1. The name Passion Spent was taken from a novel by Victoria Mary (Vita) Sackville-West called All Passion Spent. First published in 1931, the book is about the secret burning desire of a seventeen-year-old (Lady Slane) to become an artist.
2. Dave Rushby, Ian Sunderland and Jim Orwin – the founder members of Passion Spent – first met when Jim auditioned for RIO, the band Dave and Ian were forming (with Mick Douthwaite and Brian Wrigglesworth) in 1983. Through the various incarnations of Passion Spent Dave, Ian and Jim have been constant from the beginning.
3. During a Passion Spent band meeting at Jim’s house the phone rang. It was a guy called Joseph Melotte, one of the A&R team at EMI Records, and he was listening to the bands first cassette Pride or Ego. He wanted to know dates and venues of upcoming gigs so he could come to see the band. A great experience considering everyone in the band except Jim was 18 years old or under!
4. Joseph Melotte never did come to a Passion Spent gig. When the second cassette, Selected Essays, was released we phoned Joseph to ask if he’d managed to get to see the band. He said he hadn’t: he’d listened to the Pride or Ego recording a few more times and had decided it wasn’t as good as he had originally thought. [You win some: you lose some!]
5. Passion Spent were offered a publishing contract by Acuff-Rose music publishers for the song ‘Someone To Talk To’, but declined the offer. (Perhaps if Acuff-Rose had wanted to sign the band to a publishing contract and not just the song, we would have accepted.)
6. When ‘Someone To Talk To’ was released in 1987, Dave and Jim made the trek to London to try to promote the single to record companies and radio stations. While they were travelling down on the train, Jim’s wife Julie managed to arrange a meeting for the pair with Radio 1 producer Jonathan Ruffle, who at the time was producing Simon Bates’ mid-morning show. Ruffle said he liked the song, and admired the fact that the band had written, arranged, recorded, pressed, and were now promoting the single independently. He said it was an achievement to be proud of. However, he said he wouldn’t be playing it on the show.
A couple of days later, Simon Bates did in fact play the single. From the response we received it seems everyone heard it apart from the members of the band. We spoke to Jonathan Ruffle afterwards, but he said he wouldn’t be playing it again. And he didn’t. As Jim often reflects: not so much ‘one hit wonders’, but ‘one play wonders’!
7. Passion Spent set up their own record label – Paragon Records – on which to release ‘Someone To Talk To’.
8. After a radio interview with Dianna Luke on Viking Radio, Passion Spent received a not inconsiderable number of fan letters. They kept in touch with those fans for several years.
9. When Passion Spent released ‘Someone To Talk To’ they sent 1 free copy of the single to all the Virgin Record stores in the UK, with an order form for the stores to order more copies when they’d sold out. But one of the fans who was in touch with the band after the Viking Radio Dianna Luke interview, found that her local Virgin Records store had put their free copy of ‘Someone To Talk To’ straight into the 50p bargain bin. [Strange thing, this marketing lark!]
10. In Hull in the early 1980s, bands either played original material at venues such as the Adelphi (playing only occasionally and earning next to nothing); or they played covers at pubs and working men’s clubs (playing regularly and earning considerably more). Passion Spent were early adopters at that time of the practice of playing pubs and clubs, but including a good percentage of original material; thereby quickly earning money to finance recording and the issue of cassettes and their single, and getting their music heard by a much wider and larger audience.
This example was soon followed by a number of other aspiring local ‘pop’ bands writing their own material.