Globe of Frogs Revisited

Dear Reader,

I hope this finds you surfing reality with love in your heart and a hefty carapace of philosophy to protect it. This comes to you from the corner of a parking lot in East Nashville where I am, as ever, making notes in the shade.

My latest news as follows:

I recently shipped all my old master tapes from the warehouse in London, where they had lain for decades, to my basement here in Nashville. Among the 2” tapes - O stars of joy! - I found a complete set of 24-track masters for the Globe of Frogs album.

It was recorded in 1987 with Morris Windsor and Andy Metcalfe (the surviving Egyptians from the OG 1984 five-piece) who both had been in the Soft Boys with me back in 1970s Cambridge. The two of them were an ace rhythm section and our musical rat-runs together ran deep.

Released on A&M records in early 1988, Globe of Frogs was my major label album debut after 10 years on indies.

We had several musical guests on the album. One was REM’s Peter Buck. Peter’s guitar playing chimed perfectly with mine, at points we sounded interchangeable. Bassist Andy Metcalfe was also playing keyboards with Squeeze at this point, which led to their front man Glenn Tilbrook singing a fab harmony on "Flesh Number One (Beatle Dennis)." Our fellow Cambridge musician Chris Cox added some mandolin to "Balloon Man".

On its release, Globe of Frogs triggered an avalanche of airplay and publicity, largely because A&M picked "Balloon Man" as a single, which I had actually written for The Bangles. The label bosses accidentally heard our version, insisted that it went on the album and pressed the button marked GO. "Balloon Man" went everywhere! Whether it ever went to The Bangles is a moot point, but suddenly big radio stations were adding us, when we barely even knew what that entailed. Our audience doubled in size. So did my ego, probably. Was this exciting? Hell, yes! You bet your sweet bippy!

Globe of Frogs broke a lot of ice for myself and the band. Some of that ice subsequently froze over again. But the album did its work, and then tapered away into history. By the time I rediscovered the 2” master tapes, it had been out of print for some years. Listening to the record almost four decades after we made it, however, it felt like it could do with refreshing beyond simply remastering. It needed a remix.

So Brad Jones and I have sonically updated it at Alex the Great Recording Studios in Nashville. Brad sweetened the vocals where he could, softened the tone of the bass, shed some of the 1980s digital patina from the drum sound, and pruned a few overdubs to highlight the organic interplay between the guitar, bass and drums that comprise the backing tracks.

There is one exception here: when we checked the multitrack tape of the last song "Flesh Number One (Beatle Dennis)" we could find no trace of Glenn Tilbrook’s vocal. This must have been on an ancillary tape, brought in - as was common practice in the analogue era - when all 24-tracks had been used up. But that tape is lost now. Rather than lose Glenn’s Beatle-esque harmony, we decided to stick with the original 1987 mix for this album-closer. So at Infrasonic Sound, remastering engineer John Baldwin has brought its sound into line with the previous nine tracks; however, the enlarged mid-1980s snare on Morris’s kit is an enduring memento of the time when even drums had big hair.

These recordings are all the same takes as on the original A&M album, in fact, a couple of tracks are now slightly longer. Brad and I have done our best to adjust them to 21st-century ears, in the hope of giving them another phase of existence that will extend beyond our lifetimes. The album is due for release on January 9, 2026.

You can pre-order it here.

Tiny Ghost will share some of the new mixes as singles in the near-ish future.

Love on ya,

RH