MYTHS, MELODIES & METAPHYSICS: - Prefab Sprout

facilities for bands to have accompanying slide shows or films on a backdrop and
whatever else they needed to show off their talents.
But why The Soul Kitchen? - "Because all great music is soulful," they maintained.
Once settled, they promoted themselves as "the men behind the men behind the music"
with their roles as follows:
� Keith Armstrong - "A 'Cult'ivator, a dreamer with his feet firmly on the ground.
The ultimate enthusiast of everything/anything good. Hatches more ideas than a
battery hen lays eggs."
� Paul Ludford - "A sort of Chancellor of the Exchequer. Someone who thinks, cares
and worries (sometimes too much). A schemer, if something's bad, he tells you, if he
says it's good then it must be good."
The first band to play was a band called The Fire Engines. The venue location changed
with their needs and wants, but throughout its nomadic history, always had the punters
coming in. During the club's existence, Armstrong had all of Postcard Records' artistes
play at The Soul Kitchen, including Orange Juice, perhaps their most accomplished; he
moulded a friendship with Alan Horne, Postcard's respected independent label maker.
Other bands such as Josef K., The Jazzateers, A Certain Ratio, Blue Rondo and New
Order starred at the club and Tyne Tees TV filmed bands playing live at the venue
(Orange Juice, Hurrah! and The Fire Engines), the footage of which was to make their first
shelve-able 'product', a video (Cat. No. SK1).
One of the last shows on 26 August saw Prefab Sprout and The Daintees play live at the
venue.
The last two shows at The Soul Kitchen featured The Bluebells (supported by Hurrah!)
and Aztec Camera (supported by The Daintees, who Armstrong first saw busking), before
it closed its doors exactly one year to the date of opening them. Armstrong had set the free
spirited precedent for their next project, a record label. He had learned much from the
demise of Glasgow's Postcard Records - of Horne's attitude with his artistes and of his
opinion that 'he was the label', but at the same time gaining more useful knowledge in the
workings of the record industry. Armstrong wanted to be able to provide a vehicle to
promote the best of the local talent he'd had the chance of working with, but never at the
expense of holding back artistic development. Armstrong had Hurrah! and The Daintees
pencilled in, following those last two gigs in August 1982.
Let's bear in mind, Armstrong was still at this point employed full- time at HMV record
store in Newcastle and here they are again, the 'manage a trois' (Armstrong, Ludford and
Mitchell), this time launching a record label, Kitchenware Records, and searching for the
spirit to be found in being 'Young, Gifted and Black.'
From the base of The Soul Kitchen, Armstrong & Co. also formed the Soul Kitchen
Management organization, working also with other artists such as Jenny Barrett, Pavlou
Goldberg and Matthew 'Hyphen' Hobson.
Barrett formed the Newcastle-based clothing company 'Kitsch-In-Wear' after Hurrah!
needed T-shirts designing for a video they were doing, using ideas which would be easy
for fashion followers to copy and was also a continuation of street fashion ideas that were
going on at the time such as ripping sleeves off T-shirts and such like.