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After the release of their debut album ‘Predator’ and their relative disappointment of working with Heavy Metal Records Bitches Sin went back to doing what they did best – writing and recording material which they made available on cassette via mail order and at gigs. So by the time the opportunity arose to record a follow-up to ‘Predator’ guitarists Ian and Peter Toomey, together with vocalist Frank Quegan, bassist Mike Frazer and original drummer Bill Knowles (back behind the kit once more) had a large stockpile of material to work with. ‘Invaders’ appeared in 1986 and its exciting, almost belligerent material was more than able to hold its own against the more aggressive American thrash assault which was flooding the world and seemingly sweeping away everything in its path. However, the album had been picked up by a US label, and wasn’t released in Europe. ‘Invaders’ wouldn’t appear in shops east of the Atlantic until 1989, and when it did it was quite a different record: the songs had been re-recorded with keyboards added to the line-up, and three new tracks were dropped into the running order at the expense of three cuts from the original album. As a result, Bitches Sin ended up with two quite different albums of the same name. Both albums were deleted long ago, and now appear here together for the first time. The package also includes four bonus tracks – two previously unreleased – taken from various stages of the band’s career including ‘Slaughterhouse’, the song which would have been the title cut of the band’s third LP. A note about the bonus songs on this release: • ‘Aardschok’ is taken from the Moor Green session from Easter 1982. “It’s a little rough around the edges,” notes Ian, “not as tight as we normally are but we’d only just written the song. Good vocals from Tony and some great drum work too from Mark Biddiscombe.” Other tracks from this session appeared on the band’s ‘Essential Sins’ compilation CD in 2007. • ‘Guilty As Hell’ is a Mike Frazer composition from 1982/83 (“can’t quite remember the date now,” says Ian. “I’m afraid life has had a degrading effect on my memory!”). • ‘Watch Out’ is taken from the 1983 demo/cassette EP ‘Out Of My Mind’ • ‘Slaughterhouse’ was written and demoed by the original ‘Invaders’ line-up and was destined to be the title track of Bitches Sin’s third album; unfortunately, this was as far as that album got before the band finally called it a day. John Tucker September 2013 |