Legendary West London punks THE LURKERS are to get a long awaited career overview with a new box set!
Formed on the mean streets of Uxbridge, the band were the first artists to release a record on Beggars Banquet, scoring an impressive FIVE Top 75 singles during their first 18 months, including the punk disco staples 'Shadow', 'Ain't Got A Clue' and 'New Guitar In Town'.
Now Beggars Arkive are redressing the balance with a 4oth Anniversary 5-CD box set, including the band's first two classic Beggars albums Fulham Fallout and God's Lonely Men, a disc of single tracks and demos, 21 BBC session tracks and the collaborative album by Lurkers and Boys guitarists Pete Stride and Honest John Plain, New Guitars In Town, released on CD for the first time ever.
The release is accompanied by a reissue of that first classic Beggars 7" 'Shadow' c/w 'Love Story'. Says Beggars founder Martin Mills, “Underneath our Fulham shop (Beggars Banquet record store) we had a basement which we turned into a rehearsal room where punk bands like Generation X went to rehearse. One of the other bands that rehearsed down there was The Lurkers. The manager of the shop, Mike Stone, started to manage the band because they needed help. Then he needed help so we started managing them and trying to get them a deal – but we couldn’t. This was 1976 and at that point there weren’t very many labels, and each one had already signed their one punk band – and that was it. So we set about doing the record ourselves in a way that is now second-nature to almost anyone in a band. But then it was such an unusual thing to do. Then there was no road-map. There were no small independent record companies, so we worked out how to put a record out ourselves. We ended up putting out our first single by The Lurkers soon after Stiff put out ‘Buy 1’ with Nick Lowe and Chiswick put out their first single. So the three of us started at pretty much the same time. It was a lot of fun and a piece of cake, to be honest, because there were so few punk singles around that everyone bought everything there was. There was this completely captive market. So we did another Lurkers single which was just as much fun. Then we thought, let’s put out an album, and we did. Which was Streets, a punk compilation album from all the independent labels that were suddenly springing up. After this we put out the first Lurkers album.”
Set for release on 28 July, the Lurkers box set is available to pre-order here.
Watch The Lurkers perform 'I Don't Need To Tell Her' on Revolver.
