Fingerprintz - The Beat Escape 12''

By late 1981, Fingerprintz had fully decamped into the neon-lit trenches of pure dance-rock. Culled from their third and final studio album, Beat Noir, the The Beat Escape 12-inch maxi-single (Catalog No: VS 452-12) stands as the band’s high-energy swansong. While the standard 7-inch pairing relied on a non-album B-side, this glorious, bass-heavy 12-inch configuration was engineered specifically to rival the club-ready imports dominating the underground scene, proving that Jimme O’Neill’s squad could out-groove the slickest New Wave juggernauts of the era.

Fingerprintz - Beat Noir

By mid-1981, Fingerprintz had fully shed the last vestiges of standard power-pop to descend into the smoky, late-night trenches of the underground club circuit. Their third and final full-length studio album, Beat Noir (Catalog No: V 2219), stands as a definitive, rhythm-heavy document of the emerging dance-rock crossover era. Dropping the bright guitar hooks of Distinguishing Marks, Jimme O'Neill steered the band into a darker, highly syncopated landscape where heavy funk foundations, art-school dub textures, and post-punk paranoia met head-on on the dancefloor.

The album's rollout itself is a fascinating piece of New Wave history, mirroring the band's relentless perfectionism. The original UK pressing was briefly rush-released, but O’Neill quickly persuaded Virgin Records to let them cut three fresh, commercial club tracks—including the immense "The Beat Escape" and "The Chase"—to overhaul the album's entire energy. Reissued with an elegant, art-deco-infused typography cover, the finalized version of Beat Noir represents the absolute peak of the group’s rhythmic ambition, solidifying a brilliant swan song just before the band dissolved and O'Neill eventually launched his next successful venture, The Silencers.

Fingerprintz - Shadowed 12''

Fast forward to 1981, and the nervous punk friction of Who's Your Friend? has fully mutated into a sleek, nocturnal beast. Emerging from London’s infamous Blitz Club scene, bandleader Jimme O'Neill absorbed the rising New Wave Funk movement and channeled it into the standalone Shadowed 12-inch single (Catalog No: VS 420-12). Released via Virgin Records, this crucial 12" pressing anchors their brilliant, pulp-noir Beat Noir era, stretching out their changing sound on a spacious 45 RPM canvas built explicitly for the dancefloor.

Fingerprintz - Distinguishing Marks

In the autumn of 1980, Fingerprintz returned with their sleek sophomore effort, Distinguishing Marks (Catalog No: V 2170). Having refined their hyperactive quirks on the road, Jimme O'Neill and guitar foil Cha Burns recalibrated the band's sonic framework. Rather than leaning back into the nervous, skeletal minimalism of their debut, they aimed straight for a hyper-polished, melodic juggernaut—a record constructed to sound like a collection of radio-ready hit singles while retaining an unmistakably sharp New Wave bite.

The album is also famously legendary for its physical presentation, wrapped in a brilliant, conceptual picture sleeve designed by the iconic Peter Saville (the visionary artist behind Joy Division and New Order artwork). Featuring a grid of perforated, punch-out "postcards" on the cover that depicted individual track concepts, the packaging perfectly mirrored the music inside. Under the guidance of producer Nick Garvey (from power-pop architects The Motors), the band traded in their rougher, pub-rock edges for an engine that hummed with a precision-engineered, caffeinated energy.

Fingerprintz - The Very Dab

Following a series of eccentric, standalone singles that prioritized D.I.Y. experimentation over commercial safety, Fingerprintz finally delivered their debut long-player, The Very Dab (Catalog No: V 2119), in September 1979. Rather than padding the tracklist with previous 7-inch highlights like "Who's Your Friend?", Jimme O'Neill and his crew boldly opted for a completely fresh, 11-song artistic statement. This choice instantly signaled a band with a surplus of ideas, eager to prove they could construct a highly cohesive, cinematic narrative rather than just a collection of brief punk blasts.

Captured with a pristine, punchy clarity, this LP stands as an incredibly sophisticated—yet criminally overlooked—masterpiece of the late-70s British New Wave explosion. It arrived at a hyper-competitive moment in post-punk history, sitting alongside seminal debuts from classmates like Magazine and XTC. Though it missed out on the mainstream chart success of its peers, the album's slick integration of pub-rock grit, paranoid storytelling, and art-school arrangements has secured its legendary status as a foundational, subterranean classic for vinyl purists.

Fingerprintz - Who's Your Friend 7''EP

Forget the standard promotional LP bait. Led by the restless brain of Jimme O'Neill, Scottish post-punk anomalies Fingerprintz dropped the Who’s Your Friend? 7-inch EP as a pure D.I.Y. statement of intent. Issued by Virgin Records on stunning translucent blue wax—and wrapped in a deeply unsettling sleeve featuring a ventriloquist dummy gnawing on Christmas lights—this four-track beast completely bypassed their debut album (The Very Dab), trading mainstream pop aspirations for a frantic, claustrophobic slice of late-70s underground art.