The Tamworth Bands page keeps surprising me. If months ago I got to discover Emma Gibbs Loves Badges there, and this past week Great Express, today I found out about Space Seeds. Seems that the indiepop, guitar pop, in the 80s, is still much of an uncharted scene. There’s still lots to cover, lots to discover, lots to listen. And then we have the 90s and the 00s, and well, it seems quite impossible to ever think of a comprehensible guide to the music we like. Sometimes I like to think of this blog as the one that will be a guide to those deep corners of our scene, to the long lost bands, to the obscure songs, that deserve to be heard. Perhaps, my real ambition is to one day be able to put together this guide in a proper book format. But who’ll read it, who’ll publish it? Maybe it would be a digital book? Does anyone use the kindle or the ipad? I don’t. There’s something wrong about them. I feel like I would lose my vision by staring and reading from those devices. Mind you I am staring and working on the computer at least 8 hours straight at work everyday. I know. It’s nonsense. Anyways, I raise the question, would the effort of making something like that work?

My first guess was that the Space Seeds peeps were fans of Star Trek. There was an episode called “Space Seed” in the first season of Star Trek: The Original Series, that was first broadcast on February 16, 1967. During this episode the crew of the Enterprise awakens a powerful dictator from Earth’s war-torn past: Khan. My second guess was that they were some sort of nerdy band, a scientist band, were they looked way ahead in the future and saw that NASA was going to harvest plants in space, with the so called space seeds. The plan NASA had was to be able to grow plants in space, for the astronauts to eat the crops. The surprising part was that when these crops were brought back to Earth, they were super-sized. They hope that these enormous pumpkins, as well as two-foot long (06.m) cucumbers, 14lb (6.3kg) aubergines, and chilli plants which resemble small trees, could provide an answer to the world’s food crisis  some day. They also found out that near zero gravity conditions in space result in super-sized fruit and vegetables with a higher vitamin content and the plants are said to produce harvests which are ten to 20 per cent higher than normal!

In any case, Space Seeds as a band didn’t yield many songs or lasted for a long time. They were only around for 1 year, from 1988 to 1989. And even though on the photo you can see seven people, there were originally only three people in the band: Mark Brindley, Stu Blain and Mark Mortimer. Yes, the same Mark from Great Express that I wrote about before. Later, they grew up to be a seven piece when Martin Kelly, Stu Pickett, Alan Hodgetts. Mark Allison and Martin Cooper joined. They seem to have had only seven songs recorded that were released on a tape called “Seven Track Collection”. I haven’t yet found out what were the names of all the songs but four: “Autumn Girl”, “Feel Your Touch”, “Switchblade Love”, “Saturn in Her Eyes”. The last two available to stream from the Tamworth Bands jukebox. You’ll notice that “Saturn in Her Eyes” is not really poppy, but according to press from the time, this song was their exception of the rule in their repertoire. It was their Teardrop Explosion moment. They say that the rest of the tape, the other six songs were great pop songs, as you can tell after listening to “Switchblade Love”. And gig wise, they played only 8 times live, mostly in Tamworth but also outing as far as Derby, Oadby and Burntwood. They played once a gig with a band I’ve always been curious about to listen to, but no luck yet, The Macoys. Any audio from them will be greatly appreciated!

In 1989 there were changes in the band. Lead singer Martin Kelly quit the band due to “musical differences”. Julian Amos, from The Macoys and Great Express would fill in. Also these were the last days of the band. On October the 2nd of that year, they decided it was time to call it quits and start a new band called Bash out the Odd. More on them later this week on the blog. But if you can’t wait, you can check some of their tunes on the jukebox at the Tamworth Bands page too. Pretty good stuff!

So, any chance anyone has the other songs recorded by Space Seeds?

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Listen
Space Seeds – Switchblade Love