Sun Palace

Way back in the summer of 1981, two musicians got together to make a record. Mike Collins played guitar and had just bought a Roland CR78 - the first programmable drum machine. Keith O'Connell played the Fender Rhodes piano and the Prophet 5 synthesizer.Collins and O'Connell decided to record a quirky instrumental called “Rude Movements”. So they hired Utopia Studios with Pete Walsh engineering and went to work using the big Neve mixing console to 'beef up' the sound of the CR78 drum machine. A top session musician, Fiona Hibbert, played harp on some mixes.The bills came to almost £4,000. At the time, this was an unprecedented budget to spend on what was basically a vehicle to allow two musicians to improvise over a programmed drumbeat with a rolling, repetitive, hypnotic Fender Rhodes part played 'live' throughout the 7 minutes or so of music. But this, of course, is exactly why this record has proven to be so unique and 'timeless' in nature.Originally titled "Rude Movements" by "Rude Note", this title referred to the bluesy 'bent' notes played on the guitar and on the synthesizer using its pitchbend wheel which Keith called 'rude notes'.The single was released around the end of 1983 by Passion Records. Passion renamed the 'band' as 'Sun Palace' and chose a rough mix that had been re-titled as 'Winning' at one stage during the recording sessions as the A-side.This mix was actually a monitor mix run off quickly after an overdub session to add the harp and some extra Clavinet-like synthesizer lines using a PPG Wave synthesizer.The original "Rude Movements" mix was much more representative of the sound that we wanted to produce - with Pete Walsh using all his studio engineer's tricks to interact with the improvised music - dropping snare beats into reverb to get a big splash of sound to punctuate the rhythm, for example. Nigel Wright, the owner of the Passion label, who was also the keyboard player/founder of Shakatak who made several successful albums in the early 1980's, decided to remix Winning around 1987. He added a piano solo which was quite jazzy and very much in keeping with the mood of the music, but then ruined the recording by adding the sounds of a man and a woman moaning and groaning as though they were having sex!In 1998, Mr. Bongo record shop in Soho was asked to supply a large order of the single on vinyl to Japan and contacted Passion who re-pressed the record so that they could fulfil the order. I was amazed to learn that a new generation of fans were interested to buy the record over in Japan.