News

The Bastard Sons of Dennis performed live at the Black Horse again tonight. This time, as there were relatively few musicians in the bar, they were invited to play two sets. The first set was Redcap, Cities on Flame, Wings Wetted Down and Teen Archer and they returned later to play Dominance and Submission and Where Is the Furniture of My Brother. The final song was only written a couple of weeks ago and has never been rehearsed, never mind performed live before, and it seemed to go reasonably well.

The Black Horse’s open mic night is now a weekly fixture, so next week the Bastard Sons of Dennis plan to play at the Hole in the Wall on Tuesday and the Black Horse again on Thursday. Hopefully we will see some of you there again! Big up to everybody who came along tonight and made it fun.

Dark Company have been reasonably active in the studio since the site rebuild. We have just uploaded the pre-master mix of Road Tripped to their Bad Habits album, and can now give you a full update on what Dark Company have been doing recently.

As well as Road Tripped, More or Less has also been completed to pre-mastering stage and was uploaded to the Bad Habits collection during the time that the site was being rebuilt.

Ghost of the Art has been completed to alpha stage and all of the songs from that album are now available to be heard on Dark Company’s Ghost of the Art page. These include Dolls House, White Bird on Ivory and Reasons, none of which had been uploaded before the site rebuild.

The band have been laying down guides for the Benign Inquisition album from 2000. So far they have done TNT, Bright Monsters, Colt 44, Care in the Community, Falling Down and the verses for Heavy Touch. We hope to be able to make some of these tracks available for you to hear soon.

And that’s not all! We have made some progress with their Noir album as well. Pete recorded the vocals for Dead Young, FBI and Mainstream Man. Pete has been searching around for some sound samples that he likes for Code Red, although we have not done the vocals for that song yet.

In another news post we mentioned that some of the &co material had been remastered and uploaded to the Old Hands page. Now that we have located more of such material we plan to remaster and complete that collection before remastering Signmaker and Rage in Heaven. By then it should be time to master and launch Bad Habits.

Tomorrow we will strap Pete securely to the mic and make him wear his ear goggles again, so there will probably be more news soon.

Professor Fooog Dinboffin has now left Brighton and has moved to Honiton, from where he plans to base himself for the time being. As he is now in closer proximity to all of us here, we believe that there may be some action on the Alchemeon front at some point in the vaguely near future.

The Professor also hopes that he will be able to record some of the acoustic songs that he has written and performed recently. We will let you know more about this soon.

More than a quarter of a century has passed since the day when we made this recording of Lemming Meringue, way back on 20th January 1985. It has now been recovered from deep within the Wud Records archives and uploaded here for you to enjoy, or remember, or cringe at, or be bemused by, or ignore. A reasonably comprehensive history of the recording has also been included.

We have uploaded eight of Jeff the Bass’s dance remixes of Dark Company songs to the & co Drifting Stars page. These tracks were salvaged from cassette and remastered in the Wud Records studio. There are a few more to join this collection which we shall add in due course and we plan to announce a new album of Dark Company remixes under the & co banner soon.

The Bastard Sons of Dennis have been busy playing at various venues and adding new material to their set. There have been two performances at The Hole in the Wall, the second of which was rather prolonged and allowed the band to play their entire set. This included debut performances of songs such as Workshop of the Telescopes and three BSoD originals, all penned by Andy. These songs were Smile, Good Times and Sometimes.

Other recent performances include a triumphant return to the Black Horse and a debut performance at The Oddfellows, which was a lot of fun and featured a split-level stage arrangement. The plan is to return to both venues soon.

The Bastard Sons of Dennis plan to record some of their original material soon. We will keep you informed when there are further developments. They also worked on a tune by George called Second Act which has a ludicrous amount of time signature changes and is rather challenging to play, and wrote a song in Spanish about the losing and finding of a family member’s furniture. This was done in the style of a Spanish phrasebook. The band may have discovered an entirely new genre of music quite by accident!

We hope that some of you might be able to come along to their next performance. It will be at The Hole in the Wall, Castle Street, Exeter on Tuesday 23rd March. There were some there last time who were familiar with our website, so thanks for coming! The boys also plan a return to the Black Horse in early March, which we will give details of nearer the time.