Over the years some big bands – Van Halen, Soundgarden, Metallica, Iron Maiden – have lined Budgie songs. True, Budgie by no means fairly reached the foremost heights of contemporaries like Black Sabbath, however their affect stretches far.
But one Budgie track stands above the remainder by way of profile: Breadfan. It’s their Paranoid, the track their followers would holler for at reveals, the one identified by informal listeners who couldn’t identify a single different track from their catalogue.
“It is our anthem,” late Budgie vocalist/bassist Burke Shelley advised Classic Rock in 2020. “And it’s Breadfan – not ‘Bread Van’ like lots of people as soon as thought!
“Lyric-wise it’s just about someone who likes money. I came up with the word – back then money was commonly called ‘bread’.
“Generally I grew up with very little money. We weren’t a rich family. I was aware it’s good to have it, but you do see people – around bands especially – being greedy.”
In the very early 70s, Budgie’s traditional unique line-up – Shelley, guitarist Tony Bourge and drummer Ray Phillips – would head to a hut in a distant discipline on the outskirts of Cardiff. There they’d crank up the amps to their legendary ear-splitting ranges and practise and thrash out new tunes.
“We’d go, make a load of tea, and jam around the ideas,” mentioned Shelley. “Tony or I would start playing something and we’d all join in. It was a long time ago, but I’d guess Tony came up with Breadfan’s main riff. Then I’d say let’s change this bit, let’s go down there, add an accent here. I was always arranging.”
“That’s how we’d write all our songs,” recalled Tony Bourge. “We’d plug in, hammer away and blow our brains out until we were ready to settle down.
“Writing was like a jigsaw puzzle. Burke and I would look at what each of us was playing – ‘Oh, that’s a nice bit, that’s similar to something I’m doing’ – and piece it together.
“While writing Breadfan, we settled on the beat so Burke could get the timing of the singing right, then he went away with the idea and came back with the title.”
Shelley sings close to the highest of his glass-shattering vary over the primary riff which is, nonetheless, none-more-proto-metal. Locked to Phillips’s quick groove, the bass and guitar transfer in unison via a grinding, in-your-face blues motif rooted within the late-60s music of John Mayall, Cream and – the band that had actually turned Shelley’s head – Led Zeppelin.
We’d plug in, hammer away and blow our brains out until we were ready to settle down.
Tony Bourge
But when Budgie jammed the new song again a bit later, Bourge remembers that they felt it needed a lift, another element apart from that riff.
“So we took the tempo right down for the slow middle bit, I played some nice minor chords, we just eased our way through quietly as Burke sang. There are a few Spanish-y chords near the end, and it builds up again and back in. It worked out really well.”
Such quasi-progressive dynamic shifts were a regular feature in Budgie’s repertoire. Live, the band wouldn’t always include the song’s hypnotic soft centre, but when they did it served as a breather for the headbanging fans at the front of the stage, before the rhythm kicked off again for the final straight.
“And they’d always be ready for it,” Bourge says with a smile. “If you can do that with a piece of music, draw people in, that’s good.”
Powerful and (mostly) fast, Breadfan was guaranteed to get the audience churning. It became a mainstay of the set in early shows as Budgie built their core following in clubs across the Welsh valleys and beyond, and it remained their encore right up until 2010, when Shelley finally called time on the band.
The song was laid down for their third album, 1973’s Never Turn Your Back On A Friend, recorded at Rockfield Studios in Monmouth (where producer Rodger Bain had auditioned and discovered both Budgie and Sabbath four years earlier).
“We always recorded live,” said Shelley in 2020. “We did the first album in three days, Squawk in a week and Never Turn Your Back On A Friend in about three weeks.”
On now rare early pressings of Never Turn Your Back, Breadfan opens with a short excerpt from Winston Churchill’s ‘Blood, Tears, Toil and Sweat’ speech from 1942. It was subsequently removed due to a copyright claim from the owners of the Churchill recording.
Although the album didn’t trouble the charts, Budgie’s influence spread. In 1988 Metallica took Breadfan to a huge new audience when they recorded it for the B-side of the single Eye Of The Beholder. It was also included on their 1998 hit compilation Garage Inc.
“That’s when I realised the impact it had,” admitted Burke Shelley. “It always went down well. But then a lot of our tunes did – they’d be shouting out for Breadfan, Napoleon, Parents.
“I remember being surprised that it was the one everybody knows about. Metallica must have thought it was a decent song. We got a lift from that, some street cred.”
Originally published in Classic Rock issue 279 (August 2020)