The full history if you have the time...............

The Escape Club formed in London, England in1982 from the remains of two bands; The Expressos and Mad Shadows. Both bands had done quite well on the gig circuit, especially the Expressos who had released some singles and seemed for a while to be on the verge of going on to bigger things until their record company was caught hyping their next release. Johnny and Milan suddenly found themselves without a band. Trevor and John had formed Mad Shadows and were beginning to build up a following, when their drummer left .Milan seemed the obvious choice as a replacement and they asked him to join. The band carried on and were slowly filling increasingly larger venues until their keyboard player announced that he was leaving to join Talk Talk. This was a severe blow, without his keyboards the songs all started to sound a bit dodgy and within four weeks the band had lost it’s hard-earned following. Time to start again. John had been playing bass in Mad Shadows but wanted to start playing guitar so the band had asked Johnny, Milan’s fellow refugee from the Expressos, to join as the new bassist. It suddenly felt like we had a lot to learn.

After almost a year of writing and rehearsing, our first gig as The Escape Club was booked at a small pub called Merlin’s Cave London in 1983, opening for another band. Not knowing what to expect we nervously stepped onto the stage to play our new set. We needn’t have worried; as soon as we started playing, almost to our disbelief a few people started to dance to our new songs and we realised that The Escape Club was going to work. We soon picked up more Pub and Club gigs and within the year had appeared on Radio 1’s “In Concert” and released our first single “Breathing” on a small independent label called Bright Records. Our first big break came when Channel Four’s new show “The Tube” saw us playing at the Rock Garden in London and asked us to play a couple of songs live on the show the following month, unprecedented for an unsigned band. In our naivety we expected to be snapped up by a major label within the week but it took another eight months of hard gigging before EMI offered us a deal.

We had been writing songs in a different style to the White Fields album. There were a lot of bands in the U.K. at that time who sounded like U2 wannabes and we didn’t want to be just another “U3” as we called them. We decided to take a chance on the dance grooves that we often found ourselves in when we jammed, hoping to create a Rock/Dance hybrid. The Wild Wild West album was recorded in ’87 with Chris Kimsey producing and as it started taking shape we became more and more excited by the sound of the songs, especially the title track. We felt that we were covering new ground and felt sure that EMI would now be able to break us out to a wider audience. Unfortunately during this time David Munns left the company and when they came down to hear the album the head of A&R said, “sorry lads, we don’t hear a hit.”

Band legend has it that when Wild Wild West went to number one in the American charts the following year we sent the A&R man who should remain unnamed but was called Nick Gatfield, a telegram which read “can you hear a hit yet?” We’re not sure if this actually happened, it was definitely planned.

We were now on Atlantic Records, who had bought the album from EMI. To have a number one record as your first release in the USA is a strange thing. We were considered an “overnight success” which felt odd after five years of touring but we weren’t complaining. The first time any of us had been to the States was when we arrived two weeks after hitting number one to do some radio interviews. Being in the U.K. while it was climbing up the charts had been exciting but we hadn’t quite got the “feel” of it. Before the interviews started we had a couple of hours to do a bit of sightseeing. We were taken up the Empire State Building as all good tourists should but on the top we were mobbed by people asking for our autographs Things were about to change in a big way.

The next two years were a blur of Radio, T.V. and Touring. We stayed mostly in the States, playing in every major city, touring the State Fairs in the MidWest, then back again to the Cities, enjoying every minute of it and meeting some great audiences on the way. There were so many memorable gigs it would take pages to recall them all We went up to Canada then over to Germany, France and back home to the U.K. playing to as many people as we could. Two more singles, Shake for the Sheik and Walking Through Walls both charted respectably and we were happy to be out there promoting the album. After years of relative indifference to our music in the U.K. this was amazing.

By 1990 it was time to make another album. The Eighties were over and we felt that we had made a small mark. The times were changing, music in the USA was turning soft and thankfully Nirvana were about to explode out of the Pacific North West. Back home Acid House had turned the U.K. into an E crazed dance haven. We recorded “Dollars and Sex” in Los Angeles with Peter Wolf producing. Our sound had got more defined since the last album and we were concentrating much more on the rock / dance thing which had gone down so well as we were touring. The first single “Call it Poison,” made fun of all the “Big Hair” bands that we had seen so much of in L.A. and on tour,( soon to become as we were to find out an extinct breed.) The track was heavily guitar led and used a sampled vocal scream from Ian Gillan of Deep Purple. We felt that this track had all the makings of another Wild West and we remember congratulating ourselves with the record company at an INXS gig in New York on the first week at radio when forty radio stations had picked it up. This trend at radio wasn’t going to continue though. None of the really big stations seemed to want to play anything with heavy guitars on it and soon our radio lead started to slip away to the Mariah Careys of the world. Even the Big Hair bands were putting out soft ballads. Call It Poison scraped in at 28 which wasn’t bad but we would have liked a bigger hit

While we were recording the Dollars and Sex album, the wife of a friend of ours died. We were all very touched by this and late one night John started writing a song on the accoustic guitar that we kept at our apartment. The band went off to get some food and Trevor stayed in to try writing some lyrics, which John discovered later on the table “lying in a shaft of light,” as he later recalled. Whether this is selective memory or not, the song saved our butts and “I’ll Be There,” went to number Eight in the US charts in August ’91, largely driven by the power of people who had heard it phoning radio stations and requesting it.

We were now at a stage that a lot of bands must get to. We’d had some hits but fashion was changing and in order to survive the next few years we knew that we would have to change our style again. This wasn’t a problem but our deal with Atlantic Records was up and we knew that we’d have to demo some great songs to convince another label to sign us for the amount of money we needed. As usual in the music business, it all comes down to money in the end. We had got ourselves into some strange contractual binds over the years and although we had sold a lot of records, we hadn’t seen much of the money and still found ourselves in debt. We knew that there were still a lot of people out there who wanted to hear our music but contractually we were tied.

We had been together for a long time by now and the idea of going back to the drawing board, especially with a big debt hanging over our heads seemed too much at the time. We didn’t officially split up, just gradually drifted apart until by 1992 it didn’t look like we’d be making another record.

Johnny and Milan left to take up projects of their own and John and Trevor went on to write and produce acts in the U.K. where they had some major chart success with their songs, mixes and productions.

So here we are in the present day. The band is down to the original core members, Trevor and John, joined by our long-time buddy, Red who is now playing drums for us. We've recorded a brand new album, 'Celebrity'  which we're very excited about. It's written for our generation but isn't a 'Dad Rock' album. We've managed to keep ourselves fit in a musical sense by producing and writing for other artists.

Look out for it and we'll keep you posted on the gigs we're planning.


Trevor and John,

Escape Club