Now: new Inauguration artwork

New Inauguration artwork for Now has been created! It has been uploaded to all of the relevent pages where Now’s Inauguration can be heard.

So what prompted us to make new Inauguration artwork, after all of these years?

One of the things that has been going on behind the scenes in the world of Wud Records includes rescanning a lot of old photographs, and scanning a lot of photographs that were never scanned before. These will be used to upgrade and enhance the various photo galleries at the Wud Records website.

There are some photos that we shall only share privately with our artists and the wider Wud posse, and there are some that will never be shared. All the same, this work is ongoing in between everything else that we are doing.

Many of the photos in our galleries were scanned way back in 2000, for the old Wud site. Back then the order of the day was tiny files and connecting to the internet via dialup modem.

Recently we started removing our music from SoundCloud, following a ridiculous debacle that took place in July. We have still not been contacted by SoundCloud regarding the issues we faced.

Our account was finally repaired yesterday, 68 days after it was deleted by SoundCloud thinking we were spam, when we simply reported that we were the victims of spam.

There are many fake accounts on SoundCloud who just want your money, and the best thing is to just block them. We remain profoundly dissatisfied with the way we were treated by SoundCloud over this whole fiasco.

We realised that our label needs to diversify its music platforms in case of further difficulties.

As such, we have started to organise our music at HearThis. We have also joined Audiomack and Audius, and have begun to upload our music to both of those platforms as well.

We decided to start with the oldest music we have and move forwards through time, uploading the things that were created subsequently.

Doing this has reminded us that there is no music uploaded yet for two of our most venerable legacy acts – Fooog Dinboffin and the Release, and Sirius Rising. We have mined the cassette vault and are trying to find recordings that are reasonably decent and representative of these two bands. Uploads will be incoming soon, so watch this space!

Music for The Masters of Drone will appear later.

The Blaze Tape by Mark Drower and the Everyones, and Inauguration by Now, are the two oldest recordings we have. You will find both albums at HearThis, Audius and Audiomack. The Blaze Tape is also available for download at Bandcamp.

Because The Blaze Tape has its own artwork already, and Inauguration didn’t until today, we felt it would be a splendid idea to make some. One of the photos we scanned recently is a school photo from 1982, with all of the teachers and pupils of The King’s School, Ottery St Mary, in the shot. It’s way too big for our scanner, so we did it in several chunks.

Lurking within this enormous photograph, we found Mark Drower (the only photo of him we have), George, and Jon Kneebone, who were the principal players in Now‘s Inauguration. Pok was also present, even though he did not play during the Inauguration recording, so we included his photo too. These four were cut out of the big school photo, digitally enhanced, then used for the cover art.

Sadly we could find neither Pete Rippin nor Sarah Hopgood in the photo. Although Lucy Bradshaw-Smith was present, having five photos would have been a bit awkward for the design Sam had in mind.

For the lettering we chose a font that was a little like the original drawing of the word ‘Now’ that George did back in the day – and then twisted it. George’s original was a bit like AC/DC’s logo. There were a great many wet socks and aching feet back in 1982, so we chose a sort of wet-sock brown for the outer glow of the lettering.

We may release Inauguration to Bandcamp as well in the coming weeks. Should this happen, we will let you know via our News service, our Bandcamp Community, and on BlueSky and X.

We’re going to be writing to our fabulous followers in person soon. If you would like to be included, please sign up to our mailing list. It only takes a moment. There area only two fields to fill in and our data is never shared.

If you would like to admire the new artwork and listen to Inauguration at HearThis, please click here.

To admire the new artwork and listen to Inauguration at Audius, please click here.

Should you wish to admire the new artwork and listen to Inauguration at Audiomack instead, please click here.

You can check out Inauguration at the Wud Records website as well, by clicking here.