Biography
Like the more prominent Teardrop Explodes and Echo & the Bunnymen, Liverpool, England served as home base for the post-punk outfit Modern Eon. The group occupied a stylistic space midway between the Comsat Angels' irregular rhythms and layered turbulence and the fiercer edge of Sad Lovers and Giants, issuing just a single studio album, the acclaimed 1981 LP Fiction Tales. Founding members Alix Plain (Alex Johnson) and Danny Hampson formed the band during the late 1970s under the initial name Luglo Slugs. Two additional renamings later produced Modern Eon, whose first appearance on record came in 1978 via the compilation Street to Street: A Liverpool Album. Several singles issued on Inevitable, DinDisc, and the band's own Eon imprint preceded Fiction Tales, which, to the group's dismay, slipped from commercial view almost immediately and attracted scant attention. Before the album's sessions, the roster underwent substantial shifts, with guitarist/saxophonist Tim Lever, keyboardist/percussionist Bob Wakelin, and drummer Cliff Hewitt arriving in succession to supplant Ged Allen and Joey McKechnie. An additional setback arose when Hewitt sustained a wrist injury; his distinctive, off-kilter, toms-heavy approach—echoing that of the Comsat Angels' Mik Glaisher—proved impossible to duplicate, so the band completed its tour by performing over prerecorded tapes of his drumming. Plans for a follow-up album never advanced beyond the demo stage, and the group disbanded shortly afterward. Without Plain, the remaining members briefly carried on as This Time Next Year and issued a lone release in 1982. Lever spent several years in Dead or Alive before moving into production work, Hewitt later joined Apollo 440, Wakelin pursued a career as a video-game artist followed by more than a decade at Marvel Comics, and Plain released a few solo recordings under the name Che.
Albums
