News

This very week is the 40th anniversary of the original performance of Everyone by Mark Drower and the pupils of The King’s Grammar School, Ottery St Mary. Goodness knows how that happened so quickly!

To commemorate the occasion, we decided to shine the spotlight on the wonderful songs Mark composed for the performances, and upgrade the written information and backstories on all of the relevant pages – here at the Wud Records website, at our publishing partner Explicit Music, at Bandcamp and at SoundCloud.

All individual song pages on all of those websites have been similarly upgraded.

In July 1982 it was Project Week at The King’s Grammar School, Ottery St Mary. Two of the teachers, Mark Drower and Lyn Schofield, chose to stage a dramatic production of Everyone by Frederick Franck. There would be acting, music, dancing, and lots of different theatre-related technical and backstage jobs that needed doing by the students.

A company of talent signed up for the fun that would follow. It was an extraordinary and memorable event.

Mark Drower was the leader of the project. He was the new religious studies teacher, and an understated yet hugely inspirational composer and musician.

The songs that Mark wrote and performed live during the production were subsequently recorded at Blaze recording studios in Torquay. You can listen and download those beautiful and inspiring songs from Bandcamp by clicking here.

Everyone sold out all three evening performances at King’s School. Word quickly spread after the premiere and the event was a tremendous success. The performances were outstanding, far too good for a group of school pupils, and the memory of it has lingered long for those involved.

There are just four photos, complete with full descriptions, from the last night of the original performances at school. You can see them by clicking here and opening the Everyones’ gallery page.

Here are some delightfully eloquently crafted memories of those took part:

* www.wudrecords.co.uk/artists/mark-drower-and-the-everyones/emmas-memories/
* www.wudrecords.co.uk/artists/mark-drower-and-the-everyones/poks-memories/
* www.wudrecords.co.uk/artists/mark-drower-and-the-everyones/georges-memories/

A number of other songs by well-known recording artists were used during the show. They have been compiled in a new Spotify playlist, which you can enjoy by clicking here.

The play was such a success that two further performances took place later in the year at Exeter Cathedral. It was the very first time ever that the cathedral had been used for such a production.

One of the original crew, Now drummer Jon Kneebone, recently sent a press cutting and a poster (thanks Jon!) from the second performances that took place at Exeter Cathedral in November 1982, some four months after the original. What with it being a new academic year, several cast members had changed. The recorded music for the show now also included Oh Lucky Man by Emerson, Lake and Palmer.

There were a number of logistical issues with the Cathedral performance involving scenery and electricity, but all of them were solved by the clever and resourceful crew. Jo Wilson had taken over Amanda’s role as a dancer and performed beautifully. The smiley coquettish Samantha Lotz was Lisa’s replacement as Treasure and she also did a fantastic job.

It would be amazing to hear from anybody else who was involved. Any more memories or photos that you can share and add to the collection would be most welcome. We will publish them and credit you for your contribution, so that many more can continue to enjoy the magic we all made.

If anything should turn up, we shall let you know in our News service and on Twitter, so be sure to keep an eye on them.

We had several contacts from Everyone in the old Wud Records Forums. Sadly, the forums attracted so much spam and rubbish that we had to delete the software altogether. It was swamping our website and using way too much bandwidth.

In many ways Everyone was the dawn of Wud. The Blaze Tape is the oldest recording in our entire collection. Even after four decades it still invokes powerful and fond memories in the personel who were a part of it.

Whoever could have imagined an Everyone 40th Anniversary back in the Project Week of July 1982? The Falklands War had only just ended. Prince William had just been born. E.T. and Michael Jackson’s Thriller were about to be unleashed upon the world, and the fourth terrestrial TV channel in the uk, Channel Four, was still a few months from launch.

The world feels very different now compared to those days, in so many ways, and yet it still seems like Everyone was a recent event. Many of the memories are still fresh and strong.

Why don’t you celebrate the Everyone 40th Anniversary with us by clicking here and pressing play? Go on, you can do it! And you might love it. :)

Song artwork for all of Dark Company’s songs has now been uploaded to all of the band’s song pages on SoundCloud. We hope you dig the stunning new visuals that can be enjoyed with every Dark Company song!

Speedy Pete Greatorex, frontman and singer for Dark Company, was a particularly unique character and a man of many talents. One of his talents was creating the most extraordinary images using Photoshop.

There are several galleries of his artwork amongst Dark Company’s web pages here at the Wud Records website. Click here to go and see them for yourself!

Many of the images were named after actual Dark Company songs. Sometimes the title came from a line or a lyric within a song. Sometimes the name of the image suggested a song it belonged with by association, and sometimes the look of the image decided its rightful place.

Finally, we managed to put all of these together. It took place over quite a long period of time, during some of the quieter moments in the Wud Records offices.

The results are very pleasing! If Pete were here to admire them, we feel reasonably sure he would (mostly) approve of what we have done.

All of these artworks will gradually be added to Dark Company songs on Bandcamp and future platforms we are planning to release Dark Company songs to.

Just below are links to all of Dark Company‘s albums on SoundCloud, in release order. Now you can admire all of the different song artwork for yourself, and enjoy listening to the band’s wonderful songs at the same time!

Signmaker
Rage in Heaven
Alien Heat
Can of Worms
Ghost of the Art
Drifting Stars
Mind Dance
Old Hands
Benign Inquisition
Bad Habits
Noir

Album artworks for all work-in-progress albums, i.e. from Alien Heat onwards, are likely to change. Most song artwork has found a happy association that we are settled with. These are far less likely to change.

All of Dark Company’s songs and associated artwork after Noir remain under wraps! We shall be releasing this newer material once other Dark Company material has been finished and released.

If you would like a sneaky early listen, simply download a Dark Company album from Bandcamp. There are two available, Signmaker and Rage in Heaven. We will then let you know how to access the secret newest Dark Company material.

Further news regarding Dark Company will be forthcoming soon. Please be sure to keep an eye on our News service and our Twitter feed so you don’t miss it!

Here at Wud Records we seem to have reached the limit of what we can achieve without further investment in our studio equipment.

What we hear in our studios sounds absolutely fantastic. But somehow, that just doesn’t seem to translate very well to other places.

The most recent results have been particularly disappointing.

Something simply has to be done.

The remedy we have been recommended, by several trusted professional sources, suggests some urgent investment. We badly need to upgrade the existing studio speakers for a new set of good professional studio monitors for mixing and mastering. As the saying goes, “you can’t mix what you can’t hear”.

We need to raise about 600 Euros to achieve this. On top of a few long awaited essential repairs, we’ve just had a whopping ten-year internet bill, which has rather depleted our financial reserves.

Wud Records has always needed to pay for itself to exist and grow. At present rates, the studio monitor upgrade might happen by between the end of this year and the spring of 2023.

With a little help from our friends and fans of our awesome bands buying our music, that can happen sooner.

The key issue is that this really needs to happen. We want you to be able to hear the music that we are producing sounding as amazing as we can hear it in our studios. At the moment, that just isn’t happening.

Once we have completed the necessary upgrade, we shall attempt to rework some recent releases. This is so you can enjoy hearing them as they should sound, the way we hear them in our studios, rather than the garbled half-baked oddities we seem to be producing these days.

On the slate for remixing and remastering are HappySad by Flicker, Anthology by Pok the Bard, and Cosy Lube Turtle and Cherry Smoke Empire, both by The Bastard Sons of Dennis.

There is much more material that is almost ready to go, but we don’t know if we can trust the final results.

We are thinking of continuing to release music during this transition period, then sending updated versions to those who downloaded our music. This is far from a concrete decision and is the biggest issue that we are debating internally.

A few new income streams to aid this whole process will be coming online soon.

Please, support us in this endeavour to upgrade our main studio.

Here are a few ways you can help.

* You can download our tracks and albums from Bandcamp by clicking here.

* You can buy all manner of Wud merchandise at our third party Redbubble store by clicking here.

* You can Buy Us A Coffee by clicking here.

* You can send a donation directly to our Paypal by clicking here.

If you are unable to send us a financial contribution, please consider sharing any or all of these links with your social media communities and tell them why they should support us. Every little helps!

Many thanks, from all of the team at Wud Records.

The Wud Records merch store is open right now on our third party merch provider platform Redbubble. This is tremendously exciting news! We plan to add a lot more products and cool designs in the coming weeks.

Our team have been asked frequently, over a very long period of time, whether it is possible to buy a Wud Records t-shirt, or hoodie, or baseball cap, and so on. Well, now it is possible. All clothing comes in any size you could want, and with a variety of different colour options. Come and see for yourself!

There are plenty of Wud goodies on offer for your home and office. Pet accessories, mobile phone cases, bags, mugs, masks, pin badges, stickers and much, much more. There are 82 different products available in our online merch store right now.

The first design uploaded is the Wud Records logo. Designs from our bands are on the way.

And that’s not all. We are making a very special offer to all of our Wud Records merch store customers. Free digital songs and albums for everyone who orders merch from our shop!

Here’s how it works.

First, you order your Wud ‘thing’. When you receive your Wud order, share a photo of yourself with it on your social media. Let us know where you shared it so we can share it on our social media as well.

At the same time, email us (info @ wudrecords.co.uk) to let us know what you would like from our catalogue. Please put something in the subject bar to make it easy for us to recognise your email. Hopefully it won’t land in our spam folder!

You can choose digital copies of any song (one track for orders up to 10 Euros, three tracks for orders up to 15 euros) or an album/EP (for orders over 15 Euros) by any of our current or legacy bands. Please note that we cannot send anything by our Archive bands for copyright reasons.

We will let you know by return email how you can receive the music. This will vary from one track/album to another. The process will be very easy and we will do what we can to help if you encounter difficulties. We will never share your details with anyone.

Products available in our store will be tweeted regularly to highlight them. Any special offers that come along will as well.

Now you can wud the whole world with us! Everywhere you go, as well as your home and office. Even your pets can join in with some wudding! What fun. :)

Click here to visit our store.

The top ten SoundCloud tracks for June 2022 from Wud Records have been published in a new playlist.

Tracks are arranged from one to ten according to their popularity. The algorithm we use gives greatest weight to reposts, then likes and comments (active engagement) over plays.

When somebody reposts a track, that gives it the opportunity to be heard by a potential new fan. This is always a tremendous help for creative souls!

Songs published at Bandcamp and other platforms are omitted from the SoundCloud statistics because they would require separate treatment.

Archive tracks and bonus tracks are also ignored, as are likes and comments from people who clearly didn’t listen to the music. We have ways of knowing these things.

Only you, the listener, can influence our July 2022 playlist. So if there is a track you particularly like, keep playing it! Leave a comment, repost it and share it to your social media feeds!

Massive thanks go out to everybody who helped to support all of us during June 2022 by listening to, commenting on and reposting our bands’ tracks on SoundCloud, as well as other platforms.

All the wonderful fans of our bands who supported us with downloads from Bandcamp are especially appreciated because they genuinely help us keep the fires burning. May you be blessed by the gods of rock n roll! :)

We would also like to say a special thank you to all the splendid people on Twitter who have been enjoying and reposting our tracks to their followers. All the support and positive feedback has been incredibly heartwarming for us all. It makes our endeavours here seem worthwhile.

Congratulations to Flicker! Flicker enjoyed a very good month on the new chart, occupying four of the positions. All of the Flicker tracks are from their wonderful 2002 album At Least 1000 Words.

The number one SoundCloud track in June was a re-entry. Moonpath is a beautiful melodic progressive rock instrumental with impossible hybrid harmonic guitar chords that require tentacles rather than fingers to play.

Moonpath was composed after looking out to sea at Sidmouth beach on the night of a full moon. George plays the guitars using the Ice Maiden, and the bass using the Plank. Dave play drums and djembe.

Moonpath has had a fair bit of radio play recently. It is always a popular SoundCloud tune and is usually not far from the top ten in the months when it doesn’t find representation. We believe the additional airplay has been a contributory factor to its resurgence in popularity, at Bandcamp as well as at SoundCloud.

Down three places from the top of last month’s chart is Oily Road Hideaway, a delightful latin jazz dance. Oily Road Hideaway is the only track from Flicker‘s first album with programmed drums. It also has twin bass guitars playing in unison, with Dave on his Fender and George on the Plank.

Week Five is the third Flicker tune on the new chart, re-entering at number seven. Week Five has a remarkably live-sounding feel for a studio recording. It is a breezy feelgood latin rock dance number with summer vibes that wouldn’t sound out of place in a set from Carlos Santana.

Welcome to the Family drops one place on the new chart from nine to ten and is the fourth Flicker tune to find representation. Welcome to the Family is another wonderful latin-jazz-rock-fusion instrumental. It builds from its acoustic guitar beginings to a heady climax of guitar feedback and noise. There is a lovely bass solo from Dave, who also plays all the keyboard parts with outstanding aplomb and sensitivity.

Flicker‘s second album, HappySad, is under construction and you can listen to it as it stands right now by clicking here. Several more tracks are likely to be released in the coming weeks and months, so please keep an eye and an ear on our News service and Twitter.

There are five songs in total by Dark Company, who enjoyed another splendid month for Wud Records on SoundCloud during June 2022. Three different Dark Company albums all find representation, with two songs each from Rage in Heaven and Benign Inquisition, with one from Can of Worms.

Sacrifice, the opening track on Dark Company‘s Rage in Heaven album, is up two places from four to two on the new chart. Recently Sacrifice has also enjoyed radio play on a number of stations. This is probably a contributary factor in its resurgent streaming popularity.

Sacrifice is an alluring and curious mix of progressive rock, trance and rap. The genre-bending nature of Sacrifice has helped it appeal to fans from multiple musical subcultures over the years.

Probably also due to an outbreak of recent radio play, Medicines is in our charts yet again, this time climbing from six to number three. Medicines has been our biggest selling song over the years and people still seek it out and enjoy listening to it.

Medicines was popular in Europe rather than in the uk where Dark Company formed. Mainstream radio in the uk didn’t want to play it as the intro was “too long” and the lyrics “too difficult to understand”. They are about a subject other than procreation, the only subject a dumbed down mainstream audience seems capable of understanding, according to the purveyors of mainstream media themselves.

Damaged, from the Dark Company album Benign Inquisition, is a re-entry on the newest chart at number five. Damaged is a truly beautiful song with a wonderful melody and some of Pete’s finest whimsical and storytelling lyrics. Pete rarely did whimsical. Do have a listen, it’s a real gem.

Like the rest of the Benign Inquisition album, Damaged is still very much work-in-progress.

Recently it had something of an upgrade, with the addition of some wonderful cello from the marvelous Alison Reynolds. Alison has been helping us out with some cello lines recently in between her own projects, which we highly recommend you listen to as well.

To visit Alison’s website, please click here.

Spiritual Remission from the album Can of Worms falls to number six this month. It is the fourth Dark Company song to chart in June 2022 and features Pete’s wonderfully languid vocals and lyrics that reference literature and legend as well as personal experiences.

Recently Spiritual Remission has been enhanced with new bass and drums and the wonderful melodica playing of Olly Joseph. We are hoping to be able to include Olly’s talents in a few more songs in the future.

You can listen to Olly’s fabulous compositions at his SoundCloud page by clicking here.

Please remember to follow our News service and Twitter for further announcements regarding the forthcoming upgrades to the Can of Worms album.

The fifth and final Dark Company song on this month’s chart is Colt 44, a re-entry at number eight. This is a curious song with a dark triphop vibe, played on a Stratocaster, with some very low notes on the bass. Synths are plugins and come from the wonderful DSK Music, check them out if you need some for your DAW.

Colt 44 is a song about a woman who was having an existential crisis. We can confirm that her story had a “and they all lived happily ever after” ending, thankfully.

The only other act to be represented in our chart this month is Alchemeon. Their beautiful cosmic psychedelic spacerock epic Orb is an absolute wonder of a creation. This is, of course, a live version. Orb consists of various sections, each of which is an earworm in its own right. Orb returns to our charts at number nine, much as the druids in the lyrics return to the stones.

None of our other acts made it onto the chart this month.

If you would like to go to SoundCloud to hear the top ten songs from Wud Records in June 2022, as played, liked, commented upon and reposted by listeners, please click here.

If you prefer to listen right here at the Wud Records website, you will find that it is the new default music player. You will find it on all non band-specific pages at the site, including our Links collection and homepage.

Recently we have added a few more of the previous charts as pages to their section of this website. We are still more than a year behind in this work, but at least a little catching up has been done. If you’d like to see all our old charts, they can be accessed easily by clicking here. More pages will be added soon, when there is time.

June 2022 Musical Discoveries

A brand new playlist of all the favourite musical discoveries of the Wud Records team has been published at SoundCloud. All of the artists on it are amazing independent or unsigned artists who are making great music that simply aches to be heard.

These artists are not associated directly with Wud Records in any way. We simply accumulated songs that we all liked during June 2022 into one agreed playlist and published it on the first day of the new month.

Tracks have been arranged according to the number of plays at the time of publishing, starting with the fewest. Tracks that are early in playlists tend to receive more plays than later tracks. We are inclined to believe that the music which has had the fewest streams needs the best chance of exposure.

If you find some new favourites on there, why not shout about them on your social media channels? It costs you nothing to do so. The artists responsible for creating the music will welcome such word-of-mouth exposure. Many of your friends and followers would enjoy hearing the music too. At the very least… you might end up making an independent musician’s day.

Sharing Is Very, Very Important !!

Sharing is a massive help for independent artists. They don’t have big corporations and mainstream media saturating every channel with their product. Every independent share counts.

Giving something a ‘like’ is nice, but sharing exposes the artist to your followers. This means that anybody in your community can see and click on what you shared. They can potentially enjoy it as well. It enables somebody new to discover the artist and become their newest fan. You create the chance for that to happen.

Are you a musician whose SoundCloud track we liked, shared or tweeted during the last month or so? If you are, there is a possibility that one of your tracks might be on this new playlist.

Can you complete the challenge of listening to every track on a musical discoveries compilation? If you manage it, tell us! Tell the music makers involved. Tell the world on social media how you feel about what you heard. The people concerned would love to know your thoughts.

We appreciate the fact that in 2022 not many have the time, patience or attention span to listen to even one track all the way through, let alone a whole playlist. Anybody who listens to even half of a musical discoveries compilation is somebody of exceptional stamina. We tend to big up on Twitter the people who manage to listen to a whole playlist. If you want a bit of free promotion from Wud Records on Twitter, you know what to do.

Towards the bottom of the page is a list of the featured artists and tracks. The artist name is clickable and links to an external website where you can find out, hear and see more of the artist in question.

A disclaimer! Clearly we cannot take responsibility for any of the content or functionality of these pages. If you find that something isn’t working as it should, please let us know what’s up and we’ll try to find a remedy.

The links we use are for future-proofing. If the artist decides to leave SoundCloud or removes their track from that platform, you might still be able to enjoy hearing them elsewhere with a cunning click of the mouse.

If you are the artist and would prefer us to use a different link to the one we added, or if we got something a bit wrong, please send an email to info@wudrecords.co.uk so we can fix it for you.

Generally we try to use the artist’s own site where possible. This helps drive a little traffic to the artist’s website, which may not receive many visits compared to e.g. facebook or spotify. We also tend to link to something a bit more future-proof than “Listen to our latest single!” as we hope these playlists will be around for a long time to come.

We only linked to SoundCloud as a last resort when we were unable to find anything else, as users can already click the track and go to the artist’s SoundCloud page for themselves.

Free Promo For Great Music

We hope that a lot more people will find and listen to the wonderful songs on this new playlist of musical discoveries. Each and every track has something that we felt was special or interesting in some way. In many cases it was a tough job to choose just one track from an artist.

The playlist is very eclectic, so there is probably something on there to suit every taste. If the track you are listening to isn’t quite doing it for you, skip to the next one and perhaps that will please your ears more. Sometimes similar tracks end up next to each other, and sometimes extremely different tracks do, so we recommend you just try it for yourself.

In addition to the latest compilation being our pinned tweet on Twitter, every week on Twitter we boost a previous Musical Discoveries playlist and a featured track from that playlist. The featured track is chosen by the Wud Records team and is one which is a real favourite amongst us.

We also use Twitter to encourage people to vote for the next featured track. These votes are added to the votes cast by our team. All the featured tracks form an additional compilation which we also tweet frequently.

Generally we try to have a full tweeting day at least three days each week, although since late last year things have become very busy and we are not able to spend as much time on social media as we used to. That may change in the future.

All of the featured tracks can be found on a separate page at our website by clicking here, or on SoundCloud by clicking here.

How We Work It

If you would like the opportunity to be included in a future compilation, first you need to follow us on SoundCloud so we can follow you back. You can even enjoy hearing some of the music by our fabulous bands whilst you’re there. :)

We follow everyone back who follows us on SoundCloud, providing you have original music and you are not some kind of phony pointless scamming account.

There are many scammers who can allegedly make it seem that people have been listening to your music. The ‘plays’ come from bots and click farms. Nobody will engage with the music or even hear it. It is very easy to spot a track that has been boosted in this way, so just don’t do it. Spend your hard-earned musical coins on something useful!

We generally listen to at least seven songs, starting with the spotlighted tracks if there are any. After that we go to the most recent by clicking on your ‘tracks’. This way we can hear both the things you want us to hear the most (your spotlighted tracks), and then whatever you have been releasing to SoundCloud most recently. This enables us to get a rough feel of what you are all about and what you are doing. We also read your bio.

Our people listen to everyone we follow at SoundCloud on a first-in-first-out basis. It may take a few weeks for us to reach the newest additions. We always have a massive amount of music to listen to, and we use a quorum of a minimum three listeners, so please be patient and eventually you will be heard.

Listen and Enjoy

If you would like to listen to the new playlist of June 2022 Musical Discoveries over at SoundCloud, please click here.

To enjoy the new playlist of great music here at the Wud Records website, please click here.

If you would like easy access to all of the previous musical discoveries playlists, please click here and bookmark the page. Remember that we publish a new playlist absolutely full of largely undiscovered musical treasures every month and who knows – one might even include you!