The Tourists (album)

The Tourists is the debut album from the British band The Tourists, released in 1979. The album peaked at #72 in the UK Albums Chart.

Two singles were released from the album. "Blind Among the Flowers" peaked at #52 in the UK Singles Chart, and "The Loneliest Man in the World" peaked at #32.

The album has never been issued on CD.

Track listing

Chart performance

Personnel

The Tourists

The Tourists (1977–1980) were a British rock and pop band. They achieved brief success in the late 1970s before the band split in 1980. Two of its members, singer Annie Lennox and guitarist Dave Stewart, went on to achieve massive international success as Eurythmics.

Early history

Peet Coombes was a guitarist singer-songwriter, while Dave Stewart, also a guitarist, had been a member of the folk rock band, Longdancer, who were signed to Elton John's Rocket label. The two moved to London and encountered Scottish singer Annie Lennox who had dropped out of her course at the Royal Academy of Music, where she had been studying flute and keyboards, to pursue her ambitions in pop music.

Forming a band in 1975, the three of them initially called themselves The Catch, and released a single "Borderline/Black Blood" in 1977 on Logo Records. The single was released in the UK, The Netherlands, Spain and Portugal but was not a commercial success.

'The Tourists'

By 1977, they had recruited bass guitarist Eddie Chin and drummer Jim Toomey, and renamed themselves The Tourists. This saw the beginning of a productive period for the band and they released three albums: The Tourists (1979), Reality Effect (1979) and Luminous Basement (1980), as well as half a dozen singles, including "Blind Among the Flowers" (1979), "The Loneliest Man in the World" (1979), "Don't Say I Told You So" (1980) and two hits, the Dusty Springfield cover "I Only Want to Be with You" (1979) and "So Good to Be Back Home Again" (1980), both of which reached the top 10 in the UK.

Redd Kross

Redd Kross is an American alternative rock band from Hawthorne, California, who had their roots in 1978 in a punk rock band called The Tourists, which was begun by brothers Jeff and Steve McDonald while they were still in middle school. With the addition of friends Greg Hetson and John Stielow on drums, the band's first gig was opening for Black Flag.

Band history

Red Cross

At the time of their first self-titled EP, in 1980, the band changed their name to Red Cross, which was allegedly inspired by the masturbation scene in the film, The Exorcist. Ron Reyes became the drummer. Eventually, Hetson left to join the Circle Jerks (and later Bad Religion) and Reyes left for Black Flag. They appeared on the Posh Boy compilation The Siren, and then to complete the lineup on their first full-length album, Born Innocent, they assembled a revolving door of musicians including original drummer John Stielow. Full of the brothers' pop culture obsessions, Born Innocent featured odes to Linda Blair (who starred in a television movie of the same name), a cover of "Look on Up from the Bottom" by the Carrie Nations from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, and Charles Manson (whose song "Cease to Exist" they covered). The album also contains nods to Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Tatum O'Neal, and Lita Ford. Not long after the release of the album, the group was threatened with a lawsuit from the International Red Cross and changed their name to Redd Kross, allegedly being inspired by Redd Foxx.