figured that it was quite nice that there would be a quarter century gap between original album release and the CD. Plus we managed to coincide it with NZ Music Month and Bob was our uncle.

It was also very important to the band that it not just be seen as merely a re-release of the album so the second CD of demos and other recordings was given as much attention as the first. More, actually, because the whole band was involved with selection of tracks and the running order etc whereas the first CD was already sorted; album and singles.  

The first single, Rebel/Squeeze has much more of a sixties pop feel than the Toy Love album. Was that a deliberate attempt to have a hit single?

Of course! Squeeze was always going to be the A-side until we got what we considered a great recording of Rebel and everyone concerned figured that it had all the earmarks of a classic '60s-style pop single so Squeeze was relegated. Really though, most punters - and the few radio stations who actually played NZ music at the time - considered it a double A-side.

The other factor involved was that we didn't want to include any Enemy songs on our singles and the new songs we were writing were somewhat less punky than that band's output. The album, however, was about half Enemy material and, accordingly, was a bit harder edged. In content if not sound...

The Toy Love album, recorded in Sydney, is known to be hated by the band. What was wrong with the album and its recording?

Studio 301was the first 24-track studio in the Southern Hemisphere to have a computer-controlled board. We were entirely daunted by the technology, only having used 4, 8 and 16-track manual boards in the past. The sight of all these faders moving of their own volition was impressive but baffling. Todd Hunter was producing and had our best interests at heart but the engineer, Christo, had no real understanding of our approach. He had us extremely separated physically - as was the fashion at the time - and rejected Alec's Marshall amp as too noisy. We felt estranged from our own material and far from relaxed.  

As the fortnight spent in the studio wore on band members dropped out through disillusionment and fatigue - we were playing a lot of gigs - till only a couple of us were left at the mixing stage. Errors of judgment abounded, we were on a deadline and mixes were rushed through with glaring performance and sonic mistakes intact. For example, the vocal at the beginning of Don't Catch Fire is a very staccato guide track that was never, ever meant to make it to disc and Frogs is a travesty.

To add insult to injury, it was a lengthy album and Christo leached the mix of any and all bass in order to facilitate a trouble-free vinyl cut. The result was an uninspired, thin-sounding shadow of what the live band really sounded like.   

Finding old tapes can be difficult. How easy was it to find the Toy Love recordings? And what condition were they in?

The album 24-track had disappeared. I thought I had the 1/4", 1/2-track masters of the album at home but, upon actually going to find them, discovered that I did not. After much searching through Australasia it seemed that the originals were destroyed in a studio warehouse fire in Oz. Fortunately, one-time WEA exec Jeremy Freeman had made DAT transfers of a few local album masters - including ours - as safety copies before leaving that company in the late '80s and, through happenstance, I stumbled across this knowledge and gratefully took possession of these precious artifacts.

I did have 1/4" masters of the first two singles and an abundance of demo reels. All were either still playable or were rendered so by gentle application of dry heat via the highly recommended and most affordable (try Amazon) American Harvest Snackmaster Pro. Everything was transferred to digital by Glyn Tucker Jr., with whom we'd recorded the first two singles, Nick Roughan and Stebbings. Only the two songs from the Bride of Frankenstein single and our first version of Frogs had to be taken off vinyl.   

One of this listeners pet hates is reissues where the record company or producer tries to make older recordings sound like modern releases, by jacking up the treble and compressing the overall sound. Was the philosophy of Cuts to present the music as it would have been experienced on release, or to manipulate the sound into something more modern?

No way were we going to have the album recordings coming out sounding like they did on vinyl. The band had never been able to listen to the thing since its pressing and were constantly apologising for the sound - if not the songs - at the time of release.

So Dale Cotton at Platform Studios was enlisted to make it sound like the record we'd always wanted. Not to make it sound modern, contemporary, indistinguishable from records recorded and mixed in the early 21st century and certainly not more trebly! No, we wanted to have it sounding like it always should have back in 1980.

To that end, Dale boosted the bass, slightly re-profiled the mids and tops and applied his excellent ears and undoubted skills to other sonic detailing with a variety of ProTools plug-ins. The result was an album in which all the constituent sonic elements sat much more comfortably together. There was actual bass drum where before there had been a hollow suggestion of same, Paul's bass had regained its lower frequencies while losing none of its trademark upper-register bite and Alec's guitar was no longer stranded in some weedy EQ-land far away in the middle distance...

We were all very happy. We had achieved what we were after. To present a 40 song overview of the band that represented at least some substantial fraction of what it really was. As opposed to a nostalgic transliteration of a slab of vinyl that none of us could stand.

To this end we ensured that CD 1 was in chronological order with the singles coming up first; that the gaps between album tracks were severely shortened and that CD 2 - finally boasting the Ceiling with Knives title that Alec and I had always wanted for the original album - was as sonically valid as the other.  

And, after all, if the listener is still that attached to the sound of the vinyl, we're not about to stop 'em throwing the thing on their turntable...  

Was breaking up the band in 1980 the right move?

Too right! We were drained of creative energy, bored and utterly sick of the touring treadmill. Thankfully we were sentient enough to call it a day and ease back into real life.

Twenty-five years is a long time in anyone's life. Looking back, what are your thoughts on Toy Love? Are you and other band members proud of the band and music?

It was a good band, great at its peak. It was an amazing 18 months or so but demonstrated to all of us that things hadn't changed much for the better in the music biz since those evil days of the rip-off '60s. This had always (artificially?) coloured our memories but the process of putting all this stuff together has resulted in a huge amount of email communication between the band members and an equal chunk of good feeling. Now that this much more balanced view of the band is out there we're much more at ease with that slice of our past and can more easily see the good bits that got obscured by the demands of the industry and our previous recorded legacy.

Yeah, we have some pride. Quite a decent slab, thanks. And, twenty five years later, the little bugger charted...

Recording Toy Love's first single, July 1979

By Glyn Tucker

Squeaking drums and farting amplifiers all add to a great song.

I met the members of the band for a rehearsal a few days prior to the recording session, so when they trooped into the old Mandrill Studio in Earle St, Parnell, we all knew which songs we would cut; Squeeze was the proposed A-side and the raunchier Rebel the B-side.

Tim Murdoch, head of WEA, was taking care of the studio time and hired me as producer-engineer to get something on tape that captured the essence of the live band. That's always a big ask with any rock band. High energy rock music always has more live impact.

The thing I remember most were the problems with Mike's drums. The pedals squeaked, and the fittings rattled. We pulled out the oiling can and gaffer tape and sorted most of it but then Alec's guitar amp would be buzzing and farting. I decided that this was the live band so settled for the best I could get. Finally we got down to laying the band tracks to the 16 track Ampex and it went pretty smoothly.  

I was using a Shure SM57 on snare, Sennheisser MD451's on Toms and Neumann KM84's on overhead. No hi-hat mic was needed. SM57 also on Alec's guitar amp and we took a direct feed from Paul's bass and the trusty SM57 again on Jane's organ amp.

Then it was Chris doing the vocals. I seem to recall that we tried a Neumann but ditched it in favour of an SM58 that suited live and aggressive vocal style we wanted to capture. I was instantly impressed with Chris' vocals. Great attitude, and best of all... in tune. With a good song, and a good singer you really can't do much wrong. So after a couple of takes it was all done.

The final mix-down often becomes a free-for-all with bands, so I told them all to get out of the studio until I had a basic mix together. Then they came and had a listen. Chris was keen to try a different vocal effect; a bit like John Lennon. I set up a fast tape delay on his voice (about 50 milliseconds) and he loved it.

The final record was perhaps not exactly like their live performances, but a good result by all involved.