Album review : WAYSTED – Won’t Get Out Alive Volume 1 (4 CDs 1983-86)

Cherry Red [Release date: 26.04.24]

CD1: Vices
CD2: I Won’t Get Out Alive
CD3: The Good, The Bad And The Waysted
CD4: Save Your Prayers

In 2019, the late great Pete Way and his band played an unannounced gig in my home town, a few miles from Glasgow, just before the pandemic hit and less than a year before his death.

For this Won’t Get Out Alive boxset, that hastily arranged gig lay 36 years in the future. It’s a helluva thought.

And so we begin in 1983. After an enduring love affair with UFO, a brief flirtation with Ozzy, and a frustrated liaison with Fastway, bass player extraordinaire Pete Way founded Waysted.
Now remastered, Vices was the band’s debut, with Scot, Fin Muir on vocals, Paul Raymond on keys, Ronnie Kayfield on guitar, and Frank Noon on drums. And it’s a blast.

The first three tracks, the strutting ‘Love Loaded’, the dark and downbeat ‘Women In Chains’ and the jangling, pacy ‘Sleazy’ are the picks. That said, ’Night Of The Wolf’, full of smouldering atmospherics and NWOBHM energy, and ’Right From The Start’, a bluesy, Faces like manifestation of post seventies hard rock don’t come far behind.

A 4 track EP was released not long after the album hit, looking to gain further momentum. On CD2, I Won’t Get Out Alive (1984), the EP material is supplemented by a handful of live tracks recorded on the band’s UK tour the following year.
Drummer, Andy Parker had now joined the band. With three ex UFO members now in Waysted, covers of the muscular and the melodic, ‘Only You Can Rock Me’ and ‘Too Hot To Handle’ were sure fire crowd pleasers.

The Good, The Bad And The Waysted (1985) might just be the pick here. Way, Chapman and Muir had become a formidable writing team, and Liam Sternberg’s relatively unpolished production lets the raw, unadulterated hard rock do the talking. Muir’s shrill, gravel gurgling voice is welded solidly to the cranked up guitars and locked tight rhythm section, most effectively on ‘Hang em High’ and ‘Manuel’.

Save Your Prayers (1986) looked like it might be the one to make a significant commercial breakthrough.

Recruiting Danny (Tyketto) Vaughn as the band’s new vocalist added an Americanised flavour that suited the band’s musical direction.
Paralleling the rise of Glamrock and Hair Metal, it was an album that looked to bridge the gap between the honest hard rock of the seventies and the burgeoning bandana rock of the early eighties.

The reissued album was reviewed by Joe Geesin for GRTR a few years back… he described it as “a studio album essential to Classic Rock fans”, particularly highlighting ‘Walls Fall Down’ and ‘Hell Comes Home’.

Welcome value add comes in the form of the boxset’s “behind the curtain” liner notes. An entertainment in themselves. And a dozen bonus tracks, sprinkled across the boxset, are topped of with a 7” edit of the band’s peak Waysted, ‘Heaven Tonight”. This major chapter of the band’s career wouldn’t have been complete without it. ****

Review by Brian McGowan

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Power Plays w/c 9 December 2024

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