Album Notes

Mike Thorne delivered many innovative and successful recordings, from Soft Cell's 'Tainted Love' to 'Til Tuesday's 'Voices Carry'. Later, he realized that he was becoming bored making records to a marketing specification, and so promptly retired from commercial record production in 1994.

Mike Thorne's retirement from hired-gun record production, after a career which placed his production credit on perhaps 30 million records worldwide, is final. However, his record-making artistry continues, thanks to his tightly-integrated group of co-conspirators drawn from previous studio encounters.

‘Sprawl’, his own first album, features huge vocal arrangements contributed by Kit Hain, Sarah Jane Morris, Lene Lovich and the three-woman downtown New York group BETTY. The instrumental sound centers on keyboards from Mike Thorne, intense and unusual horn arrangements powered by the Uptown Horns, and raucous drums from Allan Schwartzberg. The result is a sound heard nowhere else. Tracks include two unrecorded Marianne Faithfull songs (from her rock+roll period: ‘Sexual Terrorist’, ‘Self-Imposed Exile’), ‘Pretty Vacant’ (the Sex Pistols, 1976) and an exclusive translation of ‘Le Ballet’ (originally a seductive French language song from Céline Dion).

It’s a lot of dense music, but the CD is arranged to be listened to in one go, using an intro ‘Coming Quietly’ and outro ‘Going Gently’ drawing from material in the songs. Two tweaked-piano interludes break up the twelve songs into three groups.

BETTY: vocals
Sarah Jane Morris: vocals
Kit Hain: vocals
Lene Lovich: vocalese
Allan Schwartzberg: acoustic drums
The Uptown Horns: section
Crispin Cioe: alto saxophone
Arno Hecht: tenor saxophone
Larry Etkin: trumpet
Bob Funk: trombone
Mike Thorne: rhythm, synthesizers, keyboards

Produced by Mike Thorne

Running time: 57 minutes.
With 16-page full color booklet

Much more detail at the Stereo Society website (see link at left)