The Electric Chairs
JJ Johnson tells the stories of how Wayne County & The Electric Chairs became just The Electric Chairs in 1979. Interspersed are quotes from Henry Padovani’s Secret Policeman book.
How did the Chairs end?
Probably as chaotically as it began, maybe due to intensive touring pressures, communication started to break down. Also I think, musically, we were pulling in different directions around the time of making the third album, Things Your Mother Never Told You. After a tour and recording a John Peel show around the end of 1979, Wayne and guitarist Elliot Michaels flew back to New York and formed another band.
Henry Padovani When, several months before, Wayne freaked totally out in Germany, having a nervous breakdown in a hotel where she destroyed the whole of the reception, we had come back to London. Wayne had gone to Berlin to undergo the rest of the sex change operation. She became Jayne and she stayed there for a while. She did call me to go with her in New York and keep writing songs together with her , but I wasn’t that tempted at all. I remained in London with J.J.Johnson and Val Haller.
So Many Ways/J’attends Les Marines (Safari Records November 1979)
Val Haller, Henri Padovani, and I decided to continue as The Electric Chairs, with a musical direction that was a sort of progression of certain musical aspects of the third album. So we went into the studio and recorded the single, So Many Ways/J’attends Les Marines, and which was released around November 1979 and was well received although it had a more electronic feel in its rhythmics, vocals, and atmosphere.
Henry Padovani We started to work on stuff and we went back in the studio with David Cunningham to record J’attends Les Marines and So Many Ways. That single became ‘single of the week’ in New Musical Express, and, while I received a phone call from Jean Jacques Burnel of the Stranglers who had congratulated me for that track in French and who wanted to meet with me, and apart from comments from friends and musicians like Simple Minds who were telling everyone how much they loved the psychedelic sound of the Electric Chairs, it didn’t do anything. The record company, Safari, wanted Wayne back and that we reformed Wayne County and the Electric Chairs. It couldn’t happen, it couldn’t work anymore. Big argument and no more money on their part.
Shortly afterward things went pear-shaped with the record company and management which made it impossible to function as a band, and then after a while, we reformed as the Mystere Five, a band with a deliberate anonymous image, and collaborated with non-musician Mark Gloder (Frenchie) a punk who was just forming indie record label Flicknife Records at the time.
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