Rudi - 1982 - Crimson 7''

Rudi - 1982 - Crimson 7''
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Here's what Brian had to say about the song "14 Steps"The B-side '14 Steps' is about much the same thing (as 'Crimson') only it's just saying you only get one life so don't waste it or poison it with guilt, hate and other fun emotions. The title came out of us wondering (probably drunkenly!!) why there are always the same number of steps in a staircase...(14... ulp! what were we on!) That's it in a nutshell.. Both were recorded in a few hours in Konk Studios in London and produced by Dave Woolley who engineered some Jam stuff but had never produced a record in his life before! We had wanted Mike Robinson who did the BBC session which we loved to produce the record but Jamming! couldn't afford the £200 he wanted paid to do it. Dave did O.K. though. Robin Richards who did so many of the old punk t-shirts did the sleeve for free - it was his wife on the front of it.....so we thought the finished article coulda been produced better but it did real well for us...in fact one of the best memories I have of the time I was in RUDI was the last night of our stint as support to the Jam on the Transglobal unity express Tour when we played the Queens Hall Leeds which was the biggest venue we ever played to a packed house and Dave Liddle (Paul Weller's guitar roadie) introduced us with the news that Sounds had made 'Crimson' 'Single Of The Week'..and we went down a storm.... We always said it was up to the listener to decide what the songs were about and whatever it meant to them was what it was about...(just remembered one guy thunk it was a song advocating suicide...aw well!) ya can't win em all!" ...and "Crimson" "Ronnie, Grimmy and I wrote it when we were still a 3 piece and the riff and intro were originally part of a song called 'Murder on The Second Floor' which never quite came off.. A few months later as if by magic we'd kicked it into shape and Crimson was born..! Unlike most bands we did write our songs together..words and music..it just worked better that way.. We used to get slagged for writing 'obscure' lyrics - well they weren't obscure to us - but we hated the dumb sloganeering that was so prevalent at the time (and we'd done some ourselves when we were starting out..!)..so we let people figger it our for themselves..Crimson, like a lot of our later songs was political - but with a small 'p'...not silly party political crap but I s'pose what people would call personal politics..though we never sat down and figgered that out! Idiot English journalists used to criticise us and the Undertones for not writing about the situation here - we always did but we avoided all the dumb cliches so I guess they missed the point..as if we cared! Anyways the way we put it was that we couldn't have written the songs we did living anywhere else but Belfast... Crimson was our quirky way of saying that if you wanna do something with your life, or change your life or whatever, that it was up to you to do it..and that no one else would do it for ya..but that there was always hope..even when it looked impossible...we wuz kinda optimistic back then!"

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Thanks to Brian Young for info and covers!