Description

In 2002, Dare had set up his own studio, the VIP Lounge, in Penzance, Cornwall, UK. The bulk of Sparks Lane was actually written and recorded there in the five days that Marty had between All About Eve gigs. Dare then worked on adding additional instruments and arrangements over the next few months. Because we had approached songwriting with a clean slate, with no limitations on the kind of material we would write, the album was extremely eclectic and we became a band that was impossible to pidgeonhole. It is a sophisticated record, featuring the moody My Museum and the poptastic High As A Kite, the hit that never was (although according to Chilean radio it was No. 1 in 1980), the experimental Ask Again and the Space Rock Que’est-ce Que C’est. The cover art by the late Greg Daville was composite images put together to form an unlikely reality. The device featured in the picture is called an orrery and is a real thing – a working mechanical model of our solar system. The title has no connection to the picture, it was simply the name of one of the roads in Thingwall that connected our parents’ houses to each other when we were growing up as teenagers on the Wirral. It seemed appropriate as this was our first writing collaboration since our school band in the early seventies. We were called Opal Butterfly and were influenced by the more Progressive bands of the day, then in the late seventies we had a New Wave band called The True 100’s named after a cigarette. Later I discovered that the name Opal Butterfly was already taken but for some reason The True 100’s name is still available?