The Chefs - Records & Tea: The Best of The Chefs and Lost Second Album (2024)

From the ashes of the thriving underground punk scene in Brighton in 1979, a band of songwriters called The Smartees emerged. They never made any records but after their demise one of the guitarists, Carl Evans, approached bass player Helen McCookerybook to ask her if she’d like to write some songs with him. He’d already set one of her poems, Food, to music, and they played their first gig with just three songs, each of which lasted just over two minutes: you can hear Food, Sweetie and Boasting on this compilation. The Chefs original drummer, Rod Bloor, contributed the seeds of the song Records and Tea before returning to his native Manchester. Soon, augmented by James McCallum on additional guitar and Russell Greenwood on drums, the songwriting duo started recording for local label Attrix records, firstly two tracks on their Vaultage 79 album, followed by the Sweetie EP and then 24Hours which was championed by BBC Radio 1’s John Peel, who invited them to do a session. A residency at The Moonlight Club in West Hampstead, London, tempted them all to relocate to the big city, and a move to Graduate Records saw the re-release of 24 Hours. Graduate also commissioned the album tracks included here, which were languishing in the band attic and have not been released until now. The band split up in 1982, heading in different musical directions: Helen switched to guitar and formed Helen and the Horns, Carl formed Yip Yip Coyote, Russell joined John Hegley’s Popticians, and James left the music industry. In our short three years we’d spent hundreds of hours writing and rehearsing our songs, recorded three sessions for the BBC, appeared on two compilations, piqued the interest of top pop producer Pete Waterman, and played countless gigs around the UK.

Early eighties New Wavers / punks The Chefs never really achieved the kind of commercial chart success they should have enjoyed (John Peel endorsement notwithstanding), especially given the popularity of Birmingham contemporaries The Au Pairs and America’s The Waitresses. I feel like The Chefs are sometimes a kind of amalgamation of the two, most notably on the opening track of this compilation ‘Food‘. although you could certainly argue that there’s something of a pub rock meets Stiff Records verve going on here too. Actually that’s a far more accurate comparison than my earlier one. Let’s go with that.

They’re not entirely easy to pin down, this band, which is perhaps both a blessing and a curse when you’re trying to make a breakthrough, so ‘Thrush‘ reminds me a little of the direction Dexys would later take on their fun 2012 album One Day I’m Going To Soar, albeit a faster one with a kind of ‘folk-punk’ musing, whereas ‘Someone I Know‘ sits somewhere between Madness and The Men They Couldn’t Hang.

To that end, Mary McCookerybook (no, obviously that isn’t her real name) has an appealing, partly folksy sounding quality to her voice which elevates the songs somewhat, a perfect foil to Carl Evans’s slightly deadpan, B.A. Robertson-ish style.

This double vinyl release comprises all of the band’s early work, and is a highly entertaining set which, although unmistakably from the early 1980s, is more diverse than you might expect, ‘Love Is Such A Splendid Thing‘, for example, having a thunderous drum beat that predates the similar percussion on that opening title track on The Queen Is Dead by a good few years, while the ‘lost album’ numbers (included on sides three and four here) recall several other artists. ‘Honcho‘ kind of made me think of Rip, Rig and Panic, and ‘Commander Lonely‘ which immediately follows it, rather wonderfully seems to give a knowing wink to The Slits.

As McCookerybook herself says here in the sleeve notes, “In our three years, we’d spent hundreds of hours writing and recording our songs, recorded three sessions for the BBC, appeared on two compilations, piqued the interest of top pop producer Pete Waterman, and played countless gigs around the UK. We thought we’d been together for thousands of years!“

Thankfully it doesn’t feel like a thousand years listening to Records & Tea. The 26 songs included here fly by in a heartbeat, never outstaying their welcome. A delightful compendium of a band who, in another dimension somewhere, is surely becoming a household name with a string of hits records to boot.