Musicians often talk about demos having a charm and freshness that are missing from the final versions.
It’s the ‘chase the demo’ syndrome – capturing an initial burst of inspiration often gets lost in translation when recording in a posh studio with almost unlimited potential for overdubbing.
It’s unlikely that Paddy McAloon’s demo of ‘Bearpark’, with its primitive drum machine, crap synth and lovely, understated vocal, could ever really be improved upon (and probably why Prefab Sprout never recorded it).
Meanwhile, David Bowie famously preferred his demo of ‘Loving The Alien’ to the finished version. Conversely, when you hear Love and Money’s Strange Kind Of Love demos, you can totally appreciate the hoops that producer Gary Katz put James Grant through to get the best possible vocal and guitar performances.
But it’s pretty rare for a band to release an official album of demos, part of what makes China Crisis’s Demos so interesting. It shows how the band were arguably not particularly well served by record company nor producers (Walter Becker notwithstanding). Virgin never seemed sure if they were Culture Club or OMD.
(Maybe the fact that they became a ‘proper’ band around 1983 was not a great commercial decision too, as excellent as their rhythm section was. Perhaps they’d have been a better ‘synth duo’…)
Most of the tracks on Demos are ‘mood pieces’ without vocals. They all pretty much work as instrumentals, and also reveal Gary Daly and Eddie Lundon as a top-notch melody writers and gifted synth sculptors.
The early Eno-influenced stuff is fun but the Flaunt The Imperfection era is fascinating. ‘Wall Of God’ was originally almost an ambient piece. ‘Black Man Ray’ is pure-pop comfort listening. No wonder everyone who heard it said ‘Hit!’. Arguably the finished version doesn’t add that much.
Meanwhile ‘Bigger The Punch I’m Feeling’ is Erik Satie meets ‘The Love Boat’, sans that lovely middle eight which was presumably put together by Becker.
The What Price Paradise stuff shows how that album was botched. They clearly got the wrong producers in (Langer and Winstanley). ‘Victims of a cruel medical experiment’, to quote the memorable Q review!
The demo of ‘Arizona Sky’ is altogether more agreeable than the final version, but shows that even then the chorus never quite worked. ‘Safe As Houses’ is charming, as is ‘Best Kept Secret’, originally without the shuffle groove.
The Diary Of A Hollow Horse stuff is all full-band demos, possibly completely live in the studio with a few keyboard overdubs. Again they demonstrate that Virgin arguably cocked up that fine album.
‘St Saviour Square’ works well without all of the ‘Aural Exciter’ rubbish used on the final version. ‘Sweet Charity’, ‘Singing The Praises’, ‘Red Letter Day’ and ‘In Northern Skies’ have complete arrangements and full lyrics – in fact it sounds like they kept Kevin Wilkinson’s drums from those demos and rerecorded everything else.
‘Stranger By Nature’ is a completely different – and inferior – song to the album version, and in straight 4/4, while the title track works superbly as an acoustic guitar ballad. Becker possibly missed a track there.
Demos is a great listen and merely confirms that China Crisis were one of the most underrated and commercially underperforming acts of the ‘80s.
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