FM (UK) are all about kight and breezy AOR, and surprising poppy for this South London band bought up in an era of British heavy metal, this is a top 20 album from the 80’s for mine.
Written by: gdmonline
ARTIST: FM (UK)
ALBUM: Indiscreet
LABEL: Portrait
SERIAL: PRT 26827
YEAR: 1986
CD REISSUE: Discogs Reissue List
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN: England
LINEUP: Steve Overland – vocals, guitars * Chris Overland – guitars * Didge Digital – keyboards * Merv Goldsworthy – bass * Pete Jupp – drums
TRACK LISTING: 01 That Girl * 02 Other Side Of Midnight * 03 Love Lies Dying * 04 Frozen Heart * 05 American Girls * 06 Hot Wired * 07 Face To Face * 08 I Belong To The Night * 09 Heart Of The Matter
Background
Light and breezy AOR, and surprising poppy for this South London band bought up in an era of British heavy metal a la Iron Maiden and Def Leppard.
Primarily based around the talented Overland brothers Steve and Chris, who first came to prominence with Wildlife, a band featuring Bad Company member Simon Kirke and future big-time bassist Phil Soussan.
The Bad Company influence was quite strong with Wildlife, produced by Mick Ralphs and released on the Swansong label. However, the FM band direction came about due to the obvious success of the harder melodic rock acts such as Europe, Def Leppard, Bon Jovi.
The band were also influenced by the success of Foreigner, Heart, Asia and Journey in the more lucrative US markets. No surprise then that Portrait Records ventured in and helped get this rather impressive slice of UK AOR on the map.
The Songs
Keyboards to the fore here, as the old Yamaha DX7 gets a thorough workout by Didge Digital on most songs (I used to own one of those DX7’s.. behemoth things that they were!). Merv Goldsworthy’s bass is fluid, and pulsing, and enables the guitars and vocals to shine above it all.
And Steve Overland’s vocals deliver big time. Some of the songs here are so hook laden and memorable even to this day. ‘That Girl’, ‘Hot Wired’, ‘Heart Of The Matter’ and ‘Face To Face’ are superb examples. Their classic moment without doubt would have to be the ballad ‘Frozen Heart’. This song was remixed, the one on the original LP sounding a bit better than the one on the CD in my opinion. However, all in all, you can put this album on repeat mode in your CD player and you wouldn’t get sick of it.
In Summary
FM’s history continued on for many years after, but this debut album still sticks out head and shoulders above the rest, including their follow up ‘Tough It Out’. Though the latter is still an important and essential album to have in your AOR collection, this is the one to get.
FM on Video
Click to go to YTM album page.
The YTM audio page lists songs but they are incorrectly labeled. The original poster stuffed up, but I believe this botch up was made further upstream, as I recall this album was made available on a fileshare somewhere with the incorrect titles embedded, and thus carried downstresm to all other platforms. I remembered having to fix the labeling some years ago on a download file.