Johnny Moped The Search For Xerxes

Johnny Moped's "lost album" from 1990, finally gets a reissue! I like this album, Johnny hates it. But why? I think it's more "Johnny Moped" than any other album out there. What other album has entirely penned JM songs/ditties like 'Soldiers' and 'Moped crash' plus ad-libs and all the other little interludes in between the tracks that are pure "Moped". Johnny thinks it sounds like a "disco" album, which it does in places, but, hey-ho, it was 1989 and it was the age of Stock, Aitken and Waterman. At the time there had been no Moped band since 1985-ish and certainly Slimy hadn't been in the band since the early '80s. Also, there was only one album out there, Cycledelic so there was a lot of songs destined for a follow up album that never happened and it looked like we were going to be a one album band. So, with so much unreleased material and a chronic lack of "mopedisum" I decided to embark on a little project_ This album came out in 1990 on Deltic records but the deal was that I had to produce a finished master tape that could go straight to the cutting room and be pressed, so I borrowed a 4-track Teac and a Roland sampler and Roland drum machine and got to work. Some of the tracks sound like they were recorded in someone's bedroom, that's because they were, but Captain recorded some great stuff on his 8-track where I had recorded Johnny "live" and handed over a tape for him to work with ('I'm a Spasm', 'Soldiers', 'Cut across Shorty'). Also, he provided some decent backing vocals on other tracks ('Corpse Boogie', 'Hiawatha'). The album came out in 1990 and to promote it we put the band back together... in a different format. The Johnny Moped Big Band did a series of gigs where we started with two guitarists, bass drums and Johnny for three songs and then swapped to different musicians during 'Wild Breed' for another three songs. Then we'd bring the whole lot together for the rest of the set. The photos on the back cover are taken from the "live at the Cartoon" video. Notice Johnny's original Moped jacket ha...