And they’re back (again). You can’t keep The Risk down in 2025, more than 40 years since Colin Leach joined Mark Le Gallez on stage in a new group which, in their own way, went about as far as any band from Guernsey has done to ‘make it’.
It’s now nearly 40 years since I first saw them, at the 18th birthday party of my old schoolmate, now colleague, Simon De La Rue.
They played his party at The Forest Hotel (it was not yet the Happy Landings). I was immediately hooked by the tight three-piece, and so impressed was I with Colin’s long-sleeve Fred Perry polo shirt I spent weeks trying to track one down through Ray Anthony in the Arcade – and yes, I did eventually get one.
Although I’d only heard two of their songs before – the covers of Born to be Wild and Everlasting Love – I soon would do. I had a live cassette release of theirs within weeks and would follow them faithfully around a variety of long-gone parochial nightclubs and hotels for the rest of the year, before, just as I picked up notebook and pen at the Guernsey Press, they headed off to Bristol to pursue the ‘making it’ process.
If I wasn’t heartbroken, I was certainly disappointed. But the infrequent revivals – perfectly adequate now I am long past the local gig circuit – are enough to help us remember the Good Times (one of their hardy tracks which often gets a run-through).
In a further revivalist twist, I sat the guys down for a remote chat before this coming weekend, which sees Risk gigs on Friday in The Pit at St James (£10 on the door) and Sunday at the Vale Earth Fair.
Were you mates before you got together in the band?
Colin: No. We actually met at the Savoy Club in March 1983 when Mark was playing a gig at The Savoy with his first band, Single File. Steve Collenette [drummer] and I had heard Mark wanted to form another band, which was why I was there. The three of us ended up being in the short-lived band Private Eye. Mark insists we met a few years before this, outside a little shop called This ‘n’ That in St Julian’s Avenue, opposite the Gaumont, that used to sell records, badges and skinny ties, but I have no recollection of this.
Mark: No. I just thought, ‘who is this fella with the dodgy teeth that can only play upstrokes and could not play downstrokes?’ at the time. He has got a bit better.
How long before the band was a 50-50 venture (in songwriting and in everything else)?
Mark: Not long really after Mark One. I knew we were onto something. We’re completely different personalities, really – Colin is the quiet, thoughtful one, and I am a hooligan, basically.
Colin: Not that long at all. I played on Mark’s mini LP, Mark One, in 1984, and then we wrote what would become the first Risk single, Forget the Girl, and recorded it later that year – I did the music, Mark wrote the lyrics. We are quite different people, Mark’s quite hot-headed and impetuous, whereas I’m more laid back. The Sergeant Wilson to his Captain Mainwaring: ‘Do you think that’s wise?’ sort of thing. But we just seemed to click early on.
Did you genuinely think you could go further than any other local band ever had?
Colin: I don’t think we ever saw ourselves competing with other local bands, but we did have ambitions to get to a wider audience by putting out records and playing gigs outside Guernsey. We had the opportunity to do that through contacts in the mod scene, particularly helped by local fanzine In the Crowd.
Mark: I suppose as a band you are right. There are individual musicians I can think of locally who have probably done better, but we still have a fan base, small though it is.
On that journey, what the best decision you ever made?
Mark: Best decision in my mind was going to America with the band. Another good decision was playing in London for the first time.
Colin: I’m glad we decided to go to America because that really broadened my mind and probably brought me and Mark closer together both musically and as friends. Before that I was working as an apprentice printer, so I was a bit apprehensive to give that up, but Mark said he’d knock me on the head and drag me on the plane if he had to. ‘Besides, it’ll be a laugh,’ he said at the time.
And the worst?
Mark: Have you got all day? Turning down UB40’s road manager to manage us as he was ‘funny lookin’’ – typical Guernsey, eh?!
Colin: Where to begin? There are so many! We signed a terrible publishing deal, which I knew was wrong at the time. We made lots of bad decisions, such as telling EMI we weren’t going to replace our drummer when they were thinking about signing us. The list goes on...
Did you split too soon, or not soon enough?
Colin: We sort of morphed into the Sacred Hearts rather than split up, as we felt stifled by the mod thing and wanted to expand the sound and get other people in the band. We had been playing alongside bands that went on to become Ocean Colour Scene and The Charlatans so if we had kept The Risk going and gone to London we would probably done quite well I think, but on reflection what we did was the right thing to do at time.
Mark: We never really split up. We merged into the Sacred Hearts but The Risk was always on the back burner. If it’s Colin, me and your nan, it’s The Risk (that’s stolen from another curmudgeonly Mark). That is said tongue-in-cheek and does a disservice to all the guys who’ve played with us – Andy, Gaz and Oz and now Nick and Dave, our trombone player and keyboard player.
How much fun is it getting together for the odd ad hoc gig?
Mark: It’s brilliant but I do miss Andy (Coleman, Risk trombonist who died in 2022) and think of him a lot. I thought of him today when I wrote one of my terrible spoken words (monologues that Mark performs solo) but I thought: ‘I think Andy would have found this funny!’
Colin: It is fun to get together and play the songs again. Playing the rare gig makes it feel more like an event and a cause to celebrate but also to remember our good pal Andy, because he made The Risk a better band.
Do you still feel on stage as you did 40/35 years ago?
Colin: Mentally, yes. I think music has the power to transport you to time and place, so for me it’s like playing these songs back in the day. Physically, The Risk is a bit of a workout! So, it can take its toll nowadays.
Mark: Yes, quite simply, though I play lighter basses now and just realised that I always preferred them as played a Squier short-scale bass guitar when we toured Europe in the 80s.
How important was mod to what you did and how you did it?
Mark: It was and still is very important to me. The Risk is a bit of an odd fish though, as we come from the more 1979 punk end of mod. Although saying that, that is me. Colin offers a more kind of sublime, thoughtful song, though he can also write some killers like ‘Closing Time’. His songwriting gets better, where mine has got worse!
Colin: I think the mod thing was important in the sense that it allowed us to play within that scene and enabled us to reach a bigger audience, albeit with a small cult following. Although by 1989 we did feel constrained by it, hence forming The Sacred Hearts. We were never really a mod band, much like the Sex Pistols weren’t a punk band – they just became tagged with the label because of what was happening around them at the time. We used to say ‘The Risk is a band with a mod in it’. But let’s face it, if it wasn’t for the mod association, we wouldn’t have been able to do things we did, and we wouldn’t be talking about the band today.
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