T.R.A.C.

I've put up quite a few Big Audio Dynamite posts recently but thought I'd share this with you, having just stumbled across it- blogger's stats tend to suggest there are a fair few BAD fans who come here. After getting fired from The Clash in 1983 Mick went to work pretty quickly, possibly just to prove Joe and Paul wrong. In a Clash old boys solidarity moment he hooked up with also recently fired Topper Headon, plus Leo Williams and Dan Donovan (a future Mr Patsy Kensit) and formed T.R.A.C. (Top Risk Action Company). This band transformed into BAD, gaining Don Letts and losing Topper (who was deep into heroin addiction by this point). T.R.A.C. recorded a series of demos, an albums worth. The Bottom Line, very much a demo and really quite different to the BAD version is here...



The Bottom Line was a potential Clash song, one of the most recently written before Mick's ejection- I believe they had a go at rehearsing it. In this T.R.A.C. version the riff is there (or thereabouts) and some of the lyrics but it's much less bass and drum machine led one that is on BAD's first lp. Some jazzy sax parping away at the end.

The rest of the demos are on Youtube and probably hidden somewhere in the deepest recesses of the internet. This one is Ducane Road...



The rest (you go look for them yourselves I think if you're interested) are Interaction, Nation, Apprentice, Fare Dodgers, Euroshima and The Prolific. It's interesting, if you're a geeky obsessive like me, to speculate on what might have's and what if's...