Album review : MAMA’S BOYS – Runaway Dreams 1980-92 (5 CD boxset)

Cherry Red [Release date : 26.01.24]

CD1: Official Bootleg (1980)
CD2: Plug It In (1982)
CD3: Turn It Up (1984)
CD4: Relativity (1992)
CD5: Singles, B Sides and Rarities

Three boys from Co. Fermanagh conquer the world.

Well no, it didn’t turn out quite like that, but they didn’t lack ambition.

The progression of N.Ireland’s trio of musical brothers, Pat, Tom and John McManus – Mama’s Boys – back in the eighties, follows the not unfamiliar career arc of a rock band.

Grounded in Irish folk music, as members of the award winning McManus family collective, their conversion to hard rock came suddenly.

It was the sound – thanks to bands like Thin Lizzy, Rainbow and others – that was dominating the airwaves. The boys were not immune, and so the real story began.

The debut album, Official Bootleg, was recorded in 4 hours. The boys got it pressed up in vinyl and used it as their calling card. It led to UK gigs supporting Thin Lizzy, Hawkwind and others. They had arrived.

It’s the stuff that rockumentary dramas are made of.

Official Bootleg (1980): Soaked in soul, born in the blues and telling stories like an Irish Folk band,

It gave us ‘I’m Leaving Town’, which picked up on the working class dramas that their hero, Phil Lynott was so adept in telling. The band’s emotions get so intense they almost burn off the page on ‘Belfast City Blues’, while the swaggering, US influenced rock of ‘Down And Out’ was in its own way a pointer to where their future lay.

The industry sat up and took notice. This ground level success encouraged the band again to put their hand in their pocket, and fund a follow up album, Plug It In (1982).

The band upped the production values by a £pound or two, and added a beefier, re-recorded ‘Record Machine’ and a new cut of ‘Belfast City Blues’, which seemed to carry even more emotional weight this time around, to a couple of spirited new songs: the boxset’s title track ‘Runaway Dreams’, and ‘Needle In The Groove’… a tangential move into AOR land, which became a minor US hit.

All they had learned, all they had absorbed was poured into CD3, the appropriately titled Turn It Up (1984).

It’s edgy, it’s aggressive, it’s loud yet it has heart and soul and warmth. It assembles a lot of other peoples ideas and themes, cut and shaped into the band’s own idea of how rock should sound.

High calibre tracks like ‘Midnight Promise’ and ‘Face To Face’ light up the album. The band was on a roll now. UK music media, especially Sounds and Kerrang, heaped praise on the band.

Relativity was released in 1992, with new vocalist, Mike Wilson. It sold well in Europe, but label interference and a serious illness to drummer Tom McManus seriously slowed the band’s momentum.

His subsequent death in 1993 brought Mama’s Boys to an end.

As with many similarly compiled Boxsets, it’s the final CD, populated by the singles and B Sides, that many fans will be attracted to.

‘Demon’ features twice. It was one of the debut’s most compelling tracks. Together with ‘Record Machine’, also here, it helped form the backbone of the band’s early foray into the world of rock, foundation stones of the band’s ultimate legacy.

It finishes with two covers, a Nazareth inspired version of ‘This Flight Tonight’ and a live version of their US Billboard Top 100 hit, and Slade cover ‘Mama Weer All Crazee Now’.

We are indeed. ****

Review by Brian McGowan

More to explore:
Album review/interview (Pat McManus, 2021)
Bands that time forgot (Celtus)

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