(lomax·)
Punk turned into pop the night Adam & The Ants played the Royal Variety Performance in 1981. It all felt totally wrong to bassist Kevin Mooney, who threw his guitar on the floor and danced around on stage, refusing to mine for the Queen. He left the band straight after and merged club sensibilities with his punk roots for his next bane, Wide Boy Awake.
“Max was formed by John Keogh and me, just after our departure from RCA records in the band Wide Boy Awake,” Kevin remembers. “We renamed the band Max and started playing live, then we ended up on Chrysalis for a while. Just after Chrysalis ditched the band, I think it was Sinead O’Connor who spoke to someone from ZTT in a coffee shop and soon we were introduced… Later on we had to change names because of legal problems with Max Q.”
The band became (lomax·) and released a non-reggae cover of Bob Marley’s Waiting In Vain in 1991 (“Trevor wanted a cover version, and we all liked Bob Marley.”), backed with some perfectly downtempo 12” dub mixes and input from hip-hop poet Leslie Winer. Horn produced a full album (1001 Nights, later released on WEA as Silence Running) that kept the leftfield-with-guitars spirit alive and featured contributions from Sinead O’Connor, Jah Wobble, Andy Rourke and Doug Wimbish of Tack>>Head.
Ian Peel
extract from the book accompanying
Zang Tuum Tumb, The ZTT Box Set
