The Songs of Rough Terrain

The Songs of Rough Terrain is a compilation of all the songs that Rough Terrain performed live during their two year active period.

However… none the songs that make up this particular compilation are actually performed by Rough Terrain. Instead, the compilation is mostly made up of demos from the Band of Georges. These are the songs that George recorded on his Tascam 244, a 4-track cassette portastudio, in the mid 1980s. George was the main writer of original material for the band.

Rough Terrain also performed a handful of covers. We have found versions of those particular songs and included them in the compilation as well.

Unfortunately, there is very little recorded Rough Terrain material anywhere in existence, as far as we know. The band’s bass player, Jerry, has an old VHS video of a live performance of the band playing at The Bystocks in early 1988. However, we are rather doubtful that this video will ever be digitised and turned into something that the people on the internet can actually see and hear. As such, we decided to make this compilation using the means we had available.

We have tried to arrange the songs as if in a live set from Rough Terrain, punctuated by a half-time interval, as they would often do during a bar gig. The second set tended to be longer than the first. During a stage gig, they would simply play a set from start to finish without a beer break in the middle.

Planet Earth was often used to open their stage shows. For bar gigs, Rough Terrain would often start with Born to Be Wild, which they would run into Same Old Road Again. Other set openers included Get on the Road and Won’t You Come Around My Way.

Rough Terrain would also sometimes run Two Timer, So Begins the Crying and Coping with the Runs in Mexico Blues into each other as well. Starlight Dream was usually an encore.

We tend to think that there must have been a few more songs as well as these. After all, 24 songs doesn’t seem to be so many, especially when one considers that Planet Earth was very much a stage song, and both Red Lights and Non-Lens Contact were only performed a couple of times each, at the most. Perhaps more information will arrive someday, and if it does, we shall update the playlist.