VIA PRESS RELEASE | Independent record label Independent Project Records (IPR) announced today that 1983, the first-ever release from the Torn Boys, the until-now hermetically-sealed early 80’s post-punk quartet out of Stockton, California featuring Jeffrey Clark, Kelly Foley, Duncan Atkinson, and a 19 year-old Grant-Lee Phillips, is set to be released on April 12.
The comprehensive archival ten-track set of rare, unreleased studio and live tracks documents the short but eventful life of Torn Boys, a group comprising future members of Shiva Burlesque, Gary Young’s Hospital, and Grant Lee Buffalo. It will be available on digital formats as well as compact disc and black, white and green vinyl with both formats including a bonus all-region DVD of previously unseen live recordings and newly made music videos.
Formed in 1982 by Jeffrey Clark (vocals, electric guitar) and Kelly Foley (vocals, acoustic guitar) and disbanded by late 1983, the Torn Boys lived out their one and a half summers fusing dreamscape lyricism with ultra-’80’s synth rhythms and Fripp-meets-Carl-Perkins electric guitar textures, leaving behind a scant recorded legacy before dissolving.
Local musician Duncan Atkinson started helping out as sound engineer before joining the band live on Pro One synthesizer and drum machine. In the Spring of ’83 nineteen-year-old Grant-Lee Phillips was recruited on lead guitar, his Chet-Atkins-plays-Scary-Monsters sound adding an indelible and unique ingredient to the band’s alchemy. “What Jeff (Clark) and Kelly (Foley) were doing, you just didn’t see that kind of thing happening in Stockton,” says Grant-Lee Phillips. “So we connected right away over a mutual obsession with the alluring fringes of music, art and film.”
Forty years after the fact, the Torn Boys recordings still fend off basic categorization, conjuring the darker corners of neo-psychedelic California, infusing New Wave-era sensibilities with the moodier angle of home-grown, art-punk-surrealism.
