THE B-52’S HAD MOST OF WILD PLANET WRITTEN BEFORE THEIR DEBUT WAS RECORDED

When The B-52’s faced album number two, they were not staring at a blank page.

Most of Wild Planet had already been written before they even recorded their 1979 debut. 🛸

The material came from the band’s gloriously primitive beginnings in Athens, Georgia. Their rehearsal space was a stark concrete room where bloodletting had once taken place. It had one tiny window, no heat and no electricity. A power line had to be run from the restaurant next door.

Fred Schneider remembered the rent as roughly fifteen or twenty dollars a month. Kate Pierson sometimes played her keyboards in mittens. 🩸🧤

Their writing method was equally homemade. The five musicians jammed, laughed and recorded everything—first on Ricky Wilson’s reel-to-reel machine, then on cassettes. They noted promising locations on the tape counter and copied out the best fragments. 📼

Those fragments became songs with strange, shifting structures. Choruses could change between appearances; some songs barely had choruses at all.

By Pierson’s account, the band had two albums’ worth of material before entering the studio for album one. A detailed history of the group identifies only three Wild Planet songs as newer creations from the touring period: “Party Out of Bounds,” “Dirty Back Road” and “Give Me Back My Man.” “Quiche Lorraine” was older than the band itself; the remaining songs had been left over from the debut.

In April 1980, they returned to Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas. This time, the band co-produced with Rhett Davies, while Chris Blackwell received executive-producer credit. Fred said they wanted Davies to enhance their sound without overproducing it. 🌴🎛️

Then came the peculiar sting.

Kate later remembered Wild Planet being well received—but also hearing that The B-52’s had not changed their sound. To her, it felt like a letdown.

Chronologically, however, many of those songs were siblings of the debut’s material.

Sometimes album two is simply the other half of the pile. 🚀

#musicOnOff #TheB52s #WildPlanet #NewWave #PostPunk #MusicHistory #AlbumStories