Chateaux becomes the latest New Wave of British Heavy Metal era band to be given the chunky box set reissue treatment by the excellent Cherry Red. The band’s three albums from the 1980s with some bonus stuff too.
Originally called Stealer and formed around 1981 they changed their name to Chateaux shortly afterwards with one of their songs making it on to a compilation album titled Metal Maineaxe issued by Ebony records – who would then become Chateaux’s label.
Three albums for Ebony would follow in quite short order, starting with Chained and Desperate in 1983. This featured the great Steve Grimmett on vocals doing a spot of moonlighting from Grim Reaper.
Chained and Desperate is a fine, fine album of powerful NWOBHM. The guitar histrionics from Tim Broughton are scorching with plenty of power. Add to that Grimmett’s distinctive and equally powerful vocals and you have quite a heady mix.
All in all the debut is up there with Grimmett’s “day job” in Grim Reaper and what they were up to with the style of Reaper and Chateaux not too far removed from each other.
Chained and Desperate went down well and the band hit the studio quickly – perhaps too quickly (record company pressure perhaps) to record a follow-up. There were wholesale line-up changes however. Grimmett went back to Grim Reaper and only Tim Broughton remained in situ.
Fire Power was released in 1984 and more or less repeated the formula of the debut though with less gusto involved. It’s enjoyable enough however I do feel it suffers from following on too soon after Chained and Desperate and would have been a better effort had more time been allotted.
Unfortunately for Chateaux, Fire Power started the law of diminishing returns.
Their third album – Highly Strung – was released in 1985 making it three albums in under three years. Highly Strung has a feeling of saminess about it sounding as though the band had run out of ideas.
Poor sales resulted and that was that for Chateaux.
The title track from Chained and Desperate shows what promise they had:
This box set is an interesting listen overall and as always full marks to Cherry Red for continuing to bring back stuff from New Wave of British Heavy Metal-era bands.
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