BIOGRAPHY
ARISTA RECORDS, INC.
ARISTA BUILDING
6 WEST 57 STREET NEW YORK, N.Y. 10019




GRAHAM PARKER


Passion is no ordinary word, Graham Parker proclaims. Nor, in these days of increasing musical slush, is it a quality to be found in any great supply. There is a reaction going on, a reaction to the numbing narcoplepsy of too much contemporary music, and Parker is part of that reaction. His music is anti-anesthesia. Graham Parker and The Rumour make great rock and roll. Squeezing Out Sparks, the debut Parker LP on Arista, produced by rock-master Jack Nitzsche, is one more stone in the monument to rock passion that Parker's been creating since his very first disc. On the release of Howlin' Wind, the reviewer for the Los Angeles Times stated that the LP "bristles with the kind of bold artistic promise to make even the most disheartened cynic believe rock can matter again."

In one of those rise-to-fame tales that makes so much poetic sense it sounds like a publicist's fabrication, Parker was working in a gas station in Surrey, England when he sent a tape he'd made to the Hope and Anchor pub, a showcase for a number of Britain's best rock and roll bands. Dave Robinson who managed a recording studio on the premises, heard the tape, contacted Parker and matched him up with The Rumour, the members of which coalesed from the scattered remains of Brinsley Schwarz, Ducks Deluxe and Boutemps Roulez. A new version of one of Parker's songs was aired on Radio London's Honky Tonk show, and a record contract followed forthwith.

That was the start of Parker's professional career, but music had been his life's cornerstone for years before that, since his exposure to the early Rolling Stones. Music, he told writer Robert Hilburn, "was always the main thing. You went to school and did this or that, but the real thing was what was on the charts." He got a guitar and formed a group called The Black Rockers, later called The Deep Cut Three; the repetoire was hard-edged R&B: Stax-Volt, Chess-type stuff, some Motown ("You Can't Hurry Love," in fact, stayed in the G.P. & The Rumour set for quite a time). But it didn't happen, and he took a series of frustrating jobs: breeding animals for scientific experiments, working in a bakery, washing windows.

Then, The Rumour. Flanked by Brinsley Schwarz, Martin Belmont (guitars), Bob Andrews (keyboards), Andrew Bodnar (bass) and Steve Goulding (drums), and with Nick Lowe, ex-of Brinsley's band, producing, Parker recorded his first album, Howlin' Wind, acclaimed immediately on both sides of the Atlantic as "rock'n'roll of classic stature" (Crawdaddy). This was in 1976, the year of Parker's ascendance. As tough as he sounded on record, he pounded it out even more forcefully live. An "official" bootleg LP recorded at Marble Arch proved that to anyone who hadn't yet had the fortune of seeing Parker and The Rumour on stage.

The music came barreling through: a second, equally raved-about album, Heat Treatment (the title song of which was featured in the movie Between The Lines), a four-song single originally pressed on pink vinyl and dubbed, therefore, The Pink Parker (with the exceptional "Hold Back The Night"). All this, and increasingly well-received tours of the U.S., made Parker a true rock and roll contender. Rolling Stone gave Parker and The Rumour their "Red Suspenders Award" for New Band of '76; the two LPs finished 2nd and 4th in the 1976 Pazz & Jop Critics Poll in the Village Voice "(the year of Graham Parker," the Voice said), six of the seven writers represented in the Boston Phoenix pop poll placed one or both Parker LPs in their top ten best of the year lists.

"To me it is like desperation to make music. It's like life and death."

In songs like "Back To Schooldays," "Fool's Gold," "Pourin' It All Out," "Soul Shoes," "Not If It Pleases Me," all from those epochal first two albums, Parker made his stand. Explaining his band's appeal to Newsweek, Parker said, "We have a freshness that has been lacking for some time." That freshness continued to show itself on the next albums, Stick To Me, an LP influenced by his American experiences, and The Parkerilla, a live package of some of his best material.

Squeezing Out Sparks. Ten new Graham Parker songs that bristle with anger, conviction and barely contained danger. The album drives relentlessly forward, railing against forces inward ("Nobody hurts you harder than yourself") and outward. Some of the subjects are familiar -- local girls, Saturday night, twisted love. And some tracks deal with universal matters -- abortion (on the strongly stated "You Can't Be Too Strong"), U.F.O.'s -- in straight forward rock form. The treatments are never anything but bracingly original. As Parker himself has said. "I think we're making the most progressive music on the planet at the moment." Rock and roll is in good hands if Graham Parker is the wave of its future.

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