THE CUTTING EDGE
Standard-brand pop-rock was/is/will be the norm, so why not cast a journalistic eye on its practitioners from time to time? Besides, Cutting Crew are much better at this sort of stuff—melodic, guitar-driven poprock and aching ballads—than the similarly styled Glass Tiger, and they didn’t even need Bryan Adams on backup vocals to fly up the charts.
The CREEM Archive presents the magazine as originally created. Digital text has been scanned from its original print format and may contain formatting quirks and inconsistencies.
THE CUTTING EDGE
Standard-brand pop-rock was/is/will be the norm, so why not cast a journalistic eye on its practitioners from time to time? Besides, Cutting Crew are much better at this sort of stuff—melodic, guitar-driven poprock and aching ballads—than the similarly styled Glass Tiger, and they didn’t even need Bryan Adams on backup vocals to fly up the charts. Plus, at the time of this interview, the Crew in question were just a few weeks away from topping the charts with the mainstream “(I Just) Died In Your Arms.”
Their debut album, Broadcast, is ail about love and/or the necessity of taking control of your own life; there are echoes of Yes and Genesis (“They sit in the back of your brain,” says Nick Van Eede, the group’s lead vocalist, rhythm guitarist, and chief songwriter), some well-defined atmospherics, an inadvertent rip from the Pointer Sisters’ “Automatic,” and, yup, catchy tunes—especially the second single, the rockier “One For The Mockingbird.”
Van Eede grew up in Sussex, about 30 miles south of London. His early influences included the aforementioned Yes and Genesis, as well as T. Rex and the Police. He signed his first recording and publishing deals at 18, sang jingles, and produced the “third top rock band in Yugoslavia.” In ’83, he was touring Canada ("We were big in Saskatchewan”) with his three-man, “thrashing new wave band,” the Drivers, when “our record company went tits up,” and soon the Drivers—oh, what the hell— ran out of gas.
Opening the show on the Drivers’ tour were the Canadian techno-pop band, Fast Forward, whose guitarist was Kevin Scott MacMichael, a native of Nova Scotia.
As the Drivers drifted apart, Van Eede chose to stay in Toronto. MacMichael “couldn't just leave my band,” but soon fate took over: In a car accident, everybody was hurt but MacMichael, which gave him time to join Van Eede in Toronto, where they recorded some material. MacMichael recalls, “There was an immediate chemistry... I sold everything and got out of my commitments.”
Van Eede was by then back in England; when MacMichael made the move across the Atlantic, they completed their band with Colin Farley and Martin Beedle, both veterans of bar bands, and systematically plotted their career moves. Says Van Eede, “We’ve had success, because we gave ourselves deadlines”—one year for a deal (it took nine months), another year for a hit (which came with seven months to spare).
As for their name, they thought of themselves primarily as a recording band, and, you know, bands cut records. I am assured that there is no truth to the notion that their moniker has something to do with the way in which chickens buy the farm.
Jim Feldman
