A lot of Quakes fans have expressed that Voice of America is their favorite Quakes album. I’m happy to say that we still play many of the songs from this album in our live shows. With this being the 30 year anniversary (recording started July 9, 1990), I wanted to shed some light on how we made the album and give some background about its creation.

Paint It Black
In 1988, the three of us (Rob, Dave and myself) were living in a squat (1) in east London. The previous residents were all bands and there were lots of things left behind including cassette tapes. One of those tapes was “the best of the Rolling Stones”. We had borrowed a cassette player and our only form of entertainment was listening to tapes. The song Paint it black struck me as a song that could be easily converted to rockabilly song and had a dark subject matter which was suitable.We knew that some other psychobilly bands had covered Rolling Stones songs but to our knowledge no one had done Paint It Black. A year or so later we started playing it live and saw that in fact it was going well so we wanted to record it.

(1)A “squat” is a residence that has been taken over by “squatters”. This type of thing was very common in the UK in the 80’s. In our case we knew someone who knew someone and we ended up in an flat that had been home to bands like Voice of the Beehive and Zodiac Mindwarp and many other lesser known groups. The building was owned by the council. After a while they start sending notices to try and get you out. One day a lady from the council came to the house and we were painting and fixing things up with materials we found in a building site dumpster. The lady was impressed and she got us a license to legally stay there as long as we paid rent and switched the utilities into our name.(that is another story for another time .