Angst - Some Historical Notes
In late 1998, Stephen Burns worked on transferring the original 2 track stereo mixes of “Wanna Meet The Scruffs?” from analog to digital and remastering the album to CD. Audiophiles were hoping for a “vinyl mastering” to CD which is exactly what they got and Wanna Meet sounds as terrific on CD as it did on vinyl.
During the process, Burns was already getting the usual inquiries of “what other Scruff material existed?” (besides the unreleased album “Teenage Gurls”—which people knew about, but had only heard the title tracks). Burns addressed this problem during that time by transferring the best mixes of original “ante-Wanna Meet” songs from the existing analog 2 track tapes to digital and mastering those takes.
During the process, Angst became “the origin of The Scruffs” as Burns realized that this was the period in which he was learning audio engineering, auditioning musicians for what would become The Scruffs, and recording solo songs. Burns engineered and produced all the material while playing guitars, keyboards and singing the vocals. During the course of Angst, both Zeph Paulson and David Branyan (original Scruffs) are added and listeners can hear early performances. An early version of “Tragedy” (re-recorded during Wanna Meet) is on the CD along with an acoustic version by Burns of “Revenge”.
The English music paper “Bucketful of Brains” concluded Burns “a genius 20 years ahead of his time”. While Burns doubts this was quite the case, he certainly had enough angst in him to move onto recording the pop cult classic, “Wanna Meet The Scruffs?”