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Den: That's a good name for a band...
Bad News by Bad News © 2004 Parlophone Records Ltd.
Queen Quackers By Andrew Burns Origin: I can’t remember which of my lovely girls offered this one up, but one of them misheard “Cream Crackers” as the afore mentioned Queen Quackers. And it is thus that imaginary 80s pop icons are born… Queen Quackers was formed in 1979 when Healey (born Helly Haugen) move to London from his native Oslo. He was employed as a language teacher (Healey is famously fluent in German and Russian as well as English and his own Norwegian) by day while he pursued his musical ambitions at night. His environmental and humanitarian interests were also taking root at this time being an active and militant member of his local CND chapter. He met Queen Quackers rhythm guitarist Costas Tyrell through the language school where he was teaching Spanish. He met Jim Heart, bassist, while playing gigs on the circuit. The 3 of them began to play together, mostly perfecting songs Healey already had written. American drummer Maggie Bond had put an advert in the NMM promoting her services and when the 4 of them came together, Queen Quackers was born. With the band complete and already with a honed repertoire of original music they created quite a buzz very quickly and signed with Evolution Records in 1980. Early in 1981 their first album “This Norwegian Would” was released. It produced 3 top ten hits in the UK including the UK/US number 1 “Changing Lives”. In 1982 while on tour promoting This Norwegian Would Tyrell was found dead in his hotel room in Mexico City. He had apparently taken a heroin overdose. The devastation that his death wrought was relatively short lived (indeed, Tyrell’s sister insisted indecently so) and the remaining three members of the band continued as a trio. This reduction in personnel did change their sound, leading to much more sparse arrangements giving their subsequent work a haunting, nuanced quality. Their success was only amplified by this. Over the next 4 years they released 3 more albums, all international hits and confirming Queen Quackers, and Healey in particular, as true pop superstars. When 1986’s “Popcorn for the Soul” was released Healey had already married the supermodel Chrissie Urquhart and relocated to Los Angeles. With the other two members of the band still based in London this was further strain instigated by Healey on the band and it had gone too far. The band disintegrated before 1987 had begun. Healey’s solo career and burgeoning acting career went from strength to strength without seemingly a backward look from him. The fact that he regularly included Queen Quackers hits into his solo set was a clear indication of where he felt the true creativity of the band had lain.
As the new millennium dawned, Healey seemed to have lost interest in his solo career. While he was still eminently able to fill any stadium in the world he was frustrated at the waning interest in his new work. And more than 15 years of high profile campaigning on the rights of indigenous peoples around the world seemed to have achieved little. Almost in a fit of peak, he agreed to a Queen Quackers reunion tour. The “Alive and Quacking” tour was met with global excitement and was to be the biggest ever as of 2003. They took the then little known, but fresh and exciting You Can't Go Wrong With Pink Chaps with them as their support for the whole tour. That early excitement was soured quickly and the tour made to feel a cyclical PR exercise when Healey gave a press conference stating that he was “…only doing it for the money…” Despite this, despite the anger of Heart and Bond in response to this, the tour went ahead and proved, indeed, hugely profitable for all concerned. But once it was over, Healey once again engineered a parting of the ways for these 80’s pop legends.
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AuthorAndrew Burns really should know better and has so many more important things to be doing than writing this drivel. Please offer him no encouragement either via social media or through the contact page Archives
September 2017
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