Stay Hard

Raven's first album for Atlantic, recorded after the 1984 move from Newcastle to New York. It carries the MTV single "On And On" alongside "Restless Child" and "Pray For The Sun", plus a re-cut of "Hard Ride" from the Neat debut. It began as an escape rather than a signing. Gallagher's account is that the album was started as a means of getting off Neat, built partly from songs the band had been holding back. It was tracked with their own live sound engineer, the mix came out wrong, Michael Wagener was brought in to fix it, and "Hard Ride" and "On And On" were re-recorded at the label's request. Gallagher is clear that the record was finished before the Atlantic deal was done, and that the label's interference only started with the album after it. "On And On" he names as one of the hardest things Raven ever had to record — Mark's guitar had bad intonation and the song is full of suspended chords, and he eventually threw the guitar across the room and walked out to the bar. John stacked something like eighteen to twenty vocal tracks on it himself, three-part harmony built up the old-fashioned way.