Case No: THDAMMXXII-VII-V-02/03
Client: None of your beeswax
Casefile:
Who? The Kane Gang
What? Miracle
Where? England (County Durham)
When? 1987
Why? I really enjoyed their album, and would be interested to see if they continued on after it.
Researching King led to my soup going cold, and you know what soup is like when it’s cold, and more to the point, when it goes all solid and you can’t scrape it out of the mug with a chisel. So after a rather longer trip than expected to the canteen here and a lengthy explanation as to what happened, coloured with many expletives (not all from me) I make it back to my borrowed desk, laptop bag hanging from my shoulder like a GI preparing to go into battle, gingerly holding a fresh mug of hot red liquid. Mindful of the warning I received when I passed the librarian for this section, I fish out something to use as a coaster. This old Jedward CD will do; probably the first time one of the albums by the terrible twins has been of use.
It’s so peaceful in here that it’s easy to forget the shrieking wind outside, Irish summer at its best, but the
tappa-tappa on the windows behind me is a reminder that the rain is still falling, and is likely to continue on through the night and into the morning. If I’m lucky. If luck is
not with me, then it will keep right on going throughout the day. Wouldn’t be the first time, won’t be the last. For now though, I turn my mind from thoughts of the weather and slide back into 1987 as I remember a band few others do, as they could not in any way be said to have had even one major hit. But they had a single at this time; I heard it, liked it and in a fit of ill-advised optimism bought the album.
I really was surprised at how good it was. But what happened to them afterwards? Well, the title of their second album was not prophetic, and
Miracle, despite being what I thought was an excellent and overlooked gem of an album, sank without a trace, barely making a mark on the charts, entering at forty-one, spending a mere four weeks on the chart and going no further. Kind of oddly, their previous album, the debut
The Bad and Lowdown World of the Kane Gang, had fared much better, getting to 21, and hanging on for eight weeks, so either that album was far superior to this one, or the novelty aspect kicked in, or, you know, people are sheep.
Anyway, the only single from
Miracle to do what could reasonably be called any chart business was the rather wonderful “Motortown” (well I thought so) but the best it could manage was 45, a slightly more respectable 36 in the USA, though really strangely one of the other singles, the last, “Don’t Look Any Further”, actually went to number 1 on the US Dance chart, but then, it was a cover, so maybe that factored in to people buying it. Neither album did well at all in the US, with the debut failing to break the Hot 100 while
Miracle managed a measly 115, again making the success of “Don’t Look Any Further” logically more linked to its being a cover. And not an old one either; the original had only come out in 1984 and it also went to number 2, though on the US Black Singles chart only.
So what happened to them? Are the Gang all here still? Well, not quite. The band broke up, and vocalist Paul Woods returned to what he had been doing beforehand, journalism, while Martin Brammer, the other vocalist, went into music management. As you might expect, a multi-instrumentalist like Dave Brewis was not likely to give up music, and he didn’t, going on to record various music projects, one of which (the only one I can find, to be fair) is under his own name with an album called
Autoleisureland. Why is that important? I’ll tell ya. Let me just take a slug of this soup and… aahhh! That hits the spot. Right, where was I?
Oh yeah. Well, according to an article I read in the
Chronicle Live - which appears to be a magazine or newspaper local to the English Tyne-Tees area (that’s basically “oop north”, as they say there: Sunderland, Newcastle, that kind of area) Woods and Brewis are at this moment (June of 2022) working on a new album called
Infiniti Drive. Hold that thought: I’ll come back to it in a mo. For now, here’s what Woods had to say about the breakup of the Kane Gang:
"It was a really drawn-out, depressing experience. I even remember rats running around outside at one point. What had been something I loved was now a negative influence in my life. And that was it."
He was talking there about the band’s attempts to work on a third Kane Gang album, which of course never materialised. As I say, he went back to being a journalist, while Brewis continued on with his music and released the aforementioned album. But the thing is, the new project that both are now working on is called Autoleisureland, and the album title comes from the title of one of the tracks on that original album, released in 2017. Yeah, not that interesting I know, but hell, I take what I can get in this biz. Anyhoo, their new album is due out later this year, so although Martin Brammer is obviously happy enough doing what he’s doing, it’s nice to see that in a small way The Kane Gang live on, even if the music is completely different. And there’s only two of them. And the band name has been changed. And it’s now thirty-five years later. Hey, can’t have everything!
Result of Case No: THDAMMXXII-VII-V-02/03
Case remains open
