I started to manage and guide Medium Medium shortly before Adrian and I split, I had first met them when booking them into a few shows for some concerts I was promoting. I was instantly impressed and very taken with them indeed, they were all based in Nottingham and with, an inspired charismatic genius of a front man called JOHN REES LEWIS (then just John Lewis) and a stunning rhythm section. Made even more stunning when in 1981 the excellent and admirable STEVE HARVEY joined them on drums (replacing their original drummer Nigel) the combination of Steve’s inspired drumming and the brilliant ALLAN TURTON on Bass was awesome in every sense, and all this complemented their equally inspired and gifted guitarist ANDY RYDER.

HUNGRY SO ANGRY was obviously a hit, I spoke to Adrian and he did a stunning remix of it, which lifted the whole track into a whole different dimension, subsequently driving MM to success in the USA and a chart placing in the BILLBOARD ‘URBAN’ AMERICAN DANCE CHARTS (a great honor for us at the time). I had been quietly and carefully putting a deal together with ISLAND RECORDS, which would have been the perfect label for MM, but just before the offer came through they went and signed, much against my wishes, with CHERRY RED RECORDS. This would prove to be typical of MM, an inability to listen and take advice and a talent for shooting themselves and each other in the foot! MM toured extensively and very successfully for a few years and could sell out major venues (sadly not in the UK) in the USA, GERMANY, HOLLAND, ITALY etc. We were very successful indeed in EUROPE and in the USA, particularly on the East Coast and could headline and sell out places like THE RITZ and DANCETERIA in New York, with ease, indeed I have vivid memories of a very disgruntled NINA HAGEN having to open for us. The lack of a strong label behind us that could provide any muscle or real promotion was particularly for me very frustrating, and I greatly regretted the band not signing to ISLAND, equally the tension in the band created by the fact that John the singer was a highly talented gifted songwriter and front man, who should have made all artistic decisions, which I would have backed, and the conflict between him and the guitarist.

This tension finally came to a head and John suddenly left the band I had known he had been very unhappy for some time, and in retrospect I should have acted, but, things were different at that time. I received a call from Allan one Sunday morning as I was having breakfast with ILONA in Germany, to say that John had left. This was a total disaster, with the next US tour a few weeks ahead and a major six figure deal almost on the table from Arista in NYC, what would we do? Andy came in as front man, with Julie his then girlfriend on keyboards, but Andy was no front man and had none of John’s charisma, and after the Danceteria show, the label people came up to me and said ‘Sorry Chris, we still love the band but without John, it’s just not happening’! So we carried on, and eventually split up in the States, I left first, and Ilona and I flew back to Europe and created U-BahnX, which we had been planning for a while.

Medium Medium were a phenomenally good band, one of the greats, who all things being equall, should have been absolutely huge, and indeed could easily have been, if not for their talent for self-destruction. The tracks featured here show them at full power and at their inspired best, Allan Steve John & Myself are still close friends. Allan & Steve live in LA and John in Canada, Andy is in New York.

During the early eighties, (the MM New York Days,) JOHN CALE and I had became friends, I had always been a big VELVET UNDERGROUND fan and also of John’s solo work. We tried putting MM together with John in the studio while he was working on 'MUSIC FOR A NEW SOCIETY’ but the Nottingham Boys and Mr Cale did not click at all! Cale loved the band though and always came to our NYC shows, and we would hang out a lot and discuss various music ventures, both of us were big CAPTAIN BEEFHEART fans and I tried to bring the two of them together but sadly without success.

I also at this time would run into ALAN VEGA and MARTY REV of SUICIDE a lot, I think this was through a connection I had through MARTY THAU and a French guy who I briefly worked with called ‘Roget’ who was managing Suicide at the time. I loved Suicide, a truly amazing visionary innovative band and I liked and respected Alan Vega who was and indeed is very much the ‘true artist’. Suicide/Alan Vega went on to achieve great success in France, so it seems Roget did a good job!

The two Medium Medium tracks featured here ‘Hungry So Angry’ and ‘Further Than Funk Dream’ show them at their very best and at the height of their power!

Medium Medium were a truly inspired live band, dark moody, and powerful, audiences loved them and on a good night ‘they could raise the dead and cause the blind to see’. Although our success and fan base in the USA was very important , my favorite venue was always BERLIN, I liked the Berlin audience, and of course Germany was home for me. Berlin , Düsseldorf and Hamburg were great places to be at that time. In Berlin you had wonderful eccentrics like MARK REEDER, a MANCHESTER GUY who was ‘FACTORY RECORDS MAN IN BERLIN’, and good mates with NEW ORDER,CERTAIN RATION and all the ‘serious industrialist Manchester contingent’. Mark was a guy with real style who transformed himself into a kind of post-modern Weimar Republic Dandy and knew everyone worth knowing in Berlin including GUDREN GUTS band MALARIA who were excellent and had turned being seriously grumpy and unsmiling into ‘Teutonic performance art’! Equally the real creators of ‘INDUSTRIAL MUSIC’ EINSTURZENDE NEUBAUTEN, who were a wonderful and very seriously hard core bunch of ‘pop art terrorist' indeed in those days. Berlin today is a pleasant and easy place to live but with none of the dark edge atmosphere and inspired (and very ‘German’) creativity and style that it once had.