The Darling Buds 1986-1989 - A Digest!
3 Comments Published by Tom on Wednesday, March 01, 2006 at 13:11.
The Darling Buds were formed in Cardiff, Wales by Andrea Lewis and Harley Farr in early 1986 taking their name from the H.E Bates novel "The Darling Buds of May". With Simon (surname unknown) they released their first single If I Said which was financed by themselves. The pair recruited Chris McDonagh and a drummer called Bloss then upped sticks heading to Gwent. They signed to Native releasing three singles for that label which not only brought them to the attention of John Peel, for whom they recorded three sessions, but to the major label Epic.At this point the band were lumped into the so called Blonde movement alongside The Primitives and to a lesser extent Transvision Vamp. Even Epic started allocating the Darling Buds Blond as part of their releases catalogue numbers!
From September 1988 until mid 1989 the band released four singles for Epic with Hit The Ground peaking at number 27 to become their biggest hit single in the UK Charts. Their debut album, the brilliant Pop Said also did well in the UK charts reaching as high as number 23.
I will cover the rest of the bands history in a future post.
These tracks are the debut single and it's b-side. A copy is up for sale on e-bay at present.
The Darling Buds - If I Said
The Darling Buds - Just To Be Seen
Download The Darling Buds in concert from 1987
Links to the single don't work mun
Try now.
Cheers Tom. These two tracks sound really primitive compared to their later work.
They must have influenced a number of Welsh bands, there's shades of Y Fflaps there on the B Side. Triffic' mun.