Not long ago, Martyn Leaper—the man behind beloved pop project the Minders—did a little experiment. He broke out an old eight-track reel-to-reel machine, similar to the one he and producer Robert Schneider used to record his band’s 1998 debut, Hooray for Tuesday, and recorded a new version of that album’s title track.
This wasn’t a feeble attempt to try to correct the supposed mistakes of the past or “make the songs better,” as Ian McCulloch of Echo and the Bunnymen has been claiming about his band’s forthcoming collection of re-recorded classics. For Leaper, this was a chance to “revisit in my mind where I started with this 20 years ago.”
“We were first and foremost a little garage band,” he continues. “A DIY unit. We made a couple of records in studios, but mostly they’ve been done at home. And that’s because we’re too poor and didn’t sell many records, so we have to be self-sufficient. So to go back and look at that, it’s really exciting, to be honest. I miss those days. They were great days.”
The reason for both the re-recording and this pointed reflection was instigated by the forthcoming 20th anniversary reissue of Hooray for Tuesday that Leaper is putting together for his imprint Space Cassette Records. The new edition features the original album and a handful of bonus tracks, including a demo of the title track from 1996 and the new version of that same song recorded with the Minders’ current lineup.
Preparing to reissue the debut brought Leaper back to a formative period of his life.