Early eighties New Wavers / punks The Chefs never really achieved the kind of commercial chart success they should have enjoyed (John Peel endorsement notwithstanding), especially given the popularity of Birmingham contemporaries The Au Pairs and America’s The Waitresses. I feel like The Chefs are sometimes a kind of amalgamation of the two, most notably on the opening track of this compilation ‘Food‘. although you could certainly argue that there’s something of a pub rock meets Stiff Records verve going on here too. Actually that’s a far more accurate comparison than my earlier one. Let’s go with that.
They’re not entirely easy to pin down, this band, which is perhaps both a blessing and a curse when you’re trying to make a breakthrough, so ‘Thrush‘ reminds me a little of the direction Dexys would later take on their fun 2012 album One Day I’m Going To Soar, albeit a faster one with a kind of ‘folk-punk’ musing, whereas ‘Someone I Know‘ sits somewhere between Madness and The Men They Couldn’t Hang.
To that end, Helen McCookerybook (no, obviously that isn’t her real name) has an appealing, partly folksy sounding quality to her voice which elevates the songs somewhat, a perfect foil to Carl Evans’s slightly deadpan, B.A. Robertson-ish style.
This double vinyl release comprises all of the band’s early work, and is a highly entertaining set which, although unmistakably from the early 1980s, is more diverse than you might expect, ‘Love Is Such A Splendid Thing‘, for example, having a thunderous drum beat that predates the similar percussion on that opening title track on The Queen Is Dead by a good few years, while the ‘lost album’ numbers (included on sides three and four here) recall several other artists. ‘Honcho‘ kind of made me think of Rip, Rig and Panic, and ‘Commander Lonely‘ which immediately follows it, rather wonderfully seems to give a knowing wink to The Slits.
As McCookerybook herself says here in the sleeve notes, “In our three years, we’d spent hundreds of hours writing and recording our songs, recorded three sessions for the BBC, appeared on two compilations, piqued the interest of top pop producer Pete Waterman, and played countless gigs around the UK. We thought we’d been together for thousands of years!“
Thankfully it doesn’t feel like a thousand years listening to Records & Tea. The 26 songs included here fly by in a heartbeat, never outstaying their welcome. A delightful compendium of a band who, in another dimension somewhere, is surely becoming a household name with a string of hits records to boot.
