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Formed: Great Malvern, Worcester, Worcestershire, West Midlands, England, UK

Minor group, probably most notable for having the first two releases on the Cherry Red label.

The following is taken from Iain McNay's liner notes from Cherry Red Records - The Punk Singles Collection:

It all started in the most unlikeliest of places: Great Malvern in Worcestershire. Since 1971 I had been promoting concerts with two friends, Will and Richard, at the Malvern Winter Gardens. It had only been a hobby, on average one gig every three weeks. Over the years we had pretty much learnt the art of which bands would pull enough people to cover costs, or even enable us to make a small profit. And we were delighted when punk music finally arrived in 1976. The music scene had all become quite stale, both the musical side and the structure side of the industry needed a massive shake up, and here it finally was.

Within a few months Malvern had its own unique answer to the punk explosion, The Tights. We quickly realized that if we didn't do anything The Tights would never have a record out, and that would indeed be a tragedy.

Our promotion company was called Cherry Red Promotions and Cherry Red Records seemed to be our next logical step; on 2nd June 1978 The Tights' first single Bad Hearts was released. The following week it was "single of the week" in the now defunct Record Mirror, the week after that John Peel played it, and before we knew where we were we had sold out our initial pressing of 2,000 records. To coin a phrase, we were over the moon!

A months later I left my job and decided to devote all my energies to building Cherry Red into a proper record label. A double A-Side Howard Hughes and 'China's Eternal' followed a few weeks later. The record ended up selling over 4,000 copies, but the band broke up soon after. I was sad in a way because they had a lot of potential, but on the other hand that made me doubly determined to find other bands that would sell records.

The Tights:

Malcolm Orgee - vocals
Robert Banks - guitar
Barry Island - bass
Rick Mayhew - drums

It is worth adding that The Tights were true punks: no one in the group had any prior musical education and they split up before becoming crap. They reformed in 2004 with three of the four original members (Mayhew presumably opted out) and recorded a CD, 'TV, Work & Bed'. -boyish charm, there’s a bittersweet bite to this album that tells of greater depths than pogo punk.

Drummer Rick Mayhew later played in The Samples.

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