The Lurkers get the retrospective treatment
Beggars Arkive has announced a 5-CD box set for British punk band The Lurkers for 28th July.
Formed in West London in 1976, they had 5 UK top 75 chart singles with resultant appearances on Top Of The Pops. This 86 track box includes their two Beggars Banquet albums (Fulham Fallout and God’s Lonely Men), all of their singles and 9 demos, 21 BBC session tracks, and the Pete Stride / John Plain album New Guitars In Town (the first time on CD).
Martin Mills, the founder of Beggars Banquet, talks about the start of the label and the beginning of The Lurkers…. “Underneath our Fulham shop (Beggars Banquet record store) we had a basement which we turned into a rehearsal room where punk bands like Generation X went to rehearse. One of the other bands that rehearsed down there was The Lurkers. The manager of the shop, Mike Stone, started to manage the band because they needed help. Then he needed help so we started managing them and trying to get them a deal – but we couldn’t.
This was 1976 and at that point there weren’t very many labels, and each one had already signed their one punk band – and that was it. So we set about doing the record ourselves in a way that is now second-nature to almost anyone in a band. But then it was such an unusual thing to do. Then there was no road-map. There were no small independent record companies, so we worked out how to put a record out ourselves. We ended up putting out our first single by The Lurkers soon after Stiff put out ‘Buy 1’ with Nick Lowe and Chiswick put out their first single. So the three of us started at pretty much the same time.
It was a lot of fun and a piece of cake, to be honest, because there were so few punk singles around that everyone bought everything there was. There was this completely captive market. So we did another Lurkers single which was just as much fun. Then we thought, let’s put out an album, and we did. Which was Streets, a punk compilation album from all the independent labels that were suddenly springing up. After this we put out the first Lurkers album.”
Buy the CD set at Beggars.
