You could always replace them with Move On and In My World of Words.
You really were quite a fan wasn't you, Dave?
The Explorers? Get onto it TJ...Fred (Today in World Chat)
Fred Owen Are you onto it yet TJ?
an Explorers Reunion would be nice, they split up before i was bornbut please with all songs Gabumon
I'm some new kind of great explorerI sink the lowest, I go furtherI'm sailing in the 'Lucky Dragon'I'm ready for whatever happensLiving out the life unstableMen like animals, untameableTV Smith On Wheels
Dave Thompson: "Why did you call the band The Explorers?TV Smith: "Because i'd already mentioned them in 'On Wheels'.
I always used to wonder if TV took The Explorers name from the line in On Wheels.
TV: I immediately started putting a new band together, with Tim Cross on keyboards. We'd brought him in as a keyboard player in for Cast of Thousands. I thought, well the next band I'm gonna have really good players with me as a basis and see how that goes. And I'd got on very well with Colin Stoner, who was originally bassist with Doctors of Madness and was a fantastic musician and understood what I was writing about in a classical way and could find new ways of responding to the songs. I also brought back John Towe, who was the best drummer I'd ever played with and a friend of Tim's, Erik Russell, on guitar, and we started rehearsing as The Explorers.And it was really great, very thrilling. But almost immediately that started to get problems as well. Our rehearsal room was owned by Andy Czezowski who ran The Roxy and we were running up a mountainous bill that we couldn't pay. We weren't getting enough money to get paid ourselves. John Towe got fairly pissed off with it and left again; Tim got an offer with Mike Oldfield, so he left. So I was immediately back without musicians trying to rebuild a strong band. Got Mel on keyboards who was a friend of Erik's, and got a new drummer from London Zoo, David Sinclair, who was also a friend of Erik's. I'd seen London Zoo a few times and I liked his drumming.And so we got into this second line-up, then Big Beat offered to record a single for us and we recordedTomahawk Cruise. That actually crystallised at the point where The Explorers was at its best with that second line-up, we were working really well. Then we managed to get a deal with a Chiswick subsidiary, put out the single and it got great reviews, started to sell, was virtually on the point of being a hit record when the little label we were on found they couldn't actually press enough copies - they hadn't been expecting it - and the shops ran out of copies. Big Beat moved it up onto the Chiswick label and they repressed it, but by then it was too late. It bombed. Ridiculous. Like I was saying, the problem was that as soon as I established a band, it all seemed to start falling apart. Tom Newman had come under a lot of criticism for his production of Cast of Thousands, which was done in difficult circumstances and I don't think any of us would produce it the same way again. But for me, his production of Tomahawk Cruise totally vindicated why I chose him; it showed that he could work with a band and put out something unique. If you're lucky you get the right wave of being in synch, which we did with Tomahawk Cruise.We wanted him to do the album as well but unfortunately he was booked to do a Doll By Doll album and couldn't do it - at the last minute, it turned out. The initial plan was for him to come in on New Kings after he'd done a Doll By Doll session and then spend a few hours with us. But in fact he didn't do that and we ended up without a producer. The studio engineer we were using was very good at engineering but someone to help us actually put a stamp or style on the record was not there. So it put a lot of pressure on us to be doing that ourselves and in some ways it's his album. I do like it but I think now it shouldn't have sounded so conventional. I would rather have had the kind of ragged edge that we had with Tomahawk Cruise. It was a commercial disaster. We did get signed up to a decent label, a subsidiary of CBS, but somehow nothing Kaleidoscope did could push the first single we released into any kind of charts at all and it was roundly slagged off in the music papers. We'd missed the wave. The album sounds much better today, if you listen to it in the context of nothing else, than it did back then, unfortunately. The Oi brigade totally missed it obviously and the New Romantic thing, it was also nothing to do with them. So we were pretty much standing on our own.So The Explorers folded, again under rather unhappy circumstances. We were riddled with debt, touring and desperately unable to pay ourselves or road crews. We finished up on tour in Germany, where the PA crew had pulled out half way through the tour because they hadn't been paid and left us there without any PA. With the promoter not paying us, and the nightmare of breaking up, we just said, "Let's go back to England and forget it, this isn't any fun". A familiar story!"
"the first kiss of an endless repeat" ("World Of My Own")... "across London Bridge the night crashes in, I'm being shipped to America limb by limb" ("New Ways Are Best")...
