The Chillun: A Solace and a Burden

A Solace and a Burden by The Chillun. The Chillun were one of the finest blues bands ever to play together and for a time they were based in Exeter where they had a residency at the river front pub which is still to this day called the Port Royal. We are not sure what the origins or the end of The Chillun’s story was, only that for the years they played together they were magnificent. The songs we have here are from two of their demos. The first from 1982 was titled Booze and Blues – Yer Actual Demo and the second from 1984 titled simply Demo. The first four songs are from the Booze and Blues demo and the last four from the Demo. Unfortunately, as we only had cassette versions of these songs to work with, the passage of time has caused the first two Demo tracks (Baby Too and Sleighride) to sound rather mangled, although the other six tracks seemed to clean up quite well. We will see if we can improve upon these at some time in the future. We also believe that there was at least one other recording that The Chillun made, probably in 1983. Sadly we have no details of this recording. We have been trying to remember other song titles and have come up with Painted Lady, which was a splendid rocky blues song in D that ended with Boggy’s drum solo, Cuddles which was rather a fun blues number that Boggy’s drum solo began, and The Bullfrog Blues, which was often the last song of a Chillun show. The Chillun were Andrew ‘Angus’ Russe on guitar and voice, Nick Banwell on bass and Martin ‘Boggy’ Gorman on drums. Steve Clarke played the keys on the Booze and Blues recording. Singer and guitarist Andy Russe wrote a fascinating autobiography of The Chillun for us and you can find it here: http://www.wudrecords.co.uk/archives/the-chillun/the-chillun-an-autobiography-by-andrew-angus-russe See also: http://www.wudrecords.co.uk/archives http://www.wudrecords.co.uk/archives/the-chillun http://alonetone.com/andyr https://twitter.com/WudRecords