Heartbeats and Triggers
"As soon as we moved to San Francisco, things happened pretty quickly," says Steve Barton. When they arrived in town, the band had contact information for two people. One was a freind of Larry Dekker. The other name -- given to them by a friend -- was producer David Kahne. The band called him on the phone, inviting him to come hear their demo. He said yes.
"He actually came to our studio," says Dekker. "He was listening to [our] demo on the Walkman, and I could see that he was...amused." Kahne asked the band to play it live so he could hear what it really sounded like. "So we did," says Dekker, "and he was like, 'Hm.'" Kahne took his calendar out of his pocket and scheduled Translator for a recording session two weeks from then.
Translator went into the Automatt with David Kahne; they recorded a few songs, including Robert Darlington's "Everywhere" and Steve Barton's "Everywhere That I'm Not." Dekker doesn't recall a single Translator gig since that time in December 1980 in which the band didn't play both of those songs.
The band did a demo of "Necessary Spinning" with Kahne before beginning pre-production with him for the album-proper. When the album sessions were complete, the band had seven new songs. Added to the three earlier demos, the end result was Heartbeats and Triggers. "We put the demos on the album," Dekker says, "because David wanted to make a point: 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it.'"
(excerpted from the book Disturbing the Peace: 415 Records and the Rise of New Wave by Bill Kopp)