Sad Café are an English rock band formed in Manchester in 1976, who achieved their peak of popularity in the late 1970s and early 1980s. They are best known for the UK Top 40 singles "Every Day Hurts", "Strange Little Girl", "My Oh My" and "I'm in Love Again", the first of which was their biggest hit, reaching number 3 in the UK Singles Chart in 1979. The band also had two US BillboardHot 100 hits with "Run Home Girl" and "La-Di-Da". Frontman Paul Young went on to achieve greater chart success as the co-lead singer of Mike + The Mechanics.
History
The group formed as a result of the unification of rock bands Mandalaband and Gyro. Its founder members were Paul Young, Ian Wilson, Vic Emerson, Ashley Mulford, John Stimpson and Tony Cresswell. Over the course of the band's history, only Young and Wilson were constant members, with other musicians amongst the band's ranks over the years including: Dave Irving, Lenni "Sax" Zakson, Des Tong, Michael Byron-Hehir, Steve Piggot, Jeff Seopardi, Paul Burgess, Phil Lanzon and Alistair Gordon. Harvey Lisberg, who also managed 10cc, arranged for Eric Stewart to produce their third album, Facades, which included the top 3 single, "Every Day Hurts". Reviewing the band's 1978 Misplaced Ideals LP, Robert Christgau wrote in : "In which the decade's most paradoxical, characteristic, and disgusting pop-music synthesis—combining hard rock's compulsive riff energy with MOR's smooth determination to displease no one—is achieved without recourse to jazz rhythms or semiclassical decoration. Misplaced ideals my ass—they threw them down the deepest hole they could find." The band initially dissolved in 1990, but briefly reformed in 1998, and again in 2000. The 2000 concert was a tribute to the band's former vocalist Paul Young, who had died, aged 53, on 15 July 2000. In 2012, the band was reformed by Wilson, who due to Young's death is now the band's only continuous member, along with other former members Mulford, Irving, and Tong, and new members Sue Quin, Simon Waggott and Steve Whalley. The band conducted a UK tour in November 2012, the band's first full live tour in 25 years. The new lineup formed in 2018 includes Wilson, Tong and Irving plus Sue Quin and new members Dave Day, Barry James Thomas, Neil Shaw-Hulme and Pete Hughes. They played their first gig in November 2018 to a sell-out audience at the Cinnamon Club in Bowdon and repeated the feat with two more sell-out shows in March 2019 where Matt Steele replaced Pete Hughes on keyboards.
