Fact #161807

Pat Gribben (guitarist/songwriter, The Adventures) : Simon Fuller, who later managed the Spice Girls, signed us to Chrysalis Publishing, and helped us get a record deal with the label as well. In fact, we were his ticket to AAndR, because we insisted that he should be our AAndR man when we got the deal.

I really liked the people at Chrysalis. They treated us very well. In fact, after signing to Chrysalis, we partied for a year when we should have been working. There was still a lot of money in the record business in the mid-80s and Chrysalis treated all its artists as if they were stars. So we stayed in the best hotels, drove around in limos, went nightclubbing all the time, living like kings really.

We did four singles with them, none of which really took off the way we’d have liked them to but, as luck would have it, while we were going through the end of of relationship with Chrysalis, Dave Field, an AAndR man at Elektra, rang up Simon and asked what we were doing, so Elektra kind of rescued us and we signed to them right away.

Simon Fuller took over our management after we left Chrysalis. He had left as well, and set up 19 Management.

The relationship with Elektra started very well, because we immediately had a hit single, Broken Land, which was Top 20 in the UK, a hit all over Europe, No3 in Canada and the most played record on Radio One that year. That was very encouraging, because we already had another song called Drowning In The Sea Of Love which we thought was much more commercial, planned as the second single for Elektra, and that was the one everybody thought was going to be huge.

It was released and immediately started doing well in America, it got to 46, and had loads of playlists, and then the Piper Alpha disaster happened and, of course, the song was immediately dropped off all the playlists because Drowning In The Sea Of Love wasn’t a title anybody wanted to hear on the radio.

We got into a horrendous financial mess, but you imagine that you’re on the gravy train forever. You assume there’ll always be more money, and suddenly there isn’t.

We were lucky enough to get picked up again, this time by Polydor, and we did our fourth album with them. We’d seen the advertising campaigns for our records getting smaller, and then the joke in the band was that MI5 had done the press for that Polydor album, it was like it was a well kept secret.

We were being ignored, and that’s when we decided to finish the band. It’s great if the media is celebrating you, or even if they’re slagging you off, but when they ignore you, that’s the hardest thing to take.

One sour note was that our bass player, Simon Ayre, who I’d always considered a good friend, disappeared, owing us lots of money. He moved to Amsterdam when the group ended, and we had huge debts. I’d put my house in Tottenham up as security, and things were tight, and he was liable for a quarter of the debts. I rang his work number in Amsterdam and he agreed to come up with the money, but the next time I rang he’d left and there was no forwarding address.

There’s a Best of The Adventures coming out later this year, and Terry Sharpe and I still play in a covers band around Belfast every weekend, and I’m still managed by Simon Fuller for publishing, so I’ve been doing some songwriting with Brian Kennedy for his album, and I was his musical director on his last tour. I’ve also been working with Dave Stewart and Cathy Dennis on the music for a tv cartoon series that Simon Fuller is doing. I’m also writing music for a tv documentary about the Titanic.

Eileen Gribben (vocals) : I was already married to Pat when The Adventures were going, and we had one child of five already who toured with us when we supported Fleetwood Mac. In fact, Stevie Nicks wanted to adopt her, said she could support her much better than we could, but we really didn’t think that was a very good idea. She was a strange woman. Now (Feb 00) we have four children, which takes up most of my time, and we live in Madigan Park, Belfast.
(Source : not known)