The Chameleons

Back to the music.

A little track here from the Chameleons UK.

This is...

The

Him, the track there, one of their great singles from that band, featured on their singles collection and all of its crackling vinyl there.

I'm sure that's in digital format somewhere, but I love playing vinyl on the show, you know? Makes it more authentic that way.

What else? Some Chameleons UK before that.

One Flesh, the track from their What Does Anything Mean Basically album.

And it was brilliant.

So if you were opening act, whether it be for Chameleons or other bands, do opening acts get paid or is that just more exposure for them?

It depends.

I mean, we weren't really in the opening.

I mean, we did play before the Chameleons, but we weren't.

We got, I mean, I don't say we got paid handsomely, but appropriately or whatever.

But it depends.

I don't think we noticed it so much at the time, but that's something I'm going to talk about in my summing up, that this album sounds probably more advanced in ways now than it did at the time that we know where some of these things led.

I've compared this to the Chameleons and Swamp Thing especially.

The last minute of this song is very mid-period Chameleons.

Not the bit that Noel Gallagher ripped off or Columbia, but the bit towards the end.

We're going to take a quick little bird walk because you mentioned the word, the name John Peel.

I spoke to David Gedge of The Wedding Present, Vox of The Chameleons, and other artists who have sung Peel's praises.

So you had mentioned his name, so I got to ask, memories of him, what did you think of him, his vision, all of that?

Oh, great.

That's right.

The Chameleons,

Strange Times, 1986, the third album from this band known as the Chameleons UK in the USA for reasons that seem to have fallen by the wayside.

I mean, it is very strange that this album...

Is the hardest to find of all of the albums that we've done this season so far.

Yeah.

So I remember seeing that and, you know, kind of pondering on it as I was hiking up the hill.

And and then I was listening to the chameleons.

Because it sounds like some great lost 80s album that was discovered in the rusty racks of a defunct college radio station and now changes hands for three or four figure sums on Discogs.

It contains 10 songs of post-punk and southern gothic jangle pop that not only evokes bands like the Psychedelic Furs, the Smiths, REM, the Chameleons, et cetera, but the songs are of such substantial quality that they stack up favorably against any of those bands.

It ended up in my top five albums of 2025 and as the top album for some of you out there, including Joshua Cole, our man JDC and Lance Carmine.

And if you are not hip to the Melody Chamber yet and anything I've said sounds even remotely interesting to you, you really need this record in your collection.

Out of England, hats off to Alan Duffy for putting that together.

I got to know him a little bit when he was working with the Chameleons.

But that was, Mock Turtles was his other big band, and he was doing a lot of those tribute records when it was kind of a new concept.

It wasn't the first time anybody did it, but he kind of kicked off the tribute album craze that spurred from the late 80s to the 90s, and that was one of the earliest and best of them.

The guy that...

The Chameleons, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm glad for it because I have been anxious.

to backtrack this album, one of my five picks, The Chameleons, Strange Times.

It came out in 1986, and I feel that it is an album that has been unfairly overlooked.

you know, in time.

But I will say that I discovered, upon backtracking this album and doing my research, that I feel like there is...

There's a storm brewing.

There's the renaissance for this album, for the Chameleons in general, I think, is really underway.

Like, they...

So it's like I'm still, I'm still learning about bands.

The Chameleons, you know?

Mm-hmm.

Uh, uh, Script of the Bridge, you know?

So it, it, it takes till now to even discover a lot of these bands.

Right.

And I'm so grateful that, like, The Chameleons are still out there and touring, you know?

Mm-hmm.