LARRY WALLIS - Leather forever

SINGLES LARRY WALLIS Leather forever / Seeing double sp 1986 Sonics records wav
Produced by Larry Wallis

Band ?

Wallis' pedigree reaches back to the early '70s, and a roll call of bands that included free-festival favorites the Entire Sioux Nation, former T. Rex percussionist Steve Took's Shagrat, Blodwyn Pig, Lancaster's Bomber, and, briefly, metal heroes UFO, before he joined the Pink Fairies in time for their third (and possibly finest) album, "Kings of Oblivion". The band broke up following its release and, in 1975, Wallis reappeared in Motörhead -- a move that the guitarist unhesitatingly describes as preordained: "It was just as if the serendipity fairy had arrived, Lemmy had been 'imprisoned in Hawkwind,' and was now flexing his leathern wings.... It just had to be."

Together, Wallis and Lemmy alchemized one of the hardest-hitting bands of the entire pre-punk era, and the handful of shows that the group played during this period was nothing short of the absolute revision of all that had taken place before. Certainly their label of the time, UA, was absolutely baffled by the band, sending them into the studio first with Dave Edmunds, then with former beat boom survivor Fritz Fryer, before deciding that nothing the band did was actually marketable. The band was dropped from the label and the tapes were buried in a lead-lined box, figuratively if not literally. And they remained there until -- surprise, surprise -- Motörhead became late-'70s superstars, and suddenly anything with their name attached seemed eminently saleable indeed. "On Parole", titled for one of Wallis' own compositions, was released in 1978 and has been available ever since.
Wallis departed Motörhead around the same time as they were dropped and, through early 1976, he led a revitalized Pink Fairies lineup around the London club scene as it lurched from pub rock to punk. By late summer, the Fairies had signed with Stiff Records and released the single "Between the Lines," the label's second-ever release. They also appeared at the first Mont de Marsan Punk Festival that August, a gathering of the clans that pitched the likes of Nick Lowe, Little Bob Story, and Eddie & the Hot Rods into the middle of rock's latest firestorm. Of them all, the Fairies came out on top, but with a sense of timing that they had long since perfected, the group announced that this moment of absolute triumph was the ideal time to break up. Allmusic