The Visitors – In Session for John Peel – February 25, 1982 – BBC Radio 1 –
The Visitors tonight – the Real ones. My apologies to everyone who found my page last night and discovered, not only the wrong Visitors (the Australian one), but featuring a photo of another Visitors from Portland Oregon! When I screw up, I screw up huge. For all those of you who gently (and some not-so-gently) pointed out that I had some sort of psychotic break with reality, I caught the foul-up in time and removed the offending erroneous post.
Tonights post is about the real, honest-to-god Visitors from Edinburgh Scotland who consisted of Colin Craigie, Derek McVay, John McVay and Keith Wilson. They did three sessions, were greatly admired by John Peel, who bankrolled the release of their second single but called it a day long before their time and who have, inexplicably fallen off the post-Punk radar in recent years. A compilation album of all known sessions and singles was released by Telephone Explosion Records last year. So maybe, just maybe, all is not lost after all.
This was their third and final session, recorded on February 10, 1982, broadcast on February 25th and rebroadcast on May 16th – it features the following tracks: Flow – Third Base – Unit Of Acceptance.
As a friend pointed out to me, with reference to the U.S. West Coast Punk/Post-Punk scene – there were bands springing up all over the place. Some lasted but a lot didn’t. The same is true with the UK. Fortunately, people like John Peel had the foresight to record and preserve a lot of these bands, making in some cases the only exposure a band got during their tenure.
The Visitors did get around – from 1979 to early 1982 they opened for a lot of bands and got a word-of-mouth going. But sometimes that’s just not enough to sustain a band through rough times. And being in a band, struggling for recognition is no easy task.
I was not familiar with The Visitors the first time around. Being in L.A. at the time, we were preoccupied with what was going on in our own backyards – and radio could only do so much in the course of a day. Stations like KROQ tried, but it didn’t represent everything that was going on at the time. So we missed a lot. And sadly, The Visitors were one of those bands we didn’t hear about at the time.
So once again, my knee-scraping apologies for the total screw-up from last night. I freely admit to being an idiot at times – but my intentions are at least passable.
Enjoy the session.
