Following a nearly two-decade long hiatus, founding Chameleons Mark “Vox” Burgess and Reg Smithies revived the Britpop outfit to record a post-COVID live album, Edge Sessions (Live from the Edge). Backing them were members of ChameleonsVox, a semi-eponymous project that saw Vox perform his old band’s catalog.
Something seemed to click, because ever since, Vox and friends have moved towards unveiling new material, having released two EPs—one with brand-new songs, and the other with revamped archive material—and most recently, the first new album released under the Chameleons moniker in 25 years. While last year’s Arctic Moon is a nod to the original band’s glory days, the album’s production levels are more intense than ever, as are its messages. It’s pretty clear to read between the lines on the politically-driven “Saviors Are a Dangerous Thing,” and Vox recently admitted how “David Bowie Takes My Hand” came from how the empathy of the late Starman’s “Rock and Roll Suicide” helped him out during a dark hour in 2024.
Before the Chameleons bring their Arctic Moon tour to Tampa’s next Thursday, Vox told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay all about the album that changed everything for him. Read his full quote below.
“It’s probably very strange to choose a life-changing album that impacted me before my life had really started, but no other record had the kind of impact that this album did barely a year after its initial release.
From 1963 to 1964, I was enrolled at what was known as The Cromer Mill Nursery, or what Americans would call a “kindergarten.” Both of my parents worked full-time. If memory serves me right, my father was working temporarily as a coal man, and my mother worked at the Cromer Cotton Mill, which provided a free nursery for the children of its employees. So each day I’d be dropped off there in the morning, and collected each evening, once my mother’s shift was over. I was told in later life that my mother, in particular, had grown worried due to the fact that at the age of three going on four, I was still speaking in some weird, gibberish language that no one else understood and thought I might have had some kind of neurological problem.
My mother must have discussed this amongst the nursery staff, all of whom had taken a bit of shine to me. One of them was a young trainee by the name of Irene, who hit upon the idea of bringing her favourite record to the nursery — that record was the album Please Please Me by the Beatles.
This was during 1964 and by this time, The Beatles had exploded onto the national consciousness, so much so that the young women that constituted the nursery staff were all rabid fans and had installed Beatles memorabilia in the corner of the nursery. Beatles wallpaper, four little wooden chairs with matching Beatles cushions (four different ones, naturally), and a record player.
So each day, Irene would play the songs from that album and teach me to sing them. Thus before too long, I was finally able to master the English language and put my mother’s fears to rest. However, it didn’t stop there. The genie was well and truly out of the bottle.
My nana (my grandmother on my father’s side) was overjoyed at this sudden development and urged me to sing for the convened extended family whenever there was a get-together. My nana was a mother of six, the two youngest boys, then in their late teens, I think, were twins and they bought records, and naturally, the Beatles featured heavily amongst them. My nana owned a beautiful mono radio gram, a piece of walnut furniture that featured a valve radio and turntable, and I’d spend hours playing the records. So at one particular family gathering, in return for yet another a cappella performance of “Please Please Me,” she gifted me her son’s copy of that album, minus the sleeve because that had gotten lost somewhere, and I was able to take it home. My parents gave me my own record player (a Dansette) that Christmas, and my ravenous appetite for records and pop music was sealed.
Not long after, one of my father’s brothers, Brian, along with his wife Ethel, whisked me off to a gang show that they annually organised at local music hall. A gang show was a kind of amateur variety show that were very popular at the time, whereupon they pushed me onto the stage before a full house to perform Please Please Me while strumming my cardigan buttons, which was a resounding success. After the performance, I was gifted an Easter egg wrapped in cellophane, sitting in a white tea-cup, which until fairly recently was the only time I was ever paid in hand for a live performance.
My love of The Beatles was cemented around that time when my parents took me on my first-ever visit to a cinema, The Odeon in central Manchester, to see the movie “A Hard Day’s Night.” I had no idea what was in store for me when the lights went down and then, suddenly, there they were, on a massive screen: The Beatles. What impressed me the most was the downpour of Jelly Babies from the balcony above me that started landing on my head. Apparently George Harrison had said in an interview that they were his favourite candy and so, in the wake of that, fans would pelt the stage with them. Obviously this had carried over into the screenings of the film as soon as George came on. I was delighted of course, but mistakenly believed that this was a normal feature of the cinema. Months later when my mother took me to see another movie, “Born Free,” I was constantly looking up waiting for a downpour of Jelly Babies that sadly never came.
While I went on to love and appreciate the Beatles throughout their entire evolution right up until the demise of the band in 1970 (my favourite Beatles track of them all is “Strawberry Fields Forever”) it’s that debut album that remains for me my absolute favourite. The Hamburg Beatles. That’s the album I still play in its entirety to this day. Hamburg Beatles are my favourite period, and were I able to travel back in time, it would be to Hamburg, 1959-60, when The Beatles were very much still a punk band, clad head to foot in leather, speeding their balls off, learning their craft on the Reeperbahn.
Every track of that album captures the tenderness, the charisma, the raw talent and the beauty that exploded into the global consciousness only a few months after recording it. Someone once remarked to George Harrison that they found it unbelievable that his album was recorded and mixed in a single day. George with his usual deadpan responded, “Yeah, and the second one took even longer.”
There’s a place where I can go, when I feel low, when I feel blue. That place is the album Please, Please Me by The Beatles, an album that not only changed my life, but set me on a path that I haven’t yet reached the end of. -Vox, Chameleons