No Time To Lose

There are records that never quite made the national charts and still managed to own a corner of the FM dial, and "No Time To Lose" by the Tarney/Spencer Band is one of those stubborn little miracles. It opens their 1979 album Run For Your Life, the third and last long-player from a London-based duo who had already spent a decade in studios, session rooms, and backing bands before A&M gave them a shot at their own name on the jacket. Written by Alan Tarney and Trevor Spencer, produced by David Kershenbaum, and cut for the American market, the track runs four minutes and forty-three seconds on the album and about three forty-five on the single. It does not sound like a leftover. It sounds like a band that knew the clock was running and decided to put the whole argument into the chorus.

The lyric walks a familiar late-seventies line. Every day the singer moves through shadow, unsure what he is heading for. A gentle heart is sighing nearby. Then the turn: you will never change, you can never understand, and the only workable idea left is to be like water, go with the flow, and never let go. "No time to lose" is not a slogan pasted on the end. It is the whole thesis. The arrangement matches it. Tarney handles the lead vocal, the guitars, the bass, and the keyboards. Spencer drives the drums and the syndrums. The chorus stacks clean, bright, and insistent, the kind of hook album-rock programmers could drop between a Foreigner deep cut and a Firefall single without the listener reaching for the dial. Kershenbaum, already trusted with Joe Jackson and later with acts that would define the next decade, keeps the record tight and radio-ready without sanding off the push in the rhythm section. Mastering went through Bernie Grundman. The single shipped in March 1979 on A&M 2124-S, backed with "Live Again."

The chart story is the part that still makes old AOR people grin. In 1979 "No Time To Lose" climbed to number 84 on the Billboard Hot 100 and hung around for about six weeks. Cash Box treated it kindly in some reckonings. The parent album, A&M SP-4757, reached number 181 on the Billboard 200 on the back of album-rock airplay. That should have been the end of it. By the close of 1979 the duo had already been released from a ten-album A&M deal after only three records, and a non-album cover of the Everly Brothers' "Cathy's Clown" had failed to restart the machine in Britain, though it did pick up play in the Netherlands. The band was done.

Then the clip came back. The promotional film intercuts the duo on a soundstage with roller skaters in shorts and tube socks working the streets near the Santa Monica coast, pure late-seventies California caught on a cheap film stock. When MTV launched in 1981 and needed videos that were not "Video Killed the Radio Star" on a loop, "No Time To Lose" slipped into medium rotation. A&M reissued the single as 2366-S. It charted a second time, this time peaking at number 74 on the Hot 100, ten places higher than the first run, and it reached number 66 on Australia's Kent Music Report. A song by a band that no longer existed outran its own first life because a cable channel needed pictures. Chicago and St. Louis treated it like a local hit. Years later, in 1999, Portland's KGON slid the out-of-print track back into classic-rock rotation and even parked it on a station sampler, which stirred enough demand that a Swedish label, Tone Arm, finally reissued Run For Your Life in 2008. For a long stretch the song never had a proper mainstream CD release at all. That is how a cult AOR record survives: one programmer at a time.

The album around it is worth the crate dig. The American jacket, designed by A&M illustrator Chuck Beeson, looks like a rack of paperback thrillers titled Run For Your Life, and the pressings shipped with the title stamped in red, green, silver, or gold. The British sleeve is a different picture entirely, a woman's leg in a stiletto stepping clear of an oncoming red car. Besides the opener, the record holds "The Race Is Almost Run," "Won'tcha Tell Me," "Live Again," the title track, "Don't," "Far Better Man," a cover of "Lies," the ballad "A Heart Will Break Tonight," and "I'm Alive." Cliff Richard later cut "A Heart Will Break Tonight" on the Tarney-produced I'm No Hero. Tarney wrote four of the songs alone. Spencer shares the credit on the rockers that carry the album's pulse. An earlier A&M set, Three's a Crowd, had already nicked some American airplay with help from members of the Climax Blues Band and a single, "It's Really You," that reached number 86. The debut, Tarney and Spencer, had come out in Britain only, on Bradley's, in 1976.

The two men behind the name had been circling each other since Australia. Alan Tarney was born on November 19, 1945, in Northside, Workington, Cumberland, and spent his teenage years in Adelaide after his family joined the wave of British migrants settling around Elizabeth. Trevor Spencer was born in Adelaide on May 21, 1947, studied drums from the age of ten, and was playing professionally by fourteen. They met in bands on that circuit, including the Hurricanes and the R&B outfit Johnny Broome and the Handels, then the Vectormen. In 1967 they were in James Taylor Move, one of Australia's early psychedelic and progressive groups, with Tarney on bass, Spencer on drums, Kevin Peek on lead guitar, and Robert Taylor on vocals. By 1969 both had relocated to England. They formed Quartet, cut two Decca singles and an unreleased album, and became the session pair everybody called when a British pop record needed a pocket and a backbeat. Olivia Newton-John, Cliff Richard, Marvin and Farrar, Chris Squire, Bonnie Tyler, the New Seekers, and the Real Thing all passed through their hands. Tarney also did a stretch with the Shadows.

The Tarney/Spencer Band proper started in London in 1975, Spencer on drums, percussion, and backing vocals, Tarney on lead vocals, guitars, bass, synthesizers, and keyboards. The A&M contract looked enormous on paper. The returns did not. After Run For Your Life and the failed Everly cover, they walked. What followed is the plot twist. Tarney became one of the producers who quietly rebuilt Cliff Richard's chart life, writing and shaping "We Don't Talk Anymore," then steering I'm No Hero, Wired for Sound, Stronger, and Always Guaranteed. He also produced a-ha's "Take On Me," the single that turned a Norwegian trio into a global picture, and he worked with Leo Sayer, Barbara Dickson, and Charlie Dore, whose "Pilot of the Airwaves" carries his stamp. Spencer eventually returned to Perth, helped start Sh-Boom Studios with Gary Taylor, and worked on Hank Marvin's solo albums in the 1990s. Tarney has long lived in Richmond, London. The duo never regrouped for a victory lap. The song did the touring for them.

That is the Zoo kind of record. Not the household name. The one that still sounds like a request line when a programmer trusts the hook. Hear more of that lane, the deep cuts and the almost-hits that album rock was built on, at THE ZOO. The Tarney/Spencer Band left no official website, Facebook, Instagram, or X account behind. The paper trail lives with the archivists: the band history at Wikipedia, Alan Tarney's own page at Wikipedia, the discography at AllMusic, the A&M file at On A&M Records, and the long-form album notes at Jazz Rock Soul. Put "No Time To Lose" on and let the chorus do what it did in 1979 and again in 1981. Go with the flow. Never let go. There is no time to lose.