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David Balfe has certainly lived. In Tears Bursttook amyl nitrate on The Old Gray Whistle Test and acid on Top of the Pops. As a music publisher he was involved with many groups from the KLF to the Proclaimers, and his label signed Blur when he was called Seymour. However, he will probably be best remembered as the man who didn’t die in their 1995 smash. Country House. “Balfey” lived “in a house, the biggest house in the country.”
“This will be the first thing mentioned in my Guardian obituary,” he laughs. “I know it’s not a big hit with me, but I’m really proud of it because it’s the only one where you go to a dinner party and everyone’s like, ‘What?!’
Admiring it or not, Balfe admits that the song’s description of “a professional cynic, and my heart’s not in it” is a “very accurate reflection” of his situation at the time. By the mid-90s, after two decades in music, she was depressed and disillusioned, so she sold up and bought a “very big house” (in rural Bedfordshire) to raise her children. Now, though, he’s back, and Late Shippingnew and old alliances Dalek I love you The group’s songwriter-turned-musician Dave Hughes and legendary Liverpool singer Eve Quartermain. The trio’s fascinating mix of 60s pop, film music and orchestral trip-hop is his first work in music for more than 25 years and his first as an artist in more than 40 years. “But if you think about how difficult something is you won’t do anything,” he says in a quiet pub in the ‘pool. “I have always tried not to let anything stop me.”
Now 67, Balfe grew up near Thingwall, on the Wirral Peninsula. In 1976, he was playing in a pub cover band with friends Alan Gill and Keith Hartley when his younger brother brought home the Sex Pistols’ UK single, Anarchy. “I hated it the first time he played,” Balfe recalls. But at the end of the weekend I called Alan and Keith and said, ‘We should go to punk.’
The cover band quickly became Radio Blank: “The only punk band on the Wirral. You could get beaten up for cutting your hair short and wearing tight jeans, so every game there was a fight.” Then, as punk transformed into post-punk, Radio Blank transformed into the Dalek I Love You outfit, whose first line-up consisted of future members of OMD. Balfe also played Elderly in Japanwhich included Bill Drummond who formed the KLF, Holly Johnson who started Frankie Goes in Hollywood, Ian Broudie who became the Lightning Seeds and Budgie who later joined Siouxsie and the Banshees. Balfe and Drummond formed Zoo Records to release and release Echo & the Bunnymen and the Teardrop Explodes, at the height of the scene’s biggest explosion since the Beatles.
Balfe admits: “It was fun, but we were all arguing with our spouses. We didn’t know what we were doing – there were no YouTube how-to videos in those days – so it felt like something new. Suddenly people were saying we were revolutionary.” He is laughing. “Now people are calling us ‘legends’, which we won’t deny, obviously.”
In a show full of competitors, Teardrop Explodes was a tough one. In his unedited book Face to facesinger Julian Cope suggests that anger towards Balfe was sparked because he “rocked his way to Liverpool”.
“Surprisingly, for a guy who wasn’t good-looking, I was very successful with women,” Balfe admits, boldly, “but as a new 19-year-old blond boy who was involved in this event, I had a special chemistry with Julian. I surpassed him, but he beat me only once, we are very much in love today.”
Back then, their high jinks were fueled by hallucinogens. Cope says it was Balfe who gave him the first page of LSD that began his journey from “drug puritan” to “acid king”, who later appeared on camera wearing nothing but a turtle shell. But according to Balfe, “Dalek I Love You was inspired by surrealism and talked about a new approach to acid. So I think Julian suddenly felt that it had to be his.” However, Balfe insists that he is the only Teardrop that has fallen on their bad times Top of the Pops game for Prizes: “I was passed out with acid so I didn’t realize I was pointing a horn in my mouth, so I was bleeding all over.”
After the group broke up, he moved to London, managing one of the amazing Strawberry Switchblade, whose song Trees and Flowers “Suddenly last year among teenage girls, hundreds of thousands were copying this obscure song.” His modest success aside, Balfe has always believed that “if you keep meeting the right people, great things will happen.”
In 1987 he signed the book Proclaimers to Zoo after seeing them on Channel 4’s show The Tube: then sold millions. He said: “It was obvious to me that Letter from America was a very old song, but no one understood it. Through going out with the writer he met Andy Ross and he started Food Records, winning all over the world with Jesus Jones. “Andy played for me. Info Freak. He wore skateboarding gear so he had a very powerful image. We saw them, took them to dinner and within the first course we signed. “
It’s Seymour – Blur – he needed a lot of convincing. “They had a pop and weird side. We went to eight or nine gigs, told them to change the name, told them what worked and in the end it came together.” But not, for long, for Balfe, who sold his and wife Helen’s 75% stake in Food two weeks before Parklife was released. He said: “I was making a lot of money, but I could have made more money if I had worked harder. “It’s one of the hardest times in my life, but I was depressed. I thought that was a secret, so maybe it wasn’t clear for Blur to sing ‘put me down, I’m so upset, I don’t know why’ and so on, but I’m a big guy. It didn’t really bother me.”
Between 1996 and 1999, he briefly returned as the general manager of Sony Music and Columbia Records’ head of A&R – “I thought I’d see how the professionals did it and not us cheaters, but there aren’t many secrets” – then he left music.
Since then, he has studied writing and photography and even became a Labor MP. “Because of Jeremy Corbyn. When Starmer sacked Corbyn I left.” Meanwhile, Late Transmissions bandmate Hughes has had his own career writing films such as Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels. “The movie was almost a replacement for not having a hip band,” he says, joining us in the press room. “The last moments are so hard that you kill yourself, but it keeps the muscles going.”
The two stayed in touch and when they started singing songs inspired by Shirley Bassey, Dusty Springfield, John Barry and Scott Walker, they wondered who would sing them. Balfe says: “The Internet is full of badass singers, but we found Jo. She’s Joanna Brown, a lampoon singer who took on the name Eve Quartermain Hughes after a dream. She joined the production and lives in songs like I’m Done With London (“… but London isn’t done with me”) with a mixture of beauty and pride. “I’m a prosperous person,” she says, “but I’ve had some painful and sad times.”
Late Transmissions has rekindled Balfe’s interest, but he’s just trying to get things right. “The house was not that big,” he insists. “Beautiful house. Three acres of land. There’s no place as beautiful as the one used in the video. But Julian Cope wrote a song about Bill Drummond.Bill Drummond said) and Bill Drummond wrote a song about Julian Cope (Julian Cope has died). 99.9999% of people don’t even know these songs, but everyone knows my music. “
