Well, folks, it’s time to take another dip into the wonderful world of Albums I Discovered While I Was Working At A Record Store. If you’re a former record store employee (and I strongly suspect that more than a few of you are), then you’re probably in possession of quite a few records which you hold near and dear to your heart, even though the average person would give you a blank look if you mentioned the artist’s name. When you’re toiling in the music retail mines, you’re rarely doing it for money; instead, you’re doing it for the love of music and, invariably, the free in-store play CDs that find their way into the personal collections of the employees when the album in question has run its course…if not before.
The Pleasure Thieves’ Simple Escape is one of those albums for me. They were one of those poor, unfortunate artists who were signed to Hollywood Records in the early ’90s, in the midst of the Disney-owned label’s glory days as The Label Who Held The US Rights To The Early Queen Catalog. It might’ve seemed like a great place to be, since Hollywood was ensured an arseload of sales from the works of Messrs. Mercury, May, Deacon, and Taylor, but as you’ll soon read, it was a place where no-one really knew how to go about breaking new artists. As such, most of the artists signed to Hollywood ended up only sticking around for a short stay…whether they wanted to hang around or not. (One of these days, I’m going to write up another one of my favorite came-quick-and-didn’t-stay-long Hollywood Records artists: Ghost of an American Airman.)
Granted, it’s not entirely a surprise that the Pleasure Thieves couldn’t find success with their sound in 1992. Lead singer Sinjin-William Dolan rather resembles Neil Diamond at times with his husky voice…check out the album-opening “Turn Me On” for proof…and the music’s very synth-heavy. Sadly, neither were attributes that would’ve led any band to success in the early ’90s, when you pretty much had to be flying the flannel to earn yourself rock radio airplay. They did manage to score a little bit of airplay with the album’s lead singer, “My Favorite Drug,” but it wasn’t enough to save them from Hollywood’s purge of virtually all of their artists with names that didn’t start with the letters “Q-U.” But, man, did I love that record, which was evidenced by the fact that more than a few of my mix tapes from the era feature the pop-tastic, horn-driven hook of “Wild Miracle.”
And, yet, for years, it seemed as though the band was a figure of my imagination. I did a posting over at ESDMusic.com in August 2006 where I bemoaned that “the group vanished so far into oblivion that they have no website, no MySpace page, nothing.” Thankfully, that’s changed a little bit since then – they now have both – but there hasn’t been much need to update the band’s site, so you’re probably better off sticking with their MySpace page, run by the band’s keyboard player, Matt Everitt.
