Hey Ho Let's go and record some Ramones tunes.

23 days 10 hours and 42 minutes

Blitzkrieg Bop

I am fatigued after going to Harlesden today to get my Jenga Society album mastered. It is all done now and I am really pleased that stage has been done. It is, what it is now, and will stand or fall on that. Now I must move on to working with my designer to finish the album artwork, the manufacturing cannot begin until that has been completed.

Looking back at my past releases, I now come to Blitzkrieg Bop.
Don’t get me wrong, I am still proud of the work we Neurotics did on this release but it cannot be counted as one of our best.
This was the first single that was not a Drewett original, the band tended not to do many covers and when we did we made it our own by changing the lyrics. This was no exception.

We were offered the chance to go into the studio to record a special anti-war song to go on the Wargasm 2 album. It was then that I decided that, as we used to play the Ramones Blitzkrieg Bop in our set when we first started out, that it would be a good vehicle for an anti-war song. So I changed the lyrics to be a warning about the installation of Cruise missiles in Britain by the Americans and I wrote it in a similar style to the way the Ramones wrote their lyrics.

Later I was to be honoured by the Ramones themselves saying that they really liked our treatment of the song and they even went  on to write some political commentary songs done in much the same way as I had mixed political comment with their style.

Although the original Wargasm album had done well, there was some problem with the money and the Wargasm 2 project collapsed but we were allowed to keep the tracks we had recorded in Elephant Studio. We had recorded Blitzkrieg Bop and quickly knocked out a couple of other tracks. One was another Ramones number “I Remember You” this time without any lyric changes and a new version of Hypocrite. We did Hypocrite again not because we were unhappy with the original but because Simon enjoyed being in the band so much, that he wanted to be revisionist with our past and make it look that the band had always had him as their drummer. There were three more tracks that he hadn’t played on and we thought about revisiting (and re-recording) them in the future so that he was present on all of the songs of the band, however we never go around to it.

So we had three tracks that we now had no use for, so we decided to release them as a three track single.

It was a step back for us to not to do originals but we were to have some trouble with the next release despite having new songs.

Below is the title track…