About These Colour Twigs:

Tor Midstkog and I started Colour Twigs after our first band together, Mental Mannequin, broke up. Some of my other favorite musicians had run off to join Sleeping Movement with the legendary Charles Garish (Upchuck)…and one day in the bathtub, the name Colour Twigs jumped into my mind. At first we used backing tracks on a cassette machine containing 808 drum patterns and synthesizer parts. Tor played guitar live and sang his songs and I played keyboards and sang MY songs. His songs had names like Voodoo Ballo, Walpurgis Nacht, and Be More Precise. I contributed It’s Easy, I Sleep On The Radio and Military Man. Later, Will Adams joined us on bass, Mike Stein on drums, then Dono Freeborn played drums and Michael Davidson played bass…… we even played a METROPOLIS gig with Seattle’s great Peter Barnes on drums. Colour Twigs recorded and album, and you may find it hidden in the music department or on the Gordon Raphael Spotify page. Psychedelic New Wave? Seattle Mystery-tronica?

Half the musicians in my first all-original-Gordon-music band, Mental Mannequin went over to join Upchuck’s new group called Sleeping Movement. Some of them were already playing with him in The Fags, but things got so they didn’t have time to do both anymore. Yes I was jealous, and I never really gave them credit at the time for being great, but they really were, and in a way that only the city of Seattle could have spawned. Dark, drugged-out, falling over and playing on their backs on the floor of the Meatlockers Club. Long day-glo painted fingernails, painted all the way up to their knuckles, scratching wildly on sunburst Stratocasters. Just plain fun. Thank You: Kelly Mercier, Cam Garrett, Pony Maurice Jean James Junior and James BabyTeeth Carbo– for these tremendous photo-images

 

With everyone gone, I wanted to keep improving my skills. write new songs and play shows so
I was in the bathtub in Apt.F on Thomas and Bellevue, and hit upon a concept called Colour Twigs,
in which me and Tor Midtskog would be a duo and record our friend Tom Murphy’s Roland CR-78 Cube drum machine, Tor’s 808 drums plus a few old synths, and go onstage with a cassette machine
as our backing band. Our first show was with Tuxedo Moon on a snowy night, at Gorgio’s Greek Restaurant, downtown.

More two man shows, and then after rehearsing in Rich Riggins’ Blue Room,
there evolved a real live band with Will Adams on Bass and harmony vocals, and Mike Stein
from The Young Executives on real new wave rock drums. We recorded a demo with Bruce Main at the very same church-studio in Ballard that would house us all as bohemian punk-rockers
a few years later- which was quite surreal and a Seattle flavoured bedlam/chaos.
Eventually we got Mike Davidson back on bass, and we did the recordings at Triangle
and Charlie Meserole’s ESP place that would eventually become our “album” (with special guest
drummer Don Freeborn from Oak Harbor / Medusa fame. We Colour Twigs had some fun at
The Vogue, Metropolis and Market Theater. playing shows in those early original music days.

 

Metropolis Show Review by S. O Terrik (a troll)