Ghost Dance - Grip Of Love 12"EP

Copied from an article where Gary Marx chooses the twelve songs that encapsulate his life in music. From The Sisters Of Mercy to Ghost Dance, the band he formed afterwards with Anne Marie Hurst of Skeletal Family. Here he's talking about The Grip Of Love;

"This gives me a chance to publicly acknowledge the enormous musical contribution Etch [Paul Etchells] made to Ghost Dance. Grip is probably the best showcase for his flamboyant approach to the bass. His chorus part is like Jack Bruce or Chris Squire trying to play with Joan Jett, and always makes me smile. The song became a firm favourite live, and proved to be indestructible, as we pulled it this way and that. We would go on to use it as the foundation for a number of different medleys live, throwing in bits from lots of the older tunes like Celebrate, Dr Love and Last Train. We’d chuck in whatever we fancied. Most memorably we went from Grip into Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport when our friend, the mighty Chris Pugh, was emigrating to Australia.

"Before ultimately recording Grip with producer Richard Mazda, we considered working with Nicky Graham, who had produced pop hits for PJ and Duncan and Bros, with a view to him doing a much more mainstream version of it. He lived in a beautiful house in London and invited us over to hear a version of Grip he had been working on. His studio was high up in the attic – you accessed it through a very narrow opening at the top of a an almost vertical step ladder.

"Nicky got his hand-held microphone with one of those enormous pop-shields on it and hit play. He was giving it full stadium rock oomph about a metre from Anne Marie’s face. There was no headroom in the attic for anyone above average height, so when he reached a new section he’d written, he tried to emphasise the phrases with a raised fist, but he didn’t have the space to extend his arm, so he began to crouch. He looked like a bleached-blonde Quasimodo.

"We were trapped in this tiny space listening to something that was a million miles from anything we could contemplate doing, and worse still, the man at the controls had 100% conviction that he’d struck gold.

"He passed the mic over to Anne Marie for her to have a go and she turned to us with a look of total panic on her face. I think it was me who silently mouthed the word, ‘faint’ to her. Fair play to Anne Marie, she did a good impression of a silent movie heroine and nearly fell headfirst through the loft hatch.

"Such is the circular nature of things that I ended up getting back in touch with Nicky just before his death. It was with a view to him remixing one of the songs on the new album - Stardust #5. I had discovered that before his work as a pop producer, he had been a keyboard player in Bowie’s touring band for a large part of the Ziggy years. He’s there on the fabled performance of Starman on Top Of The Pops. Nicky was an honorary Spider."

 

Ripped from the 12" single to MP3 @ 320

A1 The Grip of Love

A2 Last Train

B1 A Deeper Blue

B2 The Grip of Love (A Cheaper Blues version)