Haling from a pre-Wet Leg Isle Of Wight ,they released their sparkly gentle pre-teen ditties on their own Lobby Ludd label....which is how my father, strangely, used to refer to Robin Hood?...I blame those Nazi's and their prison camps and stuff i do.
Amazingly,according to Discogs, Mark Litten was something of a sound tech for Def Leppard!?.....I wonder what those clueless oafs thought of Trixie's Big Red Motorbike,if they ever got to hear it; as the sole purpose of all this Twee stuff was to distance the wimps who made it as far away from the spotty testosterone fueled nonsense of NWOBHM as possible. I'd like to think that Lemmy would have got it,but not necessarily actually liking it....maybe not?
Where did this stuff evolve from?
I guess the earliest roots would have to be Syd Barrett's solo work,the more whimsical end of UK Psych, and Velvet Underground's third album.Then the proto-punk nerd-chic of Johnathan Richman and Talking Heads,a bit later the TV Personalities,The Raincoats,and Subway Sect, making rejection of Rock music fashionable in 1978 leading to wimps like Orange Juice,Altered Images,Marine Girls (a marine Girl,Jane Fox, actually appears on a few of these tracks),Young Marble Giants,Dolly Mixture and so-forth.
It all gets quite confusing, with a venn diagram of Twee,overlapping ShoeGaze and Dream Pop.You can find Galaxie 500, My Bloody Valentine, and The Cocteau Twins all in the same space.
However, undoubtedly,Trixie's Big Red Motorbike is firmly entrenched within the Twee area of the diagram, alongside many of the forthcoming entities we shall be visiting making music for Wimps by Wimps.
I may have spent most of my time going to Godflesh and Napalm Death gigs in 1986/7,but nearly every other band on the circuit were Twee befringed Indie pop shoegaze dreamers,which i now realise was rather good,and refreshing......then came the second summer of bloody fucking Love,and the Shoegazers picked up a tambourine and started enjoying themselves,dancing and the like!?.Tut TUT TUT!
Tracklist:
1 A Splash Of Red 4:16
2 Invisible Boyfriend 3:19
3 Hold Me (Demo) 1:42
4 You Took Him Away From Me (Demo) 3:27
5 Hold Me 1:41
6 Trixie's Groove 2:34
7 One Nation Under A Brolly 0:46
8 Whatever Happened To The Treetops? 2:18
9 You Took Him Away From Me 2:56
10 One Nation Under A Brolly (Demo) 2:23
11 Norman And Narcissus 2:33
12 In Timbuktu 2:00
13 That's The End Of That 1:44
14 I'm In Love With You 2:06
15 When He's By My Side 2:03
16 Fairytales 2:15
17 That's Quite A Lot 2:52
18 What Was In The Loft 7:01
Bonus Tracks:
Peel Session 25/08/1983:
1 That's The End Of That
2 One Nation Under A Brolly
3 Norman & Narcissus
4 In Timbuktu
5 White Horses
Peel Session 28/07/1982:
1 Invisible Boyfriend
2 Splash Of Red
2 Splash Of Red
3 Whatever Happened To The Treetops
4 You Took Him Away From Me
4 You Took Him Away From Me
