“These songs were amongst the very earliest songs we got together pre-Peel session in 1981, but were discarded at the time due to them feeling unfinished,” says vocalist/bassist Mark Burgess of THE CHAMELEONS about the five-song EP TOMORROW REMEMBER YESTERDAY which will be released on October 11th digitally by Metropolis Records and can be pre-ordered here. The vinyl edition of the EP will be available through the Berlin based label Aufnahme+Wiedergabe with a limited number also available via Metropolis Records mail order.
With its release posited between the Where Are You? EP (their first studio release of new music in over 20 years was released in May 2024) and their upcoming album Arctic Moon due out in 2025, this EP of archival tracks is dusted off, refreshed, and re-recorded, creating a nostalgic bridge between their two new releases. The idea of releasing Tomorrow Remember Yesterday as an EP was conceived at the annual Christmas Manchester gathering in 2023 where the band played two nights at Manchester, UK’s famed venue The Ritz. “I had the idea of revisiting some of these very early songs but recording them in a way that reflects who the band is now, rather than who we were in 1981,” he says. “We were so happy with the results.”
The archival EP’s first track “The Fan & the Bellows” highlights the band’s penchant for creating epic soundscapes with searing guitar textures. “Most of them have been released over time in their original form on various retrospectives and such like but were never really intended to be,” he explains. “‘The Fan & The Bellows’ was originally the choice of CBS/EPIC as the debut single, but the band wasn’t happy with the results and rejected that in favour of the newest song at the time, ‘In Shreds’.”
“Nostalgia”, whose chorus “tomorrow remember yesterday” is the origin of the EP’s title, was also resurrected. Recorded during the same sessions as “The Fan and the Bellows” with Steve Lillywhite (Talking Heads, Psychedelic Furs, U2), both songs originally appeared on a retrospective release by Statik Records which released the band’s earliest records.