News

Emma’s memories of Mark Drower and the Everyones? Published at the Wud Records website? Seriously?!

Yes, it’s true! One of the original members of The Everyones, Emma Leach, has very kindly written her memories of Mark Drower and the Everyones.

It’s a wonderful piece of writing that is a real joy to read. We highly recommend it.

It has also been tremendous to relive these delightful memories through the lens of her perspective. We already published the memories of Mark Drower and the Everyones by both Pok (which you can enjoy reading by clicking here) and George (which you can enjoy reading by clicking here).

Emma describes many of the events that occured throughout the Everyones period. The events articulated so eloquently in Emma’s memories of Mark Drower and the Everyones were fundamental. The Everyones were highly significant with regards to how the wider Wud posse have become that which we have become today.

These memories seem to be growing more and more precious over the passage of time. It seems hard to believe that it is 39 years since the first legendary performance of Everyone in July 1982. It would be wonderful if more memories happened to be forthcoming, as it was certainly a highly memorable event. Should any more ever come our way, we shall of course let friends and followers know via our News service and on Twitter.

One of the things that Emma mentions in her recollections is some of the fabulous music, chosen by Mark, that was used throughout the show. The music was often accompanied by the performances of three dancers.

Emma mentions 2000 Light Years by the Rolling Stones and how the play opened with Led Zeppelin’s No Quarter. ELP’s Oh Lucky Man, we’re fairly sure, was a new addition for the second series of shows at Exeter Cathedral and it wasn’t included in the original King’s School set of performances.

When Everyone met his muse Treasure, as can be seen in two of the photos, Money by Pink Floyd was the theme to introduce the scene. The photos were taken by George’s friend Giles Staddon who was in the audience. Giles had been armed with George’s parents’ horrible ghastly cheap camera, which he had been forbidden to take with him but he sneaked it out anyway, along with a rotating cubic flash bulb that had only four single shots to it, hence only four photos. How technology has changed in the past 39 years!

Somewhere in the middle of that scene came the song from The Blaze Tape EP, Treasure.

When Everyone was left sat at the front edge of the stage all alone, having been forsaken by the fickle Treasure, burning photocopied fake money, Breadfan by Budgie played. Breadfan began from the middle, at the start of the gentle wistful part with the beautiful guitar and haunting vocal. The three dancers slinked onto the back of the stage in black leotards. As Breadfan cranked up into its classic riff, the dancers became more wild and their performance was the transition to the next scene.

Robert Fripp’s Exposure was used at one point in the performance, as was a Peter Gabriel track.

The play ended to the sound of David Bowie’s Five Years, with Simon jamming along on lead guitar from the gantry with Mark, and the whole cast coming together on stage for a final bow.

The three original dancers were Amanda Drew, Caireen Toms and Adrienne Law. Amanda moved away to Leicester to study theatre over that summer and was replaced for the Exeter Cathedral performances by Jo Wilson.

Although we lost touch with Caireen, Adrienne and Jo a very long time ago, we know Amanda went on to enjoy a very successful career in acting. She works mostly in the theatre and has also appeared many times in popular uk tv dramas such as EastEnders and The Bill. She also starred in a highly memorable award-winning advert where she played a young mother having a tantrum in a supermarket, shocking her young daughter. Amanda is also known for her tremendous work as a redoubtable champion of retired racing greyhounds.

If you’d like to read and see more about Amanda, here’s a link to her Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanda_Drew

If you would like to read Emma’s memories of Mark Drower and the Everyones, please click here. You can listen to the beautiful songs Mark composed at the same time. ;-)

If you would like to follow Emma on Twitter @emlovesherlife, please click here.

To enjoy listening to Emma’s most recent musical project, Strange New Things, click here to open her SoundCloud page.

A new cover design for Ride That Fantasy by Recluse? Surely not!

Yes, it’s true. We have created a new piece of cover art for Recluse‘s Ride That Fantasy album. It’s a fabulous album too.

The Ride That Fantasy CD we were given by Recluse had no cover art. All there was to go on was the track list on the insert and the name of the album on the CD itself.

To make the new cover art for Ride That Fantasy we actually used a photo of the band from the artwork of their earlier album, Propaganda. If you look at the cover photo you will see the band in Piccadilly Circus, London. To the left we see Chris White (bass), centre is Alex Painter (guitar, vocals) and right is Tim Desmond (drums).

Propaganda is a magnificent collection of songs by Recluse. If you haven’t heard it yet, we highly recommend it. You can enjoy it by clicking here.

Once we had the photo scanned and saved, the next thing was to find the right font. We decided to use the same font as the band had used for their Propaganda album and made the text using an old and still awesome piece of software from Macromedia, called Fireworks.

We also chopped out and added the little ‘world’ symbol that Recluse used on the cover of their Propaganda album.

Ride That Fantasy by Recluse is an album full of terrific songwriting and tremendous musicianship from three young guys. They were an awesome live act whose songs would enrapture their audience as well as create a decent mosh pit. Shortly after making this album the band went their separate ways to study at university.

Although we don’t know what the members of Recluse are doing any more, we hope it is something musical and we wish them well. If we find out we shall let listeners know in our News service and on Twitter.

If you would like to listen to Ride That Fantasy by Recluse, including its new cover art, over at SoundCloud, you can do so by clicking here.

If you prefer instead to listen to Ride That Fantasy by Recluse right here at the Wud Records website, please click here.

The top ten SoundCloud tracks for June 2021 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. This is because when somebody reposts a track it gives it the opportunity to be heard by a potential new fan. This is always a tremendous help to creative souls. Likes from people who clearly don’t listen to the music are ignored.

Songs published at Bandcamp are also completely omitted from the SoundCloud statistics. This is because Bandcamp statistics require separate treatment.

Archive tracks and bonus tracks are also ignored.

Only you, the listener, can influence our July 2021 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 2021 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 Dark Company! They remained at the top of our charts for a fourth consecutive month with their awesome alternative / hard / psychedelic rock and funk song Dancing In The Dark. The version you can hear is still work-in-progress.

Pete wrote the lyrics in 1989 and the song was originally performed by Alien Heat. Dancing In The Dark describes his memories of going nightclubbing in the West End of London after being revved up by his good friend Billy. Pete was not actually terribly keen on the song and would always refer to it as “Farting in the Park”.

Back in the days of Alien Heat, Dancing In The Dark included Graham’s drum solo. This was when everyone in the band would roll a cigarette (or something a little more flavoursome) while he performed it, hopefully having the deed done and the object lit in time to carry on with the song at the drum solo’s conclusion.

There has already been, and will also be, further news published regarding upgrades to other songs from Dark Company’s Alien Heat album in the coming days. We are busy fixing these in the hope of being able to repair broken gear and finish the guitars fairly soon.

A second recently upgraded Dark Company song from their work-in-progress Alien Heat album entered the June 2021 chart at number six. The lyrics for Prisoner were inspired by Frank Oz and Jim Henson’s incredible and allegorical 1982 movie The Dark Crystal.

Also sneaking into the number ten spot of the chart in June 2021 is a third song for Dark Company. Architect is the opening song from their delightful Ghost of the Art album. Architect is a magnificent cosmic hard rock and trance song which is very much still work-in-progress.

Flicker had another fine month at SoundCloud, occupying three of the positions on the latest chart. All three are taken up by tunes from their wonderful 2002 album At Least 1000 Words. In recent times Oily Road Hideaway and Welcome to the Family have been tremendously popular and appear in positions two and three respectively. Back in our chart yet again is the ever-popular Moonpath, which has featureed in many of the top ten charts since we started publishing them.

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.

Alchemeon had another excellent month. Orb was at number four, down from two last month. This beautiful, multi-faceted gem of a progressive rock / space rock epic was performed and recorded Live in Session Spring 2009. It has a tremendously strong and uplifting feel to it and was Alchemeon‘s first encore in an extended set. It is a real favourite of the wider Wud posse and we are delighted that it has been receiving some attention and love. A version comprising mostly scratch tracks lies in our machines and will someday be added to Pok‘s Anthology album.

The Freaks (Shall Inherit The Earth) by Alchemeon drops to number eight. The Freaks (Shall Inherit the Earth) was a very popular Spacegoats song in the 1990s before Alchemeon started playing it. It was performed around many a uk campfire during various road protests, as well as other infrastructure project protests, such as against the new high speed two railway.

Even more unbelievable is the recently approved scheme to cause irrepairable damage to the ancient World Heritage site Stonehenge. The british government want to build a badly conceived and unnecessary tunnel that will make money for the politicians that approved it, who are sponsored by the construction companies who will get the contracts. Politicians need to be more like Formula One drivers and wear the logos of their sponsors on their suits.

Please visit this website for more information and sign their petition: https://stonehengealliance.org.uk/

Many people protest because they believe that these things cause terrible and unnecessary damage to the landscape of the uk. These projects cost billions to implement, money which arguably could be better spent on many other things. And the big benefit? A small gain in journey times.

Also appearing on this month’s chart we see the first two tracks from the delightful Cherry Smoke Empire album by The Bastard Sons of Dennis. Good Times drops one place from last month‘s number six to this month‘s number seven, while The Furniture / Los Muebles (part 1: overture) climbs from ten to five.

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 2021, 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 over three years behind on 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.

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 2021 into one agreed playlist and published it on the first day of the new month.

This is the biggest playlist we have made so far. It features 80 different awesome independent artists.

Tracks have been arranged according to the number of plays at the exact moment 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.

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.

This is 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. 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.

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 encourage people to vote for the next featured track on Twitter. These votes are added to the votes cast by our team. All the featured tracks form an additional compilation which we also tweet daily. Sometimes we have a day off, but we tweet most days.

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 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:
1. you have original music and
2. 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!

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, so please be patient and eventually you will be heard.

If you would like to listen to the new playlist of June 2021 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!

**********
STOP PRESS!
Unfortunately we’ve had to remove one of the tracks.
It was preventing the playlist from being embedded.
The track in question is New Day by BongoPlanet.
You can check it out here:
https://soundcloud.com/bongoplanet/new-day
**********

Stephen Yates has new Demo artwork and it looks great! One could say that the Stephen Yates Demo is an eponymous prog metal EP. The new Demo artwork has been a long time coming and finally it has been finished.

There was no artwork at all with the CD Stephen gave us so we felt something needed to be created. We found a photo of Stephen looking rather handsome on Dartmoor. It is a photo that he has used on various social media websites as well as at his own website. After a little jiggery pokery and adding a little text, the Stephen Yates new Demo artwork is rather pleasing.

Over the course of our professional musical exploits, we have met many, many musicians of different abilities and renown. When we first met Stephen, at The Academy of Music and Sound, his presence was palpable the moment he entered the building. There was something very special about this man and the aura that accompanied him. He was actually grumbling that the coffee he had just bought from a place up the road wasn’t terribly good.

When he strapped on his Stratocaster and an impossible cascade of hemi-demi-semiquavers filled the area in an effortless blur of fingers, and an assortment of fretboard-melting licks were dashed off with contemptuous ease, it was easy to understand why the aura accompanied Stephen. We have never encountered any musician of his prowess and virtuosity, either before or since.

Stephen comes from a classical guitar background, where he won much acclaim and numerous awards, such as Classical Guitar magazine‘s prestigious title Guitarist of the Year. His Demo, or eponymous EP, is something more akin to progressive metal than traditional classical guitar and demonstrates a range of his extraordinary compositional and musical skills.

Here are some links to places where you can find more of Stephen Yates and his astonishing compositions, musicianship and teachings:

https://www.youtube.com/user/stephenyatesacoustic
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0RxMyFGvCkjZ7AgUpXTKow
https://www.facebook.com/Stephen-Yates-GuitaristComposer-163105717035473/
https://www.facebook.com/Steve-Yates-Electric-Guitarist-435854333413020/
http://guitarsociety.blogspot.com/2014/10/stephen-yates.html
https://fandalism.com/stephenyates

If you would like to listen to Stephen Yates’s Demo, or eponymous EP if you will, here at Wud Records, please click here.

Should you prefer to listen to it over at SoundCloud instead, please click here.

The Chillun photo gallery has been updated. Already! That was quick.

Rosie Mullin of Critical Error (among others) recently sent us some photos of The Chillun. We knew she had done this. So after hunting high and low, upstairs, downstairs, in m’lady’s chamber, on hard drives and external drives, unlikely computers, memory sticks, mobile phones and so on, we remained… confounded.

Chins and ears were scratched. Beards were twiddled and hair was twisted into tight, painful bunches. We took turns to brew tea, which was duly quaffed. It didn’t help.

Eventually Rosie kindly reminded us that she sent the images to the Wud Records Twitter account. Hooray! Eureka!

The collection of Chillun photos Rosie took in 1985 have now been added to The Chillun Gallery.

What is particularly interesting about these photos is that they feature Gnasher on bass rather than Nick Banwell. Nick must have left The Chillun by then.

Gnasher and Angus had previously played together in Incubus. You can read the fascinating backstory to The Chillun and Incubus by clicking here.

We believe that there are a lot more photos of The Chillun out there in the world. The Chillun performed frequently for a few years and were highly photogenic and visual, as well as being creators and performers of many classic timeless original songs.

With luck some more fans of The Chillun will share their goodies with us so the rest of the world can enjoy this fantastic band. If anything should occur, we will let fans of The Chillun know in our News service and on Twiter.

If you would like to see the new photos from Rosie, as well as the ones from Cliff that we already published in The Chillun photo gallery, please click here. You can enjoy listening to some of the fabulous songs of The Chillun at the same time.