The title of the latest release from The Chameleons – Tomorrow Remember Yesterday is out today – is especially apt as the band continues to simultaneously establish themselves as a current, forward-looking act – releasing their first new single in a quarter-century this past Spring and releasing their first new album in that long next year – in while simultaneously celebrating their past, touring a 30-year old record around the world and, with this release, revisiting and re-recording some of their oldest-ever songs with the current line-up.
Mark Burgess explained how the project came about:
These songs were amongst the very earliest songs we got together pre-Peel session in 1981, but were discarded at the time due to them feeling unfinished. I had the idea of revisiting some of these very early songs but recording them in a way that reflects who the band is now, rather than who we were in 1981. We were so happy with the results. Most of them have been released over time in their original form on various retrospectives and such like but were never really intended to be. “The Fan & The Bellows” was originally the choice of CBS/EPIC as the debut single, but the band wasn’t happy with the results and rejected that in favour of the newest song at the time, “In Shreds.”
Mark Burgess, The Chameleons
Manchester Post-Punk Heroes The Chameleons Announce New EP of Re-Recorded Archival Tracks @ Post-Punk.com
For long-time fans – which is most of us – there’s no wholly new songs on the recording. Four of the five tracks come from the 1986 rarities compilation The Fan and The Bellows; “Nostalgia” was also released in 1985 as the double A-side single “In Shreds”/”Nostalgia” and was appended to CD versions of the band’s second album What Does Anything Mean? Basically that year, so of everything it’s the most familiar – my brain knows those songs as part of the tracklisting of the album, from decades of listening, so the fact that they’re actually not just does not compute. And finally, “Things I Wish I’d Said” appeared on a number of live recordings but I think the first time a studio version appeared on an official release was as part of The Script Of The Bridge‘s 2008 anniversary edition. But all are beloved, and some of the best and most anthemic moments in their discography.
Some might have been concerned about the possibility of retconning the songs with the current lineup, given their intent to distance themselves from Dave Fielding’s signature watery guitar lines in new material, but thankfully these new versions are pretty faithful to the originals, with a clean, dry production and excellent performance owing to years of steady touring.
Because it’s fun, here’s the original versions of each of the songs on the new EP.
