Eternal Rhythm: The Necessaries
Some bands don’t fail because they were bad, unfocused, or ignored at the time, they fail because they didn’t sit neatly enough inside a scene. The Necessaries were one of those bands.
Formed in New York in 1978, The Necessaries emerged from the ashes of Harry Toledo & The Rockets, playing Max’s Kansas City as glam collapsed into punk and punk began to splinter into something more uncertain. As drummer Jesse Chamberlain told Melody Maker in 1980: “The group has no niche, it doesn’t fit in anywhere.” It’s a line that still explains their strange absence from canonical histories of the era.
Rather than aligning themselves fully with punk’s aggression or art rock’s irony, The Necessaries operated in a liminal space - literate, melodic, slightly detached, and emotionally precise. Their songs didn’t posture; they observed. Chamberlain once likened their approach to The Clash’s social realism, but without the rhetoric. They weren’t shouting about America, they were reporting from inside it.
Part of what makes The Necessaries fascinating now is their personnel. In the band’s short lifespan, members included Ernie Brooks (The Modern Lovers), Jesse Chamberlain (Red Crayola), Randy Gun (Love Of Life Orchestra), and most significantly Arthur Russell. Russell’s presence places The Necessaries firmly within his wider, shape-shifting universe, where pop forms were endlessly bent, softened, and emotionally re-wired.
Arthur Russell’s contributions weren’t about virtuosity or flash; they were about feel. That sensitivity - the sense of something held back, unresolved, quietly yearning - runs through The Necessaries’ recordings. You can hear it in the way the songs refuse easy climaxes, in the tension between restraint and release. For fans of Russell’s work beyond disco and minimalism, this anthology reveals another crucial side of his musical life: band-based, song-centred, and deeply human.
The band were championed early by John Cale, who produced their first single for Spy Records in 1979. Momentum followed, but industry interference soon derailed things. Demos recorded for Warner Bros. ended up, astonishingly, released by Sire Records as their debut album Big Sky, unfinished, unmixed, and without the band’s consent. The album was withdrawn and replaced by Event Horizon in 1982, but the damage had been done.
Despite continuing to record through 1982, The Necessaries never released a follow-up, and their final sessions were shelved, until now.
Completely Necessary (Anthology 1978–1982) finally restores the full picture. Across three LPs, it presents the band as they were meant to be heard: Event Horizon, early studio recordings collected as Pilots Facing North, and the long-lost final sessions Songs From The Blue Colony. Of the 37 tracks included, 28 are previously unissued, a staggering amount of recovered history.
More than a box-ticking anthology, Completely Necessary reframes The Necessaries as a missing link: a band just ahead of college rock, adjacent to punk, connected to downtown New York’s avant-garde, yet never fully claimed by any of it. With restored audio, unseen photos, and liner notes by Michael IQ Jones, this release doesn’t mythologise, it clarifies.
This is music for listeners who enjoy the edges of movements rather than their headlines. For Arthur Russell listeners especially, it fills in a vital gap, not as a footnote, but as a fully realised chapter.
Sometimes rediscovery isn’t revisionism. Sometimes it’s simply overdue.
Buy: The Necessaries - Completely Necessary (Anthology 1978-1982)
