{"id":239104,"date":"2026-04-20T16:42:25","date_gmt":"2026-04-20T16:42:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/239104\/"},"modified":"2026-04-20T16:42:25","modified_gmt":"2026-04-20T16:42:25","slug":"before-tampa-gig-chameleons-vox-reveals-the-album-that-changed-his-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/239104\/","title":{"rendered":"Before Tampa gig, Chameleons’ Vox reveals the album that changed his life"},"content":{"rendered":"

Following a nearly two-decade long hiatus, founding Chameleons<\/a> Mark \u201cVox\u201d 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\u2019s catalog.<\/p>\n

Something seemed to click, because ever since, Vox and friends have moved towards unveiling new material, having released two EPs\u2014one with brand-new songs, and the other with revamped archive material\u2014and most recently, the first new album released under the Chameleons moniker in 25 years. While last year\u2019s Arctic Moon is a nod to the original band\u2019s glory days, the album\u2019s production levels are more intense than ever, as are its messages. It\u2019s pretty clear to read between the lines on the politically-driven \u201cSaviors Are a Dangerous Thing,\u201d and Vox recently admitted how \u201cDavid Bowie Takes My Hand\u201d came from how the empathy of the late Starman\u2019s \u201cRock and Roll Suicide\u201d helped him out during a dark hour in 2024.<\/p>\n

Before the Chameleons bring their Arctic Moon tour to Tampa\u2019s next Thursday, Vox told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay all about the album that changed everything for him. Read his full quote below.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s probably very strange to choose a life-changing album that impacted\u00a0me before my life had really started, but no other record had the kind of\u00a0impact that this album did barely a year after its initial release. <\/p>\n

From 1963\u00a0to 1964, I was enrolled at what was known as\u00a0The Cromer Mill Nursery, or what Americans would call a \u201ckindergarten.\u201d Both of my parents worked full-time. If memory serves me right, my father was working temporarily as a\u00a0coal man, and my mother worked at the Cromer Cotton Mill, which provided\u00a0a free nursery for the children of its employees. So each day I\u2019d be dropped off there in the morning, and collected each evening, once my mother\u2019s shift\u00a0was over. I was told in later life that my mother, in particular, had grown\u00a0worried due to the fact that at the age of three going on four, I was still\u00a0speaking in some weird, gibberish language that no one else understood\u00a0and thought I might have had some kind of neurological problem.<\/p>\n

My mother must have discussed this amongst the nursery staff, all of whom\u00a0had taken a bit of shine to me. One of them was a young trainee by the\u00a0name of Irene, who hit upon the idea of bringing her favourite record to the\u00a0nursery \u2014 that record was the album\u00a0Please Please Me\u00a0by the Beatles. <\/p>\n

This\u00a0was during 1964 and by this time, The Beatles had exploded onto the\u00a0national consciousness, so much so that the young women that constituted the nursery staff were all rabid fans and had installed Beatles memorabilia\u00a0in the corner of the nursery. Beatles wallpaper, four little wooden chairs with\u00a0matching Beatles cushions (four different ones, naturally), and a record player. <\/p>\n

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\u2019s fears to rest.\u00a0However, it didn\u2019t stop there. The genie was well and truly out of the bottle.\u00a0<\/p>\n

My nana (my grandmother on my father\u2019s side) was overjoyed at this\u00a0sudden development and urged me to sing for the convened extended\u00a0family whenever there was a get-together. My nana was a mother of six,\u00a0the two youngest boys, then in their late teens, I think, were twins and they\u00a0bought records, and naturally, the Beatles featured\u00a0heavily amongst them. My nana owned a beautiful mono radio gram, a piece\u00a0of walnut furniture that featured a valve radio and turntable, and I\u2019d spend hours playing the records. So at one particular family gathering, in return\u00a0for yet another a cappella performance of\u00a0\u201cPlease Please Me,\u201d she gifted\u00a0me her son\u2019s copy of that album, minus the sleeve because that had gotten\u00a0lost 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. <\/p>\n

Not long after, one of my father\u2019s\u00a0brothers, Brian, along with his wife Ethel, whisked me off to a gang show\u00a0that they annually organised at local music hall. A gang show was a kind of\u00a0 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\u00a0Me while strumming my cardigan buttons, which was a resounding\u00a0success. 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. <\/p>\n

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\u00a0\u201cA\u00a0Hard Day\u2019s Night.\u201d I had no idea what was in store for me when the lights\u00a0went down and then, suddenly, there they were, on a massive screen:\u00a0The Beatles. What impressed me the most was the downpour of Jelly Babies from the balcony above me that started landing on my head.\u00a0Apparently 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\u00a0them. 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\u00a0my mother took me to see another movie,\u00a0\u201cBorn Free,\u201d\u00a0I was constantly looking up waiting for a downpour of Jelly Babies that sadly never came. <\/p>\n

While I went on to love and appreciate the Beatles throughout their entire\u00a0evolution right up until the demise of the band in 1970 (my favourite Beatles track of them all is \u201cStrawberry Fields Forever\u201d) it\u2019s that debut\u00a0album that remains for me my absolute favourite. The Hamburg Beatles.\u00a0That\u2019s 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,\u00a0clad head to foot in leather, speeding their balls off, learning their craft on the Reeperbahn. <\/p>\n

Every track of that album captures the tenderness, the charisma, the raw talent and the beauty that exploded into the global\u00a0consciousness only a few months after recording it. Someone once remarked to George Harrison that they found it unbelievable that his album\u00a0was recorded and mixed in a single day. George with his usual deadpan responded, \u201cYeah, and the second one took even longer.\u201d <\/p>\n

There\u2019s a place where I can go, when I feel low, when I feel blue. That place is the album\u00a0Please, Please Me\u00a0by The Beatles, an album that not only changed my life, but set me on a path that I haven\u2019t yet reached the\u00a0end of. -Vox, Chameleons<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Following a nearly two-decade long hiatus, founding Chameleons Mark \u201cVox\u201d Burgess and Reg Smithies revived the Britpop outfit…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":239105,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[105945,2081,37299,135,1865,2082,137,136],"class_list":{"0":"post-239104","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tampa","8":"tag-chameleons","9":"tag-live-music-in-tampa-bay","10":"tag-new-world-brewery","11":"tag-tampa","12":"tag-tampa-bay-concerts","13":"tag-tampa-concerts","14":"tag-tampa-headlines","15":"tag-tampa-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239104"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239104\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/239105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}