Wilder Times: How the Teardrops Exploded
Mick Houghton, 'Fried and Justified' (Faber & Faber), Summer 2019
AUTHOR'S NOTE: The back story here is the release of the Teardrop Explodes' second album Wilder on 20 November 1981. Rather than do the usual promotional UK tour, manager Bill Drummond came up with the idea of Club Zoo to focus more on the Teardrop Explodes as a group rather than on Julian. They would play two sets a night, three days a week over three weeks during December. Club Zoo took over a small back-alley Liverpool club called the Pyramid, but by the time it opened, Wilder had already flopped and everything and everybody was falling apart. Having recently watched Martin Scorsese's Rolling Thunder Revue movie, I was struck by a comment that by the time the first leg of that tour was over everybody had become an extreme version of themselves. This was definitely the same with Club Zoo.
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Total word count of piece: 908
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