News

The pages at Explicit Music pertaining to Pok and his growing Anthology album have all been updated. Before we started doing this with our partners at Explicit Music, only four pages existed there. Now all eleven of the currently-released tracks have a page.

Anthology is an album of some of Pok’s oldest songs, which we have known and loved for several decades. Many of them have no proper version, i.e. one that attempts to do justice to the songs in the way we imagined them to be, as fledgling wudders and Masters of Drone from back in the day.

By making this Anthology album, something which we have always wanted to do, we are attempting to rectify this situation. Virtually all of the tracks on the Anthology album we consider to be essential classics in the pantheon of Pok’s enormous catalogue of extraordinary creations.

Explicit Music is the publishing company that deals with all the intellectual property of Wud Records. Among Pok‘s Anthology pages there, you can read official lyrics for all the songs. You can also read some details concerning backstories to the songs and a few details of action that took place behind the scenes when we were recording the tracks. There is also all of the relevent legal copyright information, names of the performers and references to websites where sounds and samples came from, where applicable.

Lurking within the depths of our machines there are mnay more songs for the Anthology album that are in varying degrees of finalisation. We hope to be able to finish some of these soon and add them to the growing collection. Of course, we shall let fans of Pok know about this in our News service and on Twitter.

If you would like to listen to Pok’s Anthology album on the Wud Records website, please click here.

If you prefer to listen at Bandcamp or download a copy of the album for your collection, please click here.

To check out all of the official song data, lyrics and fun facts from the Anthology album by Pok the Bard over at our partner site Explicit Music, please click here.

You can easily listen and check out the lyrics and fun facts at the same time by opening the different pages in separate tabs. All the links you can click from this news post will open in new tabs for you.

We Know You Well is the latest track to be completed and added to the growing Anthology album from Pok the Bard. Despite an unprecedented amount of delays caused by the various trials and tribulations of moving to a different country and rebuilding and repairing everything more-or-less from scratch. we are happy with the overall sound of the finished song. This has been the longest period Wud Records has gone between releases since before our new website was launched in 2008.

We Know You Well was originally created by Mark Drower and evolved when he and Pok were in the band Beyond the Pale. Their performance of We Know You Well, at The King’s School, Ottery St Mary, is the stuff of legend. We hope that this version does that one, from 1983, some kind of justice. Sadly there are no recordings in existence of Beyond the Pale, as far as we know.

We Know You Well was also jammed by Now, but not really developed any further until the seminal Cander recording by Laughing Sun, in the long summer of 1985. This version owes a great deal to the Cander version.

Laughing Sun performed We Know You Well at their first ever live performance, which was at Exeter College in 1985. Unfortunately the song was curtailed and the final three minutes or so were never played because the drama hall was needed and the band had run over time. Flump.

Maxx on bass normally tunes B-E-A-D. He says that E simply isn’t low enough these days. For this song he drops his B down to an A, properly low! Sven’s bashings and tappings are as immaculate as always. What a rhythm section.

Pok‘s electric and acoustic rhythm tracks are panned to the right. The acoustic rhythm track is played on the Tanglewood, which is also used for the echo guitars in the teacher-talk mashup and the weird psychedelic section. The electric rhythm guitar is played on Broken Horn. Broken Horn is also the instrument for the widdly-diddliness from about 11:19. The particulalry dirty tremolo guitar in the verses is Betty the Bastard.

The rhythm guitar parts played by Fedax are panned to the left. He plays the acoustic parts on an Encore that cost £11 including delivery from eBay. It is the same guitar that Pok used to play the main line in Cordelia Dreams as well. The electric parts were played on the Ice Maiden, even the filthy dirty rhythm at the end.

The weird section after the third verse that starts at about 8:56 owes its existence to the Cander version of We Know You Well. We made this section by taking Nicodemus (panned to the right) and playing loose notes whilst retuning the strings, then playing the whole thing backwards so that by the end Nicodemus sounds in tune. To the left we hear some whammy wangage on Marsha, or perhaps the Ice Maiden, but not Betty as the sequencer claims.

The violining and the fiercely panned beams of guitar sweeping from side to side in the intro section were performed on by Pok on Betty, with Marsha adding extra wobbliness and phasing in phases two and three.

Pok‘s deliciously classic solo from 6:57 was played on Betty and his amazing acoustic virtuosity showcased in the solo from 9:58 was played on a borrowed semi-acoustic.

Fedax plays three solos on the Ice Maiden. The first is a short outburst of wibbliness between verses one and two and the third a further ouburst of wibbulation in the slowdown right at the end from 11:55.

The second and main solo from Fedax at 10:24 was recorded first take without any prior warm-up. Although he was not keen on it at first and left it there to mark that one should exist, Pok loved it and convinced him to go with it.

We Know You Well is a subversive song about teachers, school, the misuse of power and control, oppression, the standardisation and homogenisation and eradication of individuals and their unique talents within the uk education system, the similarities and differences between the roles of teachers and pupils, ego, and teachers’ fears and uncertainties. Perhaps it can be considered a cousin of Pink Floyd’s song Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2).

This song is 37 years old at the time of its release. It is a song we have always loved and dearly wanted to make a decent version of someday. We hope you enjoy our attempt to do so.

If you would like to listen to We Know You Well, please click here and press play in the new tab that opens.

If you would like to read the lyrics and song information regarding We Know You Well, please click here and a new tab will open to the relevant page at Explicit Music.

If you wish to listen to or download Pok’s entire Anthology album as it stands right now, please click here.

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 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 2019 into one agreed playlist and published it at the end of the 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, and we feel that the ones with fewer plays need the best chance of exposure.

Can you complete the challenge of listening to every track?! If you manage it, tell us, tell some of the music makers involved, and tell the world on social media how you feel about what you heard. Everyone concerned would love to hear your thoughts. If you find some new favourites on there, why not shout about them on social media as well? We are sure the artistes responsible for creating the music will welcome such word-of-mouth exposure and your friends and followers would probably love to enjoy hearing the music too. At the very least you might end up making an independent musician’s day.

As with many music streaming platforms, there is a vast amount of great music on SoundCloud if you have the time and inclination to filter through it. If you happen to be looking out for some great new music, we’ve already done that filtering for you!

If you are one of the bands from which we recently liked, shared or tweeted a track at SoundCloud, there is a chance that one of your tracks might be on this new playlist.

Towards the bottom of the page is a list of 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.

If you are the artist and would prefer us to use a different link to the one we added, 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. 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.

Are you a member of SoundCloud? We always follow back if you have your own tracks and we always listen eventually, even if it takes a few weeks. So if you would like the opportunity of a bit of free publicity you could follow Wud Records on SoundCloud. It’s even free to join with a basic membership!

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. All the featured tracks form an additional compilation which we also tweet daily. All of the featured tracks can be found on a separate page at our website by clicking here, or on SoundCloud by clicking here.

If you would like to listen to this special new playlist of June 2019 Musical Discoveries over at SoundCloud, please click here.

To enjoy this 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, and remember that we publish a new playlist full of undiscovered gems every month!

The top ten SoundCloud tracks for June 2019 from Wud Records have been published in a new playlist. Tracks have been arranged from one to ten according to their popularity and take into account plays, comments, likes and reposts. The algorithm we use gives greatest weight to reposts, then likes and comments over plays.

Tracks published at Musicoin and Bandcamp have been omitted from the SoundCloud statistics. This is because we feel these results require separate treatment. Archive tracks and bonus tracks are also ignored.

Only you, the listener, can influence our July 2019 playlist. So if there is a track you particularly like, keep playing it!

Massive thanks go out to everybody who helped to support all of us during June 2019 by listening, commenting and reposting our bands’ tracks on SoundCloud, as well as other platforms.

A special mention needs to go to Atom Collector Records. Their service continues to help us achieve consistently and significantly better activity. If you have tracks on SoundCloud, Bandcamp, YouTube, Musicoin, Spotify, ReverbNation, dSound, dTube or Choon, you too could see considerable growth in activity. It’s even free to join. Just click here to go to their site.

Congratulations to The Bastard Sons of Dennis, whose song The Furniture (part 1: overture) from their truly extraordinary creation The Furniture/Los Muebles returned to the top of our chart. Last month’s top track, Good Times by The Bastard Sons of Dennis, and also from their Cherry Smoke Empire album, dropped down to number three.

Some Dark Company demos from their forthcoming Old Hands album proved to be popular, especially at Atom Collector Records – in particular Peek-a-boo!, Double or Many and Medicine Man. Their old favourites Medicines from the Rage in Heaven album and Armed & Dangerous from Signmaker proved to be ear candy once again among our listeners. Another demo track, It Starts Right Here from Flicker‘s HappySad Demos also made the chart.

Completing this month’s somewhat demo-tastic Top Ten we see The Ug Brothers with an awesome live instrumental jam of their jazz-funk-rock masterpiece Wibble and Bling and Rough Terrain‘s Won’t You Come Around My Way, an ever-popular track from their Daylight Demo and which also appears on their Exit Stage Deaf compilation at Bandcamp. No other act managed to break into our chart this month.

If you would like to go to SoundCloud to hear the top ten songs from Wud Records in June 2019, as played, liked, commented upon and reposted by listeners, please click here.

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

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 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 May 2019 into one agreed playlist and published it at the end of the 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, and we feel that the ones with fewer plays need the best chance of exposure.

Can you complete the challenge of listening to every track?! If you manage it, tell us, tell some of the music makers involved, and tell the world on social media how you feel about what you heard. Everyone concerned would love to hear your thoughts. If you find some new favourites on there, why not shout about them on social media as well? We are sure the artistes responsible for creating the music will welcome such word-of-mouth exposure and your friends and followers would probably love to enjoy hearing the music too. At the very least you might end up making an independent musician’s day.

As with many music streaming platforms, there is a vast amount of great music on SoundCloud if you have the time and inclination to filter through it. If you happen to be looking out for some great new music, we’ve already done that filtering for you!

If you are one of the bands from which we recently liked, shared or tweeted a track at SoundCloud, there is a chance that one of your tracks might be on this new playlist.

Towards the bottom of the page is a list of 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.

If you are the artist and would prefer us to use a different link to the one we added, 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. 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.

Are you a member of SoundCloud? We always follow back if you have your own tracks and we always listen eventually, even if it takes a few weeks. So if you would like the opportunity of a bit of free publicity you could follow Wud Records on SoundCloud. It’s even free to join with a basic membership!

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. All the featured tracks form an additional compilation which we also tweet daily. All of the featured tracks can be found on a separate page at our website by clicking here, or on SoundCloud by clicking here.

If you would like to listen to this special new playlist of May 2019 Musical Discoveries over at SoundCloud, please click here.

To enjoy this 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, and remember that we publish a new playlist full of undiscovered gems every month!

The top ten SoundCloud tracks for May 2019 from Wud Records have been published in a new playlist. Tracks have been arranged from one to ten according to their popularity and take into account plays, comments, likes and reposts. The algorithm we use gives greatest weight to reposts, then likes and comments over plays.

Tracks published at Musicoin and Bandcamp have been omitted from the SoundCloud statistics. This is because we feel these results require separate treatment. Archive tracks and bonus tracks are also ignored.

Only you, the listener, can influence our June 2019 playlist. So if there is a track you particularly like, keep playing it!

Massive thanks go out to everybody who helped to support all of us during May 2019 by listening, commenting and reposting our bands’ tracks on SoundCloud, as well as other platforms.

A special mention needs to go to Atom Collector Records. Their service continues to help us achieve consistently and significantly better activity. If you have tracks on SoundCloud, Bandcamp, YouTube, Musicoin, Spotify, ReverbNation, dSound, dTube or Choon, you too could see considerable growth in activity. It’s even free to join. Just click here to go to their site.

Congratulations to The Bastard Sons of Dennis, whose recently uploaded Cherry Smoke Empire album dominated our May 2019 chart with five entries. These include the fabulous acoustic funk-rock jewel Good Times, which remains our number one track for a second month. Cherry Smoke Empire is an album of original songs by The Bastard Sons of Dennis featuring the incredible off-the-wall piece of creativity known as The Furniture/Los Muebles. It has been split into all of its separate parts with other songs segwayed between each part. You can listen to and download the complete version of The Furniture/Los Muebles by clicking here.

Also appearing on this month’s chart we see The Ug Brothers with an awesome live instrumental jam of their jazz-funk-rock masterpiece Wibble and Bling. Flicker and Dark Company have two tracks each. No other act managed to berak into the chart this month.

If you would like to go to SoundCloud to hear the top ten songs from Wud Records in May 2019, as played, liked, commented upon and reposted by listeners, please click here.

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