GENERATION X (BILLY IDOL) "GENERATION X" 1978 U.S.1st PRESS EX/NM- OOP DEBUT LP

$

22

TWO YEARS AGO I LOST ONE OF MY BEST FRIENDS TO CANCER, HE WAS A COOL MUSICIAN A DRUMMER BY TRADE, ORIGINALLY FROM SEATTLE, BUT RELOCATED TO L.A. IN 1985, HE AMASSED A VERY LARGE MUSIC COLLECTION, AND HAD KILLER TASTE FOR ROCK & ROLL, SADLY I AM SELLING OFF A LOT OF HIS COLLECTION ON BEHALF OF HIS WIDOW TO HELP PAY OFF DEBTS INCLUDING HOSPITAL BILLS, TAXES AND STORAGE UNIT FEES. I AM NOT TAKING ANYTHING FOR THIS SERVICE, DOING IT FOR MY FRIEND (MISS YOU DAVE!). THIS ITEM IS FROM HIS COLLECTION.

THE PHOTO'S MAY BE A LITTLE BLURRY, HAVE A LITTLE GLARE, SOME REFLECTIONS OR IN SOME CASES YOU MAY SEE SPECKS OF DUST. BUT THE PHOTO'S ARE OF THE ACTUAL ITEM YOU ARE BIDDING ON. I DO COMBINE SHIPPING. BUT I DO NOT ACCEPT “BEST OFFERS”, THE MONIES GO TO MY FRIENDS WIDOW.

THESE ARE VISUALLY & PLAY GRADED.

ARTISTS: GENERATION X

TITLE: “GENERATION X”

TRACK LISTING: SEE BELOW

Credits

• Bass, Vocals – Tony James
• Drums, Vocals – Mark Laff
• Engineer – Alan Winstanley
• Guitar, Vocals – Bob Andrews*
• Producer – Martin Rushent, Phil Wainman (tracks: A1, A2, B3)
• Vocals – Billy Idol
• Written-By – Idol*, James*

Notes

Barcode and Other Identifiers

• Matrix / Runout (Side A runout etchings): 1 S CHR-1169-A [Z in a circle] A 4
• Matrix / Runout (Side B runout etchings): 1 S CHR-1169-A [I in a circle] A 4

LABEL: CHRYSALIS RECORDS

CAT.#: CHR-1169

YEAR: 1978

RECORD CONDITION: ALL RECORDS ARE VISUALLY & PLAY GRADED.THIS RECORD IS IN NM- CONDITION. NICE SHINY LUSTER TO THE VINYL, NO LINES, SCRATCHES, SMUDGES, FINGERPRINTS ETC. THE SONGS SOUND SUPER CLEAN. THERE IS NO AUDIO BETWEEN THE TRACKS SUPER CLEAN. ONE OR TWO VERY VERY LICHT CLICKS ON THE LEAD IN GHROOVE SIDE 2.

SLEEVE CONDITION: THE JACKET IS IN NM CONDITION THERE'S NO WRITING ON THE JACKET. STRAIGHT EDGES, NO WRITING, TEARS, WRINKLES OR SEAM SPLITS, ETC.ETC.

MORE INFO: THIS LP IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT. INCLUDES ORIGINAL CHRYSALIS INNER SLEEVE.

NOTE: I HAVE A FEW GENERATION X/GEN X RECORDS I AM LISTING. JUST A HEADS UP & THANKS FOR LOOKING!

MORE INFO ON THE ARTISTS/RELEASE:Generation X (later known as Gen X) were an English punk rock/post punk band from London in the late 1970s, primarily remembered today for being the musical starting point of the career of its frontman/vocalist, Billy Idol.

Formation - 1976[edit]

During the punk rock pop music movement in London in late 1976, William Broad, a 21 year old guitar playing university drop-out from Bromley and associate of the Bromley Contingent; the drummer John Towe, a West End music shop assistant, and - at Broad's suggestion, having already met via an ad previously put in the Melody Maker by Broad seeking other musicians - Tony James, a 23 year old university graduate bass player from Twickenham and former member of the London S.S., all replied to an advert placed in the Melody Maker by John Krivine, the owner of a fashion clothing shop called Acme Attractions in the King's Road in Chelsea, seeking musicians to form a new West London band around the vocalist/frontman John O'Hara aka "Gene October". After a few weeks of rehearsals the band became known as Chelsea, and began by playing a few support gigs in West London and Manchester, primarily playing cover versions of rock and roll songs from the 1960s. However, by November Gene October felt that Broad and James were becoming too dominant creatively, and that his personal chemistry with them wasn't good, a feeling which they reciprocated, and Broad, James and Towe together abandoned Chelsea and formed a new band they named Generation X after a book with that title that James found that belonged to Broad's mother when visiting his family home. The new band was initially managed by Andrew Czezowski, Acme Attractions' accountant. 

With his photogenic looks and inherent egotism Broad, styling himself with a punk pseudonym name of "Billy Idol", abandoned the guitar to be the frontman and lead singer of the new unit when the 17 year old lead guitarist Bob "Derwood" Andrews was recruited from the Fulham rocker band Paradox, and 'Generation X' took the stage for the first time in public at the Central School of Art and Design on 10 December 1976. The new band played its second gig 4 days later at the newly opened The Roxy, which their manager Czezowski had also taken over the management of, being the first to play at the venue. Soon after formation Generation X abandoned playing cover versions in its live performances around London of other acts' songs and began writing its own material, with Idol writing music around James' lyrical song constructions.[

1977-1978[edit]

In early 1977 the management for the band was passed from Czezowoski, who preferred club management to live acts, to a dual management of Stewart Joseph, a fanzine promoter from Rough Trade Records,[cord companies to secure a recording deal for it. 

On 16 February 1977 the band went into a studio for the first time to record a demo session of five songs at De Lane Lea Studios in Wembley, North London, sponsored by Chiswick Records. The lyrics of some of the songs possessed a partially politicized tone (with a critique of The National Front, and the conflict in Ulster) that the band would abandon after its early months. Later in the year Generation X's first record was released by the band itself in the form of an unmarked white label for promotional purposes, with the song Your Generation as its A-side, and Listen as the B-side, taken from the De Lane Lea demo session. 250 copies were initially pressed, followed by another 500 copies, all in unmarked white paper sleeves.

In mid-March 1977, amidst a heavy performance schedule in London and increasingly beyond the confines of the capital city into England's provinces, a gig had to be abandoned at the University of Leicester mid-performance due to Derwood Andrews requiring hospitalization from being struck on the head by a beer bottle thrown from the crowd. In mid-April 1977, having just played their first international date in Paris in a joint billing alongside the upcoming bands The Jam and The Police, and recorded Generation X's first live radio session at the British Broadcasting Corporation's Maida Vale Studios, John Towe was asked to leave the band by James and Idol as they felt that his style of playing was too overt for what they wanted from a drummer, and James, the band's strategist, had come to the view that Towe's personality didn't fit with the image that he was formulating the act into. Towe moved on to join a new outfit called Alternative TV. He was replaced on drums by the 18 year old Mark Laff from North Finchley, recruited from Subway Sect after an extensive audition process for the vacancy organized by Idol and James in May 1977. From June to August 1977 in between gigs the band practiced in a rehearsal space in the basement beneath a Beggars Banquet record shop in the Fulham Road. 

In mid-July Generation X signed a recording contract with Chrysalis Records, and went into Wessex Sound Studios in North London for the band's first formal recording session for commercial release. Under the supervision of the producer Bill Price the session proved to be abortive due to the band being unhappy with the results, and Chrysalis Records sought another producer, which it found in Phil Wainman. At the end of July 1977 the band worked with Wainman at Morgan Studios in Willesden, recording its first single "Your Generation". Wainman wasn't impressed with the musical ability of the band, particularly with Laff's technical ability, or with Idol's capacity as a singer, and in response to Idol asking for his opinion during production as to whether he thought Generation X were "going to make it", answered with some dubiety. On release at the start of September 1977 the single went to #36 in the U.K. Singles Chart, after being critiqued by Elton John in a review column in the Record Mirror as 'dreadful garbage'. The band played the song on Marc Bolan's afternoon variety show, Marc, a few days later using Granada Television's Manchester studio instruments for the performance, afterwards making off with the drum-kit and being banned by Granada for 10 years as a result. 

Along with writing and performing the band's musical output, James and Idol around this period sought to extend the band's brand identity beyond purely the musical sphere by designing and manufacturing a series of op-art and pop-art T-shirts for use in Generation X's photo-shoots and live performances, and James was attentive to its public image conveyed in the act's dress and styling. The band's co-manager Jonh Ingham introduced them to the graphic artist Barney Bubbles, who with them created the cover for the Your Generation single release, drawing inspiration from the 1920s abstract geometric work of Russian designer El Lissitsky, which introduced the Russian Constructivist school into English pop music design, which would be utilized by other bands into the 21st Century. Bubbles was also commissioned by the band to design its newspaper adverts and posters. 

In September 1977 Generation X was one of the first punk units to appear on the B.B.C.'s mainstream pop music programme Top of the Pops, and began to acquire some mass media recognition as one of the punk-rock acts that had an accessibility of sound and image with the potential to achieve commercial pop music success. Contrarily the same analysis led to recurring adverse criticism of the band in the media of the alternative music scene from which it had emerged, with a number of reviewers dismissing the act as artistically and intellectually vapid, and suggesting that it was using the guise of being a part of the punk movement cynically as a stepping-stone in pursuance of more prosaic pop music fame and fortune. As punk-rock developed an increasingly radical overtone, driven partly by the politicized content of the songs of The Clash, Generation X also faced accusations of being middle-class interlopers upon what was increasingly espoused as a working-class sub-culture movement, evidence for this being a story in circulation within the scene originating from the music journalist Tony Parsons of the New Musical Express that when Idol and James had turned up in The Ship pub in Wardour Street for an interview with him, on being asked what they wanted to drink, had requested orange juices, and had openly criticized and rejected on an intellectual basis the hedonism of the "Sex, drugs and Rock 'n' Roll" lifestyle. The interview had been conducted shortly after the band's formation, and James and Idol (particularly the latter) had since moved some way from this stance as they moved through the social circles of London's pop music scene, but the initial impression from it lingered in the British punk rock movement.
Generation X stood out in the burgeoning milieu of punk-music bands for its combination of the raw raucous energy of punk-rock with a more commercially melodic sound and visual image in the tradition of earlier British pop music styles of the 1960s, drawing influences from bands such as The Who, The Kinks, The Small Faces, and The Beatles. It also produced songs that lyrically focused on the concerns of being an adolescent in West London in the late 1970s and, apart from playing a few gigs in support of Rock Against Racism, eschewed the societal commentary, cultural nihilism and radical politics of the punk movement, for which it drew some criticism from its peers, including John Lydon, the frontman-lyricist of the preeminent Sex Pistols. 

In late September/early October 1977 the band spent several days recording demo sessions, overseen by Phil Wainman, at Utopia Studios in Primrose Hill, North London, in preparation for its first long-player release. 

In Mid-November 1977 the band released the single Wild Youth, written on the spur of the moment during a publicity photo-shoot with the photographer Ray Stevenson in the streets of London's West End a few weeks earlier, the song being inspired by street graffiti. The single's cover-art comprised individual colourized rotoscoped band portraits, taken by the photographer Peter "Kodick" Gravelle. It was produced by Phil Wainman at Utopia Studios, with an experimental b-side track entitled Wild Dub attempting an early fusion, before the subsequent Two-tone movement, of the Ska music of the West and South London Afro-Caribbean immigrant communities with Generation X's punk-pop sound, following on from The Clash's foray into the same area a few months earlier with their cover of the song Police and Thieves. On release Wild Youth was the only commercial single issued by Generation X that failed to enter the UK Singles Chart.

Towards the end of 1977 Jonh Ingham resigned from Generation X's management as a preliminary to his going to live in the United States, and after having come into conflict with Tony James, leaving Stewart Joseph in sole charge. 

In February 1978 the single Ready Steady Go (with a b-side track entitled No No No) was released with cover art taken from the design of one of the band's self-produced T-shirts, but it failed to enter the top 40 of the UK Singles Chart. The band kept a hectic touring schedule throughout Great Britain through 1978, which included the event of a Hell's Angel in the crowd at a gig in Derby in mid-March climbing up on to the stage and punching Idol in the face hard enough to cause him to fly backwards "like a ping-pong ball", landing in the drum-kit - Idol getting back on to his feet, dusting himself down and resuming the band's performance as if nothing had happened. In the same month the band's first long-player was released, entitled Generation X (1978), produced by Martin Rushent and engineered by Alan Winstanley at T.W. Studios in Fulham, with a cover portrait shot photographed by Gered Mankowitz, which went to #29 in the U.K. Albums Chart.

In April the New Musical Express featured Generation X in a 2 page centre-spread interview with the band to facilitate the first LP's retail sales, with a front-page full feature photo of Idol and James on the foreshore of the River Thames beneath the Embankment, taken by Pennie Smith.[60] The article's illustration, atypically for band photography, displayed Idol with James separately from Andrews with Laff, and gave rise to talk within the punk scene that this was indicative of an inherent divide of some nature within the act, with it possessing an inner core which Andrews and Laff weren't party to. 

The band maintained a high work rate of live performances as the year developed, with Idol also going on a first promotional visit for the band to the United States in May 1978, followed by another international gig for the band in Paris in June, several live BBC radio performances, and being supported by a new West Sussex band named The Cure for several dates in November and December '78. In October Generation X went into Wessex Sound Studios in Islington, with Ian Hunter acting as Producer, to record their second album, entitled Valley of the Dolls,[63] which saw the band moving to a style of mainstream rock music with the incorporation of aspects of the early 1970s Glam Punk movement and Progressive Rock into its sound and look, along with the mid-1970s song-writing techniques of Bruce Springsteen.

Generation X is the first studio album by English punk rock band Generation X, released 17 March 1978 by Chrysalis Records. It was produced by Martin Rushent. 

One single, "Ready Steady Go", was issued in February 1978 prior to the album's release which reached #47 in the United Kingdom's Singles Chart.

The band portrait used as the front cover was photographed by Gered Mankowitz.

Production[edit]

Generation X was recorded at TW Studios in Fulham, West London, during November-December 1977, with the producer Martin Rushent and the engineer Alan Winstanley. 

The band had previously worked with the producer Phil Wainman on prior singles, but had been dissatisfied with the results, critiquing his production sound as too "poppy" and polished, and sought a recorded sound for the album that resembled the band's live harder-edged performances. Frontman Billy Idol suggested Rushent for the role as he had been impressed with his recent work with The Stranglers. Guitarist Derwood Andrews later recalled, "Martin Rushent told great jokes, but his engineer Alan Winstanley was more responsible for the sound of the album". 

The album was recorded during one week, with many of the songs being completed in one take. Bassist Tony James wrote most of the lyrics, with Idol composing the music. Andrews and drummer Mark Laff finished the songs by adding instrumental parts. 

"We (recorded) it in TW (Studios), and it was like recording in a garage, it was such a shithole. But it was great as we felt completely at home, we just plugged in and played great and it sounded great. ... 'Youth Youth Youth' was done in one take, we just set Derwood up with a wall of speakers in the studio, no headphones and just left the tape running. We were pissed, and did it at midnight, that's the only way we could have possibly recorded that track. He just went mad, we just all sat there in awe as he went crazy (playing that solo)." ? Tony James

Release[edit]

The original U.S. release of the album featured a variant track listing, omitting three songs and adding three songs from the band's singles releases, with the addition of a cover of John Lennon's "Gimme Some Truth".

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