Sector Frontier by Sector Frontier

Another real album by a fake band.

Sector Frontier: The Forgotten Vanguard of Post-Punk Britain

Origins in the Blitz of Boredom

Sector Frontier emerged from the smoke-choked pubs and council-estate squats of West London in 1978. The city was in pieces: strikes, bin bags piled like barricades, kids in safety pins fighting skinheads in Carnaby Street, and Margaret Thatcher’s looming iron fist promising “discipline.” Amid that chaos, Mick Murray—a sharp-jawed singer/guitarist with a sneer as wide as the Thames—decided to form a band “that sounded like the Jam after a fistfight with Devo.”

Mick recruited Ewan Swann, a lanky art-school dropout obsessed with German synths and cheap pedals. He played guitar like a buzzsaw but could just as easily hammer out a dystopian arpeggio that sounded like a factory collapsing. The rhythm section came from the Tupney brothers: Cliff on bass, perpetually sullen, and Wedge, a drummer who pounded with the subtlety of a demolition crew. They rehearsed in a condemned warehouse in Acton that smelled of damp carpets, spilled cider, and Marmite sandwiches gone rancid.

Songs from a Broken England

Sector Frontier’s debut, the self-titled LP released in 1980, became a cult classic for those tuned into Britain’s turbulent undercurrent.
It was packed with songs that captured the bitterness, humor, and restlessness of the era. “Love Goes Out The Window” seared with jagged guitars as Mick laid bare the collapse of romance under the crushing weight of unemployment and rising rent. “Tears” followed with icy synths and a confessional lyric about hiding vulnerability behind bravado, resonating with London’s so-called “hard lads” who wept behind closed doors.The single that drew the most gossip, “Why Can’t We Get It Together,” came straight from Mick’s doomed fling with new wave model and musician Sarah Scrumley. What sounded like a track about missed buses and bungled rehearsals was, in truth, a lament for their chaotic love life. Rumors of Scrumley’s later dalliances with Sting only added petrol to the fire of Sector Frontier’s feud with The Police.

Elsewhere, the band flexed their sardonic wit. “Parties Are Such Sweet Sorrow” painted an almost comic picture of the socially inept flailing through awkward conversations. “Super Mario,” half joke and half existential dread, turned arcade escapism into a metaphor for modern alienation. “Hanging The Hangman” brought a darker edge, railing against authority with satirical bite.

Super Mario Origins

Interestingly enough, “Super Mario” predates the famous video game by several years. Mick Murray actually wrote it about an old mate from the council flats, Mario Antonetti, who had a knack for jaw-dropping leaps across stairwells and rooftops—earning him the nickname “Super Mario.” Legend has it that one night in 1980, while the band was bashing out the tune in a smoky West London pub, a young game designer from Nintendo happened to be drinking in the same room. Struck by both the name and the imagery of Mario’s acrobatic feats, the designer later took the idea back to Japan—sparking the creation of the character Super Mario and eventually the global phenomenon Super Mario Brothers. Mick, never one to miss a fight, tried to sue Nintendo years later for “artistic theft,” but the case fizzled quickly when the corporate giant unleashed a small army of lawyers. As Mick would later grumble in an interview: “We had passion, they had barristers.”

And then came the closer: “I Do My Best On The Dance Floor.” Unlike the more cerebral tracks, this was pure body music, a pounding, jittery anthem about losing oneself under the strobe lights. It struck a chord with working-class kids who couldn’t buy freedom but could rent it for a night on sticky dance floors. The single became their breakout moment, turning Sector Frontier into cult heroes.

Grit Behind the Glamour

By 1980, Titan Records had them under contract but hated Mick’s insistence on songs about dole queues, broken love, and awkward parties. The label pushed for synth-pop romance; Ewan quietly recorded demos in that direction, which enraged Mick. Rehearsals dissolved into shouting matches: Cliff threatened to smash Ewan’s keyboards, while Wedge graffitied “SECTOR FRONTIER HATES STING” across a police van, earning the band both notoriety and a criminal record.
Implosion and Absurd Demise Their 1981 follow-up, Wasted Circuits, deepened their reputation with critics but magnified fractures inside the band. Mick resented Ewan’s synth dominance, the Tupney
brothers fought like alley cats, and shows became unpredictable eruptions of brilliance and violence.
The end came in 1982. At a Hackney barbecue, Wedge tried to impress groupies by deep-frying a jar of Marmite, insisting it would be “the most punk condiment in history.” The jar exploded, covering him in molten yeast extract. Wedge Tupney died from what tabloids gleefully described as “catastrophic Marmite trauma.”
The Sun ran with: “POST-PUNK DRUMMER SPREAD TOO THIN.” Cliff quit on the spot, Ewan defected to a synth-pop act called Chrome Nun, and Mick drifted into bitter pub gigs and reunion tours.

Legacy

Though they never cracked the mainstream, Sector Frontier’s self-titled debut and its jagged follow-up live on as cult treasures. Songs like “Love Goes Out The Window,” “Tears,” “Why Can’t We Get It Together,” “Parties Are Such Sweet Sorrow,” “Super Mario,” “Hanging The Hangman,” and their breakout closer “I Do My Best On The Dance Floor” still circulate on bootlegs, mixtapes, and obsessive online forums.
As Mick Murray once spat in a 1999 fanzine interview: “We didn’t just break up—we spread ourselves too thin. Blame Marmite.”

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