The Story of 50/50
Summarised by Richard Haines
In spring 1979 my good friend Mike invited me to join him and his group of friends invited me to join them at Slug Studio in Reigate, as he knew I played keyboard and guitar. We played a few songs they had written, a few songs I had written - it was a lot of fun. After a few of these Slug sessions we began recording them on my Akai 4000DS reel-to-reel tape recorders, on which I had been making my own recordings since about 1969. The recordings were made at my house in Oxted. These turned out okay, but it soon became clear that one of the group - Dave Cowles - and I had new ideas about more songs. We wanted to get more serious than just continuing the earlier messing about like we had been at Slug. We both wanted to devote a lot more time to writing together than the others, and we found that we shared a vision of how the songs should sound.
In the summer of 1979 we began to write new material. I had bought a very basic monophonic Korg Micro Preset synthesiser which featured in my earlier recordings including She Lies Down Slowly and I Wait For You which Dave and I re-recorded. The first songs we wrote together include Greg’s Song, Silverlight and Pittsburgh. At the time I was good friends with Genesis’ manager Tony Smith and invited him round to give his opinion of the songs we had written so far. He was very encouraging and said that our songs showed a lot of promise - this was all we needed to really devote more time to writing and recording.
Dave and I spent three evenings a week writing and recording together from then until late 1984. We always saw ourselves as writers not performers. We both had senior jobs with considerable responsibilities at the time; I was a director of an AV company and Dave was partner at an estate agents. It was not practical for either of us to devote a lot a daytime to the pursuit of music, although once we did both take a day off once to devote to writing. Ironically neither of us consider the songs we made that among our best work!
During that time we were consistently prolific, with me playing something on guitar or keyboard and Dave singing a melody over whatever I played. He has this fantastic knack of being able to sing instantly over whatever I produce. We also had identical opinions as to what sounded good and so when a song started to take shape, we would play around with the idea and create a fully formed song with layers of sound, harmonies etc. Subsequently we have over 24 hours of recorded ideas with many of them never becoming complete songs. As soon as we played something that sounded good, I would turn on the recorder. Our skills are complimentary - with me playing all the music, and being in control of recording and producing, I could have everything sounding as I felt right and Dave’s incredible talent to come up with lyrics and melodies whilst having a great singing voice, makes the whole combination very strong. We’ve always had a very high opinion of most of our finished songs.
Between 1980 and 1981 we were writing two or three completed songs a month, writing whatever we felt worked, not following a particular style or genre. A very strong melody has always been the most important aspect of our music. Strong hooks and a deliberate avoidance of any melody that sounded like something else popular at the time was paramount. As soon as we had written about twenty songs, we began making demo tapes and sent these out with handwritten letters to music publishers and A&R managers at record companies. No internet or email to help in those days! We received many rejections but more importantly quite a few encouraging replies, where our songs were recognised as having good potential. Dave and I were invited to visit more than half a dozen companies.
We were invited to Martin Coulter Music and were signed to them initially. I remember we were a bit scared when asked “How would you respond if you were asked to go to Germany for a TV interview?” - I think they were unimpressed by our reaction because a month or two later they called and said we should destroy the contract as it was no longer required. In the meantime, we had met Bill Martin himself and he had been particularly fond of our song All I Need (sung by Gill Ware). Nothing further came of this though. We also met Bruce Welch (of Shadows fame) at his company Neon and he signed up The Lift and I Saw The Future. Bruce tried to get the songs taken up but without success, so he asked us if we wanted them back - which we did.
In 1982 we were contacted by Bocu Music (publishers in the UK for Abba, The Zombies, Colin Blunstone, Johnny Logan) as Carole Broughton and Howard Huntridge felt that our song Army Games was a hit. We met them and they were very fond of our material, and we signed all our existing and future songs to them. We recorded Army Games with comedian David Copperfield and producer Barry Murray, with me playing the music and Dave doing a very significant amount of singing. The song was a humorous send up of army life, however the single was released rather inappropriately in the wake of the Falklands War in October 1982…
In November that year Dave and I recorded Memories Linger/Just Can’t Win as 50/50 at Portland Studio with producer Pete Smith (Music Deals) and session drummer Charlie Morgan, and the 7” and 12” singles were released on the PRT record label. Despite positive reviews from Tony Jasper of Music Week we only ever heard it once - backing music to a trailer of a forthcoming music show that it didn’t even feature in! Soon after that we released Talk Too Much/I Saw The Future as a second single on PRT (7” and 12” versions) but nothing resulted.
All this time Dave and I were continually writing new songs and every few weeks visiting Bocu Music, playing the new songs to them, getting lots of encouragement and then we’d all go off to the Greek restaurant in Baker Street for a bit of lamb kofta. This continued through 1983 and 1984 but despite a large output of songs we considered very marketable nothing resulted. Apparently songs were submitted to Jona Lewie (Outside Looking In, The Lift) as they were written with his style in mind. At one point Howard at Bocu had said our song Semi-Mental was a hit and we recorded this as at Pineapple Studio. I played all the music and was able to control the final mix, Dave sang all the vocals and we were very pleased with the result as was Bocu but it was never actually released.
Bocu financed (out of forthcoming royalties) the purchase of my Korg Polysix which was a fairly leading edge synthesiser at the time. Over the years we went from using my two Akai 4000DS stereo machines (where we bounced the song between the two machines adding and committing the new additions each time we bounced), to a Teac Pro 4 track reel-to-reel machine, to a Fostex 8 track reel-to-reel machine and a Yamaha digital recorder. We used various effects pedals including a Harmonix Small Stone, WEM Copycat echo unit, GBS Great British Spring reverb unit and a Chorus pedal, a volume pedal and a Big Muff fuzz pedal.
By late 1984 we had written over 100 songs including what we considered to be our best song - The Fighting’s Over - and at this point we had become disheartened. All of our music was owned by Bocu and nothing was happening, so things kind of fizzled out. From then nothing really happened at all music wise. Dave and I had focused on our families and working lives, happy and content. We knew we had made some cracking music, so over the last few years I sporadically uploaded some of our tracks to YouTube and Soundcloud. Our families were very proud of the music we had made - Dave’s daughters Sophie and Chloe had 50/50 tunes as their first dances at their weddings!
In May I asked my daughter Amy if she would help me choose ten tracks for a 50/50 album, as she had always been a vocal fan of our music. She agreed to help and began listening through our extensive archive of tunes: official releases, family favourites, even half finished ideas. A week later she and her partner Luca, a graphic designer, got back to me and said it would be a shame to limit the many years of output to one album. They suggested a rollout of various projects, to do justice to our artistic vision had things gone our way all those years ago. They set about deciding suitable themes and track listings for each release, as well as titling them and designing the covers, resulting in six albums and two EPs. The original recordings ended up on TDK SA cassette tapes and, considering the technologies we were using at the time, are pretty good quality. My son Greg is a music producer and has been mastering the songs from these original files to ensure everything is in order, so the music is sounding its best ever thanks to him. Dave and I are absolutely thrilled - we’ve always been very proud of the songs we’ve written and both feel that it needs to be given every chance to be heard, so now it will be ‘out there’ in perpetuity which is fantastic.