User:TheWho71/band/debut album
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| Ready Steady Go! | |||||
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| Studio album by The Wings | |||||
| Genre | Hard rock Pop rock |
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| Professional reviews | |||||
| The Wings chronology | |||||
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Ready Steady Go! is the eponymous debut album of the rock band The Wings. It is their less successful album and was considered by many critics and the band itself as a "false start".
Contents |
[edit] Track listing
- "The Beginning" (John Taylor) – 1:30
- "Boston Rock" (John Taylor) – 4:00
- "Ready Steady Go!" (John Taylor) – 3:20
- "Yesterday and Today" (John Taylor) – 4:00
- "Forest" (John Taylor) – 4:50
Plus 5 others.
[edit] The Beginning
John Taylor wrote "The Beginning" a few weeks before the band had been formed, along with another song on the album, "Boston Rock". He finally kept the numbers for the Wings' first album. It is the only song on the album with "The Very Difficult Song" to be credited solely to John Taylor, the others being co-written with band mates Dan Gibson and Steven Banks. It consists of a fast rock instrumental with dominant clean guitars. It opens the album as an introduction to the second song, "Boston Rock".
[edit] Boston Rock
"Boston Rock" had been mainly written by John Taylor, as a parody of the group Boston, and completed later with Steven Banks. The music clearly recalls "More Than a Feeling" or "Long Time" from Boston. The lyrics, written by Taylor, are quite humorous although they deal with love. It talks about a boy who likes a girl but she likes someone else. When the boy is looking for her lover, he finds out it is a little puppy called Boston.
The song was released as a single in Canada, where it reached Top 5, and U.S., where it did not chart.
[edit] Ready Steady Go!
The number was written by Gibson and Taylor as an attempt to write a hit song to promote the album. The basis was found by Taylor while he was looking for new sounds made by guitars and feedback. He called Gibson to complete "a song [he] made that could be a good number for the album". Gibson arrived and liked the song, unlike Taylor who was not sure. The two worked on it for hours and finally came up with a six-minute song for the band with lyrics written by May. It was reworked by the whole band and Gibson added a solo during the recording.
The song reached Top 5 in Canada.
[edit] Yesterday and Today
The idea for that number came to John Taylor when he was writing existentialist questions on a paper and trying to answer them. He thought that these questions had to stay without answer and that anyway, "yesterday and today will pass before anybody could find an answer."
The music was composed by Gibson, Taylor and Banks during a jam session at Taylor's house. Pam Brooks gave contribution with her drum part and nature sound effects, but she was not credited.
[edit] Forest
"Forest" is considered as one of the best songs of the album. It was written by John Taylor, who confessed : "It is not my best song and I am not the best composer in the band. I prefer writing the lyrics and let the music composition to another, but I think I'm doing a good job, then."
The song narrates the story of teenagers running away from their homes after they were angry with their parents' authority. They hide in a forest around their town. Despite reaching Top 10 in charts, the song's supposedly inappropriate lyrics offended some radios who refused to play the song. Some radio stations judged the song as an "incitation to the teens to run away from their homes", although Taylor denied this. The term "turn on" in the lyrics is used for "having sex", and "another grade" perhaps describes the change of stage of life for a man (the man having his first sexual intercourse passes to another stage of his life, "another grade"). John Taylor denied to have put intentionally explicit lyrics, and just said that "there was just a place in the lyrics where I needed to put something and I written the first thing I had in the head."
A promotional film of "Forest" featured teenagers having a dispute with their parents, reuniting and running away from the town.
[edit] Personnel
- Steven Banks – rhythm electric and acoustic guitars, harmony and backing vocals
- Dan Gibson – lead electric and acoustic guitars, harmony backing vocals
- John Taylor – bass guitar, acoustic guitar, lead vocals, backing vocals, sound effects
- Mike Waters – drums, percussion, harmony vocals
