I Can't Make Up My Mind

You are tuned to THE ZOO, the freeform album-rock station that still believes a two-minute rave-up can say more than a whole hour of filler, and the cut spinning out of the stack is “I Can’t Make Up My Mind” by The Inmates, buried near the end of side two on Shot In The Dark. Two minutes and four seconds. No single push. No video. Just a London pub-rock band in the summer of 1980 cutting a Peter Staines original like they still had a packed room to win, and the tape still sounds like they did.

Staines is the name on the publishing. On the sleeve he is Peter Gunn, lead guitar and the band’s main songwriter, the same man who had already handed the debut First Offence “Mr. Unreliable” and would keep writing the originals that sat beside the covers. “I Can’t Make Up My Mind” is pure Staines: short, twitchy, no chorus that overstays, a lyric that keeps flipping the coin and never lands. Bill Hurley sings it the way he sang everything in that era, half snarl and half grin, the voice of a frontman who had come up in the London rooms where Dr. Feelgood had already proved you did not need a light show if the rhythm section locked and the guitarist knew when to stop talking. Tony Oliver chops rhythm guitar beside him. Ben Donnelly holds the bass down. Jim Russell, who had settled in as the permanent drummer by the time this album was cut, keeps the backbeat mean and dry. Nobody solos for the sake of a solo. The whole record was built that way.

Shot In The Dark came out on Radar in Britain, catalog RAD 28, and on Polydor in the States, recorded in May and June of 1980 and produced by Vic Maile at his own studio in Rickmansworth. Maile was the former Pye engineer who had become the house sound for a certain stripe of British rock and roll: Motorhead when they wanted weight, the Feelgoods’ cousins in the pub circuit when they wanted grit, Brinsley Schwarz when they wanted the room to breathe. He piled the Inmates in with vintage gear and refused to polish the edges off. Years later he told Gunn that Shot In The Dark was the best production job he ever did. That is a heavy claim from a man who had already cut some of the toughest British rock of the period, and it holds up when you drop the needle. The album opens on a cover of the Music Machine’s “Talk Talk,” Sean Bonniwell’s garage snarl rebuilt in Inmates cloth. It picks up the Jagger and Richards song “So Much In Love,” a Mersey-leaning tune the Stones themselves never cut, and it closes the original program with the Soul Brothers Six stomper “(She’s) Some Kinda Wonderful.” In between sit Gunn originals: the rockabilly snap of “Tell Me What’s Wrong,” the theatrical jangle of “Crime Don’t Pay,” and “(I Thought I Heard A) Heartbeat,” which a lot of the faithful still call the band’s finest writing. “I Can’t Make Up My Mind” sits just before “Show You My Way,” track eleven, the short one, the one that never got the single treatment and never needed it.

The sleeve was designed by Keith Breeden and Malcolm Garrett, photographed by Chris Gabrin. The lineup on the back reads Hurley on vocals, Gunn on lead guitar and vocals, Oliver on rhythm guitar and vocals, Donnelly on bass, Russell on drums and vocals. That was the working band that had come out of the split of the Flying Tigers in 1977 and parked themselves in the London pub-rock lane just as the first wave of that scene was supposed to be over. They did not care. They played like early Stones crossbred with early Dave Edmunds, Creedence muscle under a Standells haircut, originals that sounded like they had been found in a junk shop next to the oldies they actually had found in a junk shop.

The oldies are how America met them. A cover of the Standells’ “Dirty Water” became the calling card, climbing to number 51 on the U.S. chart in January 1980 and dragging First Offence, the Vic Maile debut on Radar, up to number 40 on the album list. In Britain the bigger radio record was their take on Jimmy McCracklin’s “The Walk,” a Top 40 hit that put them on the same circuit as every other band still playing rhythm and blues like it was a contact sport. Trouser Press heard the whole catalog as primal rock and roll that did not pretend to invent anything, and that was the compliment. They were not trying to be the next movement. They were trying to be the band you stayed for when the headliner was late.

“I Can’t Make Up My Mind” is the deep cut that proves the originals could stand next to the covers. It does not borrow a riff from Bonniwell or from Jagger. It is Gunn writing inside the same two-minute box the garage bands used, Hurley selling indecision like it is a dare, the guitars answering in short stabs instead of speeches. Maile keeps the vocal up front and the drums dry. You can hear the room. You can hear why a producer would look back on this album as the one he got right. The same sessions also turned out “Sweet Rain,” “Waiting Game,” “Stop It Baby,” and “Why When The Love Has Gone,” a program that never pads a track to fill a side. Thirteen songs, most of them under three minutes, the way album rock used to trust a listener to stay for the song and not the runtime.

The pace caught up with them. Three albums in about three years, plus the road, and by the end of 1981 Hurley was out with a breakdown. Barrie Masters, fresh from Eddie and the Hot Rods, stepped in and fronted the band through the live album True Live Stories, cut by Maile at the Venue in London, and the studio set Five. Masters eventually went back to the Hot Rods. Hurley came back. The Inmates kept working: a live Beatles set recorded in Paris and issued as Meet the Beatles, Fast Forward, Inside Out, Wanted, Silverio, and live records into the 2000s. Into the 2010s they were still touring, especially on the continent, with four of the original five still in the room. Gunn later cut a solo record, Life Savings, with his Neatbloods, and Jim Russell sat in on drums. The catalog never went away. A Stephen King novel, Christine, used “I Can’t Sleep” from the debut as a chapter heading. Los Lonely Boys covered “So Much In Love.” Dr. Feelgood cut a Gunn song, “Sweet Sweet Lovin’.” American band Will and the Kill, with Will Sexton on guitar, recorded “(I Thought I Heard A) Heartbeat.” The songs traveled even when the name on the marquee did not.

That is the Zoo argument for playing “I Can’t Make Up My Mind” instead of reaching again for “Dirty Water.” The hit is the door. The album track is the room. Shot In The Dark is the record Maile himself ranked above the rest of his work, cut by a band that had already had the American radio moment and still walked into Rickmansworth to make a tighter, stranger, more confident set of songs. If you want the paper trail, the Wikipedia entry lays out the Flying Tigers split, the Masters years, and the discography, and the Discogs listing for Shot In The Dark has the writer credits, the May and June 1980 dates, and the Radar catalog number. The old Trouser Press review still reads like a dispatch from the racks, and the Louder Than War piece on the 1979–82 albums is where Maile’s verdict on this record got put in print. MusicBrainz keeps the sessionography if you want to chase every version.

No current official band site, Facebook, Instagram, or X account for this Inmates checks out as theirs, so those stay off the card rather than send you to some other outfit using the name. The music does not need the extra window. Two minutes, a Gunn riff, Hurley unable to pick a side and not apologizing for it, Maile’s best board work, and a London band that outlasted the scene that was supposed to have already ended. That is “I Can’t Make Up My Mind,” and that is why it is on THE ZOO.