News

Important!

Episode #96 will be our last monthly Musical Discoveries compilation for the time being.

We are moving to a quarterly release schedule due to the strangling of social media (more here: https://www.wudrecords.co.uk/news/wud-records-social-media-is-dead/) and a general waning interest in music.

Please read this first: https://www.wudrecords.co.uk/news/wud-records-future-of-musical-discoveries/

July 2024 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 July 2024 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 that we shared 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 2024 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.

As such, 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 artists and tracks in the compilation. 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. Sometimes finding these links can take quite a bit of research as many artists are not especially skilled at linking all their pages together.

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 (without the spaces) 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 might 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.

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

On Twitter we 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.

We used to tweet just about every day. Since late 2021 things have become increasingly busy, meaning we are not able to spend as much time on social media as we used to. Full tweeting days are now something of a rarity. When they happen, we try to do a clump of full days together over a period of a fortnight, if possible.

Now that Twitter has been largely destroyed by its newest owner, it is difficult to foresee a time that we will be tweeting much at all any more. Perhaps someday somebody will buy the platform from him and repair all the damage he has done. Until then, it’s become no better than farcebeak.

Wud Records has set up camp at BlueSky and if you would like to follow us there, we would be delighted to have you on board. Click here to find us!

If you need a code to join, we have few spare. Send us an email to info @ wudrecords .co.uk and we’ll send you one.

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 typically takes 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.

July 2024 completes an eighth year of Wud Records Musical Discoveries compilations. That means 96 compilations of amazing independent music you almost certainly never heard before! Why not put one on in the background whilst you’re busy pottering around the house or doing what you are doing? Something is bound to leap out at you.

Listen and Enjoy

If you would like to listen to the new playlist of July 2024 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!

The future of our Musical Discoveries compilations is in severe jeopardy. Very few people are listening to our recommendations any more.

So far this month we have observed 14 streams for the first track on the latest compilation, which is a fantastic creation from the amaziing Stone Age Man, and NONE beyond that.

Since we started monitoring the streams a few months ago, nobody has listened beyond the third track in one of our monthly compilations. Fourteen streams for a first track is actually the highest since we started checking, but how many actually listeners reached the end of that first track? As nobody listened to track two yet, ‘none’ would be a reasonable guess.

Does that mean we need not bother making compilations longer than three tracks? In which case, what is the use in making these playlists if nobody actually gives a hoot, not even the artists who we discover and highlight?

We would love to help shine the spotlight on musical artists who are making wonderful music and are barely being heard. We have been doing our part for eight years. The next playlist, July 2024, will be #96. But if nobody cares enough about wonderful independent music to actually listen to some of it sometimes, or acknowledge its discovery in some way, what is the actual point?

This apathy-based frustration applies even more to the discovered artists themselves. Why do not more of them not take this opportunity to share with the world the fact that somebody else discovered their music independently and thought it was so fabulous they recommended it to other potential fans?

In 1979, when Horn, Downes and Woolley wrote the song Video Killed the Radio Star, they left out a word. It probably would have sounded weird with a bar of 5/4 in the chorus of a mainstream pop song. The word was ‘games’.

Video games killed the radio star, not video. And now, social media is killing video games. Music is way down the list by now. It is so much easier to scroll through social media than actually do something, such as working on getting good at a video game, or even listening to a whole song.

Apathy is what is killing independent music now, just as much as all the mainstream corporate media leverage is brainwashing the majority with cheap muzak designed by committee in a boardroom. There are people in their 30s and 40s who taught their children that Take That and The Spice Girls were great bands.

This is another major reason why so much low-quality music is so popular. The majority of people who hear mainstream music have been brainwashed for years. Mainstream media tell us every day, to quote RockStar Games: “We know what’s good! And we play it until you like it!”

Music consists of four elements – melody, harmony, rhythm and dynamics. Rap and trap music has no melody or harmony because it is poetry, or spoken word.

Dynamics in recordings are squeezed out by mastering engineers making their tracks as loud as possible. We invite you to research a thing called The Loudness Wars. So dynamics are also gone.

Which just leaves the rhythm, which is nearly always four beats to the bar at around the same tempo using very similar collection of sounds. Not much to rejoice about there.

Brainwashed people of the present and future will find it increasingly difficult to understand and consume beautiful music of the past because it will contain unfamiliar and therefore unpallatable elements.

It’s a development along the lines of pubs that only allowed bands to play covers. No original songs permitted, as obviously everybody will die, or worse, if subjected to something unfamiliar or original. Jumping Jack Flash and Wonderwall again please, boys and girls. That’s the only things people wanna hear. Yeah, right…

Brainwashing is great news for mass media corporations, who can use AI to generate cheap muzak, and thus earn bigger profits without having to pay musicians or composers any more. Nobody has been signing actual musicians for years as they are too expensive.

Is the only way to save music through the traditions of classical music, and formal musical education for the privileged minority? Perhaps. Because sitting around doing nothing will achieve nothing – apart from the oblivion, and at best the extreme marginalisation, for all the most wonderful music as we have known it.

There are two excellent videos by Rick Beato on this subject, and we shall link them below.

So let’s return to the future of our Musical Discoveries compilations, and our attempts to shine the spotlight on independent artists making original and valuable music.

Yes, we understand that social media algorithms are very tight now compared to even one year ago. It is harder for anything non-mainstream to gain any traction.

It is also profoundly unhelpful when we try to inform our followers of the release of a new compilation and the new AI police bots consider this suspicious activity. This means we are locked out for 24 hours and then have to correctly perform a series of ten exceedingly annoying tests that don’t always work very well, or be locked out for even longer. It has taken 12 days to inform our supporters, instead of 30 minutes, and it’s a major PITA.

But even though social media is somewhat dead (please refer to this previous news post), we expected more inertia from the previous seven years of compilations.

Surely people who follow us on social media remember that we make these things every month? Surely the people we tag whose music we include can use this opportunity?

No, it would seem not. The hard facts speak for themselves.

We are phasing out and probably ending our Musical Discoveries compilations.

We tend to feel: What is the point? Why should we spend our precious time trying to expose wonderful music to the world when the world simply isn’t interested in music any more?

After the July 2024 compilation, we shall be scaling eveything back. We shall produce a Musical Discoveries compilation every three months instead of every month and see how that goes. If anyone actually cares and would like us to continue with the monthly Musical Discoveries, please let us know.

The compilations we have created shall remain both on SoundCloud and here at our website. If we see people listening and we receive more feedback, then we shall continue with them. But for now, the future of our musical discoveries compilations is in the balance.

The sad truth is that nobody seems to care enough any more.

Music is DYING. And nobody cares.

Just think about that.

Rick Beato: The Real Reason Why Music Is Getting Worse – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bZ0OSEViyo
Rick Beato: I Know You’re Angry, So Am I… – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TU96wCDHGKM

Porcupine Tree: The Sound Of Muzak (Rockpalast 2005)

The June 2024 Chart

The top ten tracks for June 2024 from Wud Records have been published in a new compilation at SoundCloud.

However… there is a certain proviso to all of this. In much the same way as all social media platforms become ever more strangled under ever tighter controls, so too is the data from streaming services – especially SoundCloud – more vague and less complete. In fact, the quality of data from some platforms has become so downgraded that we have been forced to calculate the chart this month using an entirely new system. Thank goodness for the Statistics module at university!

This new system is entirely based upon general tendencies and trends that have occured over the last calender month. We shall elaborate further below with regard to each platform where our music is represented.

Why Use Bandcamp?

We believe that the stats we see from Bandcamp are perfectly accurate, just as SoundCloud‘s used to be before they decided to downgrade everything to a pile of rubble that is unfit for purpose.

If you are not yet a member of Bandcamp, we strongly suggest you sign up. Do it now! It’s free to join.

If you are an artist and want to sell your music and merch, there is no better place on the web to do so. If you don’t believe us, check out any search engine to see what other artists have to say. Bandcamp are simply Numero Uno. Finito.

Consider also this. There is always a danger that streaming services might remove music or artists from their platform (e.g. the recent dispute between Universal Music Group and TikTok), or the platform may even cease to exist altogether. When you subscribe, you don’t own any of the music! You’re just renting a bit of bandwidth on their distribution service, most of the revenue from which goes to big corporations rather than the artists you love. It’s a terrible business model for artists and fans alike.

To avoid having the soundtracks to your life erased, we strongly recommend buying physical media and downloads so you can listen to your favourite songs whenever you wish. You know it makes sense.

Whilst several music platforms offer music downloads, they all charge a lot more and take a much bigger percentage of that higher price then Bandcamp does.

This means that you pay more, the band receives less, and a big greedy corporation takes a big old chunk of the money you paid to support the artist all for itself, just because it can. It’s a lose-lose situation, unless you happen to be a big greedy corporation who can rip people off however the fancy takes them.

Buying music from Bandcamp will cost you less and support the artist more. It’s always a good idea to download from Bandcamp whenever possible as they are the best site for supporting artists. You can even pay more than the asking price for music on Bandcamp if you wish to add a little extra support for the artist.

HearThis

We are considering moving all of our SoundCloud music to HearThis because we rather like the platform, even though it is less than 5% of the size of SoundCloud. Their MD has promised us personally that his company will not ride roughshod over its userbase without any warning at all in attempts to cut costs, and that is rather appealing.

We’ve had plenty of issues and arguments with SoundCloud over many years, such as our disabled messaging for allegedly ‘spamming’ other artists there, who we dared try to inform about being included in a Musical Discoveries compilation. It would have probably been fine if we’d messaged a bunch of major hiphop stars, instead of the multitude of curious and largely undiscovered wonders we try to support. More news on this will follow in the future.

SoundCloud

In the last few months, SoundCloud have decided, in their seemingly infinite wisdom, to downgrade their excellent ‘Stats’ for premium users (such as ourselves) to something completely and unbelievably dreadful that they call ‘Insights’, which are surprisingly uninsightful despite the profoundly misleading nomenclature. You couldn’t make this stuff up. It beggars belief.

Somebody at the company thought it would be a good idea to take a system that worked spectacularly well in real time, and replace it with another that is so riddled with inconsistancies and errors that the data is a worthless waste of time. The scope of the data is also now severely limited, in that it only gives the top three of a given category, rather than the top 50 as it always did before.

The downgraded data has become so unreliable by now that all we can go by is the list of recent popular tracks. Nothing adds up correctly and figures can unexpectedly change even as you are looking at them. Essentially this means that SoundCloud data has become completely worthless and unusable. Once again we are considering abandoning that platform for another one that gives reliable data.

We simply do not believe the information we get from SoundCloud any more. It makes no sense and is of such poor quality that specifics need to be disregarded completely. We have very strong evidence that it is not accurate at all.

Why on earth people have to do these things seems utterly bewildering, but there we are. It has been done, and there is nothing we can do, apart from write monthly emails of remonstrations and complaint, pointing out specific errors and inconsistencies within their system, only to receive an AI generated response from a bot that has failed to understand our email and might indeed be answering somebody else’s. Customer service was never really one of SoundCloud‘s strengths.

This is the world we live in today. All social media has been tightened and downgraded and it’s becoming ever harder to use any of the platforms, with ever diminishing rewards for anyone bothering to fritter away their precious time doing so.

Shitify

We are now using data from our distributors for streams on platforms such as spotify, YouTube, Deezer and so on when reckoning the monthly charts. Unfortunately the data arrives several days late, so we only use it to extrapolate general trends.

The data from the Wud Records Snotify for Artists pages covers everybody at that platform on our label. We also use the Snortify data from our distributors CD Baby and Soundrop.

Truth be told, we dislike spotify rather intensely right now. Not only are they tardy regarding supplying their stats, they have also implemented their most hideously egregious policy so far from 1st January 2024.

Spotify have chosen to take all of the revenue generated by any track having under 1000 streams and redistribute that revenue to the people who have the most streams, such as drake, kanye, taylor and so on.

Read about it here: https://blog.discmakers.com/2023/11/spotify-royalty-theft/

This isn’t just theft, it’s an absolute disgrace. Whoever thought this up should be ashamed of themselves and publicly rogered with a wire brush. Size four.

As such, we are considering boycotting spotify entirely. More news on this to come at the end of 2024.

Should our music achieve more than 1000 streams per track, which is highly likely over the course of a whole year, that means we are in effect stealing somebody else’s royalties when we are paid.

Just because a creative person achieves under 1000 streams for a song doesn’t mean we have the right to take their royalties. They probably worked just as hard as we did to make and release their music. They are no less deserving of their royalties than anybody else.

The whole thing is mucky and bad and makes us feel dirty for being paid not just our own royalties, but those of people who were unable to make the cut. This is just so wrong. It’s a proper mess.

In Conclusion…

Previously the algorithm we used gave greatest weight to downloads and reposts, then likes and comments (active engagement) over plays (passive engagement).

If somebody actually pays to download something, they must have liked it! Our artists and ourselves are always very grateful to our supporters in this respect. It genuinely helps keep the fires burning and the wheels turning.

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. It enables that track to be discovered and enjoyed by the community of the person doing the sharing, which can generate new fans.

A ‘like’ is nice, but repost actually helps the artist reach a bigger audience. You create the chance for that to happen. Recommending a song costs you nothing at all and can be a massive help for an independent artist. Why not do it now?

How Did We Calculate The June 2024 Chart?

We have combined the stats from the general trends and tendencies from all of the services mentioned above. Each platform is represented and weighted. Archive tracks and bonus tracks are ignored. Feedback from people who clearly didn’t listen to the music is now rendered insignificant.

Only you, the listener, can influence our July 2024 chart. So if there is a song you particularly like, keep playing it! Leave a comment, repost it, share it to your social media feeds! Download it from our Bandcamp! Add it to a playlist! It absolutely can make a difference.

Thanks For All Your Help!

Massive thanks go out to everybody who helped to support all of us during June 2024 by listening to, commenting on and reposting our bands’ tracks on SoundCloud, Bandcamp and elsewhere.

All the wonderful fans of our bands who supported us with downloads from Bandcamp are especially appreciated. You genuinely help us keep the fires burning and collectively we thank you for that most graciously. 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 and BlueSky 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 feel worthwhile.

Thank you very much to everyone who bought items from our merch store. Anyone who shares a photo of themselves with their Wud item on social media will receive an extra goody from ourselves once we have seen it and shared the photo on to our community as well.

If you buy something cool from the Flicker merch store, or the Dark Company merch store, both of which opened recently, we shall also send you an extra goody if you show us a photo of yourself (or friend, or environment) on social media with the item you purchased.

Last and by no means least, we would like to say thank you very much to all of the splendid people who have been buying us coffees at BuyMeACoffee. It’s very kind of you to help us out. All of these things absolutely contribute to ourselves being able to keep going, and spend more time making beautiful music for you to enjoy. It is truly appreciated very much indeed.

Who’s In The June 2024 Top Ten?

Pok the Bard

Congratulations to Pok the Bard! We have started to release his Anthology album’s tracks to SoundCloud (as mentioned in this News post) and doing so has made an immediate impact. Pok has claimed three of the top spots on our new chart.

A brand new entry at number one is The Lecher. This has just been remixed and remastered and sounds a whole lot better than it did before.

The Lecher is in the key of E major and trundles along at 88 BPM with a shufflesome 12/8 feel. The song was composed by Pok, who created the riff, and there were likely others involved in its creation as well, such as George, Roy and Dick, when they were all pupils at The King’s Grammar School, Ottery St Mary, in 1982.

The Lecher was actually inspired by one or more of the teachers at the aforementioned school, which had rather an abundance of beautiful young maidens. Exactly which teacher (-s) would have been the main inspiration for The Lecher is now lost to the mists of time.

The Lecher is a deliciously expressive piece of music that captures, with considerable style, the essence of a lecherous schoolmaster going about his daily business. Essentially the song is a truly awesome riff and lots of jamming, and the result is just fabulous. It was the first finished and released song for Pok’s Anthology album.

Down from number one to this month‘s number five is our newest release. Wear a Feather in Your Hat tells a most extraordinary tale about a group of travellers in the USA in the 19th Century and a man with purple skin. This really truly is a delightful song and the tale has the most peculiar twist at the end.

Pok plays three guitar parts on his beautiful Gretsch acoustic – one left, one right and a lead part. The lead part was recorded all in one take, and it was the first take. The man’s skills are often under-rated. Maxx and Sven do a fabulous job with the bass and percussives, as always.

Wear a Feather in Your Hat first appears on the Indeed recording by Laughing Sun. The lyrics even say “You can be a man of Wud or you can go insane!” – which seems a relatively easy choice to make.

Back in 1985, when Pok wrote Wear a Feather in Your Hat and used the word ‘man’, it was widely understood to mean ‘woman’ as well, in an all-encompassing and friendly way, rather than today’s necessity for lengthy politically correct pronoun conjugations and configuarations.

Down from number two to number seven is the third entry from our PokStar. Young Light is a beautiful song that Pok composed after he left the sixth form of school in 1983. He wrote it for Mark Drower for all the inspiration that Mark unintentionally gave to the fledgling wudders.

Young Light is quite a short song at only 2:36 and is full of wistful wonder. There is also a banjo, that Pok happened to have with him when he came to visit the studios on the day the song was recorded. It seemed like a fun idea to include it.

Dark Company

Dark Company have been somewhat conspicuous by their absence from the charts so far in 2024. The new method of reckoning sees them back with a bang, with three tracks represented.

Future Sadness Past is a re-entry at number two, making its first appearance since January 2018. Future Sadness Past enjoyed some viral streaming in North America during June, and was by some distance the most streamed track from Wud Records in this time.

With both feet planted firmly in the “distinctly weird” category, Future Sadness Past is unlike any other Dark Company song. It appears on their Signmaker album.

The version you can enjoy there was recorded live in Silent Running Studios in 1991. George plays guitar, Jeff plays bass and there is a lot of echo from the Alesis Quadraverb. Pete’s wonderful vocal delivers a most extraordinary and allegorical lyric that was still hot off his pen at the time the song was recorded. Pete also adds a few percussive sounds, using a rather odd Zippo gas lighter and a Fast Fret tin.

The band tried a few times to recreate the magic of this version of the song, but could never quite do it. Ultimately the original ‘live’ studio version was salvaged from cassette and polished for the Signmaker album. It was highly spontaneous and some rather good hashish may have been consumed before, during and after the performance.

A new entry at number eight is another track from Dark Company‘s Signmaker album. This is an & co remix of Armed & Dangerous, and was left unfinished when Dark Company’s internal and external troubles caused the band to implode in 1994.

There is actually not much more of the original Armed & Dangerous than some of the intro in the brief (just 1:57) Digital RMX version that has appeared in the new chart.

Of course, the original idea was to finish the whole song in a new digital version, like the digital remixes of Killer (also unfinished, no outro) and Astrologer (finished!), so that Dark Company might be able to perform them live using a DAT machine for their backing tracks. It is unlikely that Armed & Dangerous (Digital RMX) will ever be finished, but never say never.

A re-entry at the tenth position is a song called Number 6 by Dark Company. It is the song’s first appearance on our charts since December 2018. The wailing guitar hook is a real earworm and the song features cameo voice performances from Pok, Sven, Maxx, Natalia, and a talkover at the end from the legend who is Martin “Mooncat” Rowe.

This is an alpha version of Number 6 from the splendid and generically diverse Mind Dance album. All of the songs from Mind Dance were composed in 1998. The demo versions, where you can hear co-vocalist Sammi smiling uncontrollably as she tries to keep Pete on the straight and narrow, have tons of their own quaint charm which we love.

Goodness knows when more work will be done on Dark Company‘s Mind Dance album as there is a lot to do before we reach that one. However, we hope to be able to finish and release it someday so that Dark Company fans can finally enjoy it properly.

The Bastard Sons of Dennis

The Bastard Sons of Dennis enjoyed a good month on the chart in June 2024, claiming two of the ten possible positions. Both songs are from their fabulous Cosy Lube Turtle album.

Since the studio upgrade early last year, we have been working on improving the sound quality of everything we released in the last few years. Fans of our gruesome twosome can expect some exciting news regarding this album fairly soon. We are waiting on just a single file before making a big announcement.

A progtastic full-band mini-album by the dynamic duo is also in the early stages of finalisation.

Sadly we tend to feel that further recordings of their many remaining Blue Oyster Cult covers seems an unlikely prospect. This is mostly due to “discommunication, disorganisation and general untogetherness”, as the legend who is Paul Bateman once said of them when they were in Rough Terrain.

Then Came the Last Days of May rises four places from number seven to number three. This beautiful song tells a true story of how three university friends of Blue Öyster Cult’s guitarist, Donald ‘Buck Dharma’ Roeser, were brutally murdered in a drug deal that went horribly and tragically wrong. The version by our dynamic duo adds a twist to the versions heard on Blue Öyster Cult’s eponymous studio album and the live On Your Feet Or On Your Knees album from 1975.

Derek would sing “Now and then a duck” instead of “truck”, which caused fans of the duo to bring toy ducks with them along to live performances. Chuck’s solo is largely based on the live On Your Feet Or On Your Knees version, and his little whistle at the end (which didn’t always come out quite right in a live show) came from the character Tom Good in the uk tv sitcom The Good Life.

This month‘s number nine song, Astronomy, is a profoundly beautiful and haunting creation. It was composed by the Bouchard brothers, Joe and Albert, and Sandy Pearlman. It is the final track of Blue Öyster Cult’s 1974 Secret Treaties album, and an absolute masterpiece of progressive rock composition.

The version of Astronomy by The Bastard Sons of Dennis is more produced than their live performances. They would often end a show with Astronomy, introducing it as a song that was famously covered by Metallica. “We wrote it, of course; ahem, cough…” Chuck would quip.

Flicker

Flicker enjoyed another decent month in June 2024 as they achieved a pair of entries on the new Wud Records chart. Both come from their incredible 2002 album At Least 1000 Words.

Week Five is a climber from five to four, having made its first appearance last month since January 2023. Week Five has a remarkably live-sounding feel for a studio recording. It is a breezy feel good latin rock dance number with summer vibes that wouldn’t sound out of place in a set from Carlos Santana.

Week Five is a piece about looking forward to the future and feeling excited about forthcoming adventures and new experiences. It begins with a sample from the Prague metro and as the tune builds it becomes progressively more intense.

Farsight by Flicker is a re-entry at number six and makes its first appearance since December 2023. Farsight is a delightful and whimsical piece of music, progressive rock or indie jazz perhaps in style, highly melodic and decorated with samples from Captain Kirk’s USS Enterprise, Jonathan Agnew and Maharaj Ji, among others.

Farsight was originally an Ug Brothers creation that came about very late in that band’s existance, and didn’t make it to a live show before they folded in 1995. For the full backstory, we recommend the tune’s page at the Explicit Music website.

* None of our other acts made it onto the June 2024 chart. *

Listening Options

If you would like to go to SoundCloud to hear the top ten songs from Wud Records in June 2024, 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.

The June 2024 chart has its very own dedicated page among the charts pages of this website. You can listen to the new compilation on its page by clicking here.

Each of the previous charts also has its own page in the charts section of this website. If you would like to see all our old charts, or for any previous month you are especially interested in, all of them can be accessed easily by clicking here.

June 2024 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 2024 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 that we shared 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 2023 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.

As such, 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 artists and tracks in the compilation. 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. Sometimes finding these links can take quite a bit of research as many artists are not especially skilled at linking all their pages together.

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 (without the spaces) 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 might 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.

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

On Twitter we 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.

We used to tweet just about every day. Since late 2021 things have become increasingly busy, meaning we are not able to spend as much time on social media as we used to. Full tweeting days are now something of a rarity. When they happen, we try to do a clump of full days together over a period of a fortnight, if possible.

Now that Twitter has been largely destroyed by its newest owner, it is difficult to foresee a time that we will be tweeting much at all any more. Perhaps someday somebody will buy the platform from him and repair all the damage he has done. Until then, it’s become no better than farcebeak.

Wud Records has set up camp at BlueSky and if you would like to follow us there, we would be delighted to have you on board. Click here to find us!

If you need a code to join, we have few spare. Send us an email to info @ wudrecords .co.uk and we’ll send you one.

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 typically takes 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.

June 2024 continues an eighth year of Wud Records Musical Discoveries compilations. That means 94 compilations of amazing independent music you almost certainly never heard before! Why not put one on in the background whilst you’re busy pottering around the house or doing what you are doing? Something is bound to leap out at you.

Listen and Enjoy

If you would like to listen to the new playlist of June 2024 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!

Big progress of a highly significant and positive nature has been achieved regarding Pok‘s Anthology album. This is tremendous news and everybody concerned is delighted with what potentially can now be achieved.

When we left the uk in 2017 (see also this post), only a couple Wud personnel remained within driving distance of our new location. Being spread far and wide across different European lands created a new set of challenges. Fortunately, the development of modern technology has rendered these issues theoretically negligible.

Pok is still based in the uk, whereas Wud Records has no collective intention at all ever to return to that ruined land. Life quality here by the Czech/German/Austrian border is massively better than anything we ever experienced in the uk, so why would we?

The question is, then, what has actually happened? Well… one of the biggest issues we have faced with regard to working on Pok’s material is his lack of reliable and regular internet. Pok is an exceptionally well educated man and remains a highly analogue creature, who has no particular interest in technology like computers or mobile phones, which therefore tends to make modern long distance communication quite tricky. Sometimes we manage to have a Skype session when he is staying with a friend, and once in a blue moon he might venture into a cybercafe and send us an email. But mostly not.

The specifics of the recent glorious progress are thus – Pok has discovered how to share files with us using our dropbox. He has managed to use a track we shared with him to record some audio and then share that back with us. We have managed to put it into our machines and then share the mix of the new audio back. Everything worked!

The fact that Pok has managed to record and send us some new parts for his songs using digital techniques is a massive breakthrough. It took a six-hour Skype session to put it all together and was worth every single second.

After Pok had become ‘played out’ towards the end of the call that we shared whilst he was visiting friends in Scotland, we had a good listen through everything that is currently in progress for the Anthology album and decided what needed to be done with everything. As such, on a surging tide of post-success musical activity, a number of songs have been developed further, each along their individual roads to completion and release.

In terms of tracking, a lot of songs mostly only need the things that Jim used to do, i.e. keyboards and backing vocals, such as It’s a Blue Sky Don’t Hold No Rain, Born, and Finale. There are a few that require odd bits of guitar and bass as well, such as Crazy Mandy, Centre of the Cyclone, Fire Burning Fever and She’s Beautiful.

There are still a few songs that require a fair bit of tracking, such as The Winged Man, Orb, Alchemical Transformer and Set the Marks. We shall probably focus more on these once some of the others are released.

Johnny Wake Up requires some special treatments before it can be finished. Midnight Under the Tor requires a collection of special effects. Love Is My Purple Bicycle only needs backing vocals and Don’t Let It Pass You By just needs a little more in the way of keyboards. We are hoping to finish and release this one very soon!

A number of other songs have not had much development and they may end up forming a separate album, if we manage to get that far.

All the same, we are very pleased with the progress achieved recently with regard to Pok and his growing Anthology album. This enthusiasm has resulted in a surge of progress at our end as well.

As previously mentioned in an earlier News post, there will be more remixes and remasters coming soon as well.

The Lecher is sounding absolutely fantastic and is very close to being re-released. It may even be finished this weekend.

Wanted to Be a Singer, however, is proving more tricky to remix, due to an issue involving corrupted audio files. This one may take some time.

In between all of the work we have been doing with Pok, we have also managed to progress a lot of Flicker‘s music for their HappySad album. More news on this will follow presently.

As if that were not all, we are approaching the end of a huge and awesome development regarding The Bastard Sons of Dennis. This has remained largely secret, but there will certainly be an exciting announcement or two in the near future.

Whilst we are indeed very excited by all of the progress achieved towards finally completeing Pok‘s Anthology album, there is still a fair way to go. We recommend you bookmark our News service, or join our mailing list (which you can do by clicking here), joining our Bandcamp community, and for what it may be worth (probably not much these days), following our socials, which you can find here in our linktree.

All of the remixed and remastered Anthology works of Pok are up at SoundCloud, and you can enjoy listening to those by clicking here. The playlist will grow as more work is completed.

To listen to the whole of the incomplete and growing Anthology album as it stands right now, please click here to go to Pok’s Anthology page at Wud Records.

If you prefer to listen over at Bandcamp, and even support our work with a download (always greatly appreciated), you can do so by clicking here.

The May 2024 Chart

The top ten tracks for May 2024 on Bandcamp and SoundCloud have been published in a new compilation.

SoundCloud ‘Insights’ Erratum

There is a certain proviso to all of this. In the last few months, SoundCloud have decided, in their seemingly infinite wisdom, to downgrade their excellent ‘Stats’ for premium users to something completely unbelievably dreadful they call ‘Insights’. You couldn’t make this stuff up. It beggars belief!

Somebody at the company thought it would be a good idea to take a system that worked spectacularly well, and in real time, and replace it with another that is so riddled with inconsistancies and errors that the data seems to be even more unreliable than a politican’s memoires.

We simply have no idea how accurate the information we get from SoundCloud is any more, and we are rather inclined to believe it is not very accurate at all. As such, we are using it as a very rough guide and trying to work with it as best we can.

Why on earth people have to do these things seems utterly bewildering, but there we are. It has been done, and there is nothing we can do, apart from write regular emails of complaint, pointing out specific errors and inconsistencies within their system, only to receive an AI generated response from a bot that has failed to understand our email and might indeed be answering somebody else’s.

This is the world we live in today. All social media has been tightened and downgraded and it’s becoming ever harder to use any of the platforms, with ever diminishing rewards for anyone bothering to fritter away their precious time doing so.

Shitify

We have previously considered using data from our distributors for streams on platforms such as spotify, YouTube, Deezer and so on when reckoning the monthly charts. Unfortunately the data arrives several days too late from the distributors and we are rather keen to have the new chart up at our website on the first day of each new month.

Truth be told, we dislike spotify rather intensely right now. Not only are they tardy regarding supplying their stats, they have also implemented their most hideously egregious policy so far from 1st January 2024.

Spotify have chosen to take all of the revenue generated by any track having under 1000 streams and redistribute that revenue to the people who have the most streams, such as drake, kanye, taylor and so on.

Read about it here: https://blog.discmakers.com/2023/11/spotify-royalty-theft/

This isn’t just theft, it’s an absolute disgrace. Whoever thought this up should be ashamed of themselves and publicly rogered with a wire brush. Size four.

As such, we are considering boycotting spotify entirely. More news on this to come at the end of 2024.

Should our music achieve more than 1000 streams per track, which is highly likely over the course of a whole year, that means we are in effect stealing somebody else’s royalties when we are paid.

Just because a creative person achieves under 1000 streams for a song doesn’t mean we have the right to take their royalties. They probably worked just as hard as we did to make and release their music. They are no less deserving of their royalties than anybody else.

The whole thing is mucky and bad and makes us feel dirty for being paid not just our own royalties, but those of people who were unable to make the cut. This is just so worng. It’s a proper mess.

Why Use Bandcamp?

Whilst several music platforms offer music downloads, they all charge a lot more and take a much bigger percentage of that higher price then Bandcamp does.

This means that you pay more, the band receives less, and a big greedy corporation takes a big old chunk of the money you paid to support the artist all for itself, just because it can. It’s a lose-lose situation, unless you happen to be a big greedy corporation who can rip people off however the fancy takes them.

Buying music from Bandcamp will cost you less and support the artist more. It’s always a good idea to download from Bandcamp whenever possible as they are the best site for supporting artists. You can even pay more than the asking price for music on Bandcamp if you wish to add a little extra support for the artist.

Consider also the danger that streaming services might remove music or artists from their platform (e.g. the recent dispute between Universal Music Group and TikTok), or even cease to exist altogether. To avoid having the soundtracks to your life erased, we strongly recommend buying physical media and downloads so you can listen to your favourite songs whenever you wish.

How Did We Calculate The May 2024 Chart?

The algorithm we use gives greatest weight to downloads and reposts, then likes and comments (active engagement) over plays (passive engagement).

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!

We have combined the stats from both SoundCloud and Bandcamp for the new chart. This is because it will not be long until all our Bandcamp tracks are also published at SoundCloud, providing they do not mangle their stats too horribly in the conversion/downgrade to ‘insights’ as mentioned above.

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 June 2024 chart. So if there is a track you particularly like, keep playing it! Leave a comment, repost it, share it to your social media feeds! Download it from our Bandcamp! Add it to a playlist! It absolutely can make a difference.

Thanks For All Your Help!

Massive thanks go out to everybody who helped to support all of us during May 2024 by listening to, commenting on and reposting our bands’ tracks on SoundCloud, Bandcamp and elsewhere.

All the wonderful fans of our bands who supported us with downloads from Bandcamp are especially appreciated. You genuinely help us keep the fires burning and collectively we thank you for that most graciously. 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 feel worthwhile.

Thank you very much to everyone who bought items from our merch store. Anyone who shares a photo of themselves with their Wud item on social media will receive an extra goody from ourselves once we have seen it and shared the photo on to our community as well.

If you buy something cool from the Flicker merch store, or the Dark Company merch store, both of which opened recently, we shall also send you an extra goody if you show us a photo of yourself (or friend, or environment) on social media with the item you purchased.

Last and by no means least, we would like to say thank you very much to all of the splendid people who have been buying us coffees at BuyMeACoffee. It’s very kind of you to help us out. All of these things absolutely contribute to ourselves being able to keep going, and spend more time making beautiful music for you to enjoy. It is truly appreciated very much indeed.

Who’s In The May 2024 Top Ten?

Pok the Bard

Congratulations to Pok the Bard! We have started to release his Anthology album’s tracks to SoundCloud (as mentioned in this News post) and doing so has made an immediate impact. Pok has claimed three of the four top spots on our new chart, as well as a fourth later on.

Up from number three to this month‘s number one is our newest release. Wear a Feather in Your Hat tells a most extraordinary tale about a group of travellers in the USA in the 19th Century and a man with purple skin. This really truly is a delightful song and the tale has the most peculiar twist at the end.

Pok plays three guitar parts on his beautiful Gretsch acoustic – one left, one right and a lead part. The lead part was recorded all in one take, and it was the first take. The man’s skills are often under-rated. Maxx and Sven do a fabulous job with the bass and percussives, as always.

Wear a Feather in Your Hat first appears on the Indeed recording by Laughing Sun. The lyrics even say “You can be a man of Wud or you can go insane!” – which seems a relatively easy choice to make.

Back in 1985, when Pok wrote Wear a Feather in Your Hat and used the word ‘man’, it was widely understood to mean ‘woman’ as well, in an all-encompassing and friendly way, rather than today’s necessity for lengthy politically correct pronoun conjugations and configuarations.

Down from number one to number two is the second of four entries from our PokStar. Young Light is a beautiful song that Pok composed after he left the sixth form of school in 1983. He wrote it for Mark Drower for all the inspiration that Mark gave to the fledgling wudders.

Young Light is quite a short song at only 2:36 and is full of wistful wonder. There is also a banjo, that Pok happened to have with him when he came to visit the studios on the day the song was recorded. It seemed like a fun idea to include it.

Holding steady at number four for a third month is The Sidewalk Song. This was co-written with Mark Drower and is a very historic and classic old song. The Anthology version we made is based upon a Now recording that Pok and ourselves consider to be largely definitive. The Sidewalk Song is a gloriously bombastic hard rock piledriver in E major, full of youthful self confidence, swagger and braggadocio.

After Now ceased to exist, The Sidewalk Song was subsequently performed by Lemming Meringue and Wud, although Ken’s Robert Plant influenced vocal was never quite up to Mark‘s more wholesome humanistic version. The breakdown section with the added percussion was improvised. The vocal was never performed the same twice, neither by Mark nor by Ken. The chords are very simple and clearly defined, and the traditional shout of “G!!!” is left in, as it was used to warn band members of the upcoming change.

Pok‘s fourth song is a re-entry at number ten. The Dark, The Ring and The Knowedge is a fabulous tale of wizards and strange events. It is in the key of G major. The Dark, The Ring and The Knowedge was based on a true story that happened in approximately 1985, involving the discovery of a piece of lost jewelry. The lyrics are not simply a curious and compelling tale, they also hold within them highly practical pearls of wisdom.

Pok plays a lovely expressive fingerstyle acoustic guitar and quirky bluesy electric lead. Josh did an outstanding job on keys, playing piano with one hand and organ with the other, and capturing the psychedelic mood of the song perfectly. Sven’s infectious dancehall shuffle is an absolute delight (fantastic when soloed in the control room!) and Maxx’s bass is perfectly understated to glue everything together.

Mark Drower and the Everyones

It has been a good month for Mark Drower and the Everyones as one song from their seminal Blaze Tape recording find itself as a re-entry in the chart this month.

Treasure by Mark Drower and the Everyones has a redoubtable history and was often jammed and made into other songs entirely, songs which never saw the light of day beyond the rooms they were jammed in.

Treasure is another fabulous song that Mark created. Its wonderful lyrics were often quoted, and those obscure chords in drop-D tuning that Mark taught us never appeared in any chord dictionary.

Treasure features the fabulous lead guitarings of a teenage Pok the Bard. Lisa Williams, who played the part of Treasure during the play, read the talkover at the beginning.

Flicker

Flicker have been somewhat conspicuous by their absence from the charts in 2024. That has now been rectified as they achieved a pair of entries on the new Wud Records chart. Both come from their incredible 2002 album At Least 1000 Words.

Week Five is a re-entry at number five, and makes its first appearance since January 2023. Week Five has a remarkably live-sounding feel for a studio recording. It is a breezy feel good latin rock dance number with summer vibes that wouldn’t sound out of place in a set from Carlos Santana.

Week Five is a piece about looking forward to the future and feeling excited about forthcoming adventures and new experiences. It begins with a sample from the Prague metro and as the tune builds it becomes progressively more intense.

Aeroplane by Flicker is a re-entry at number six and makes its first appearance since August 2023. Aeroplane was composed on an acoustic guitar tuned DADFCE and was the first piece of music George composed after arriving in Prague in 1996. Phil “The Fiddle” Jones played some wonderful soaring violin lines when the two of them performed this tune live on the famous Charles Bridge as Dr Watson.

When Flicker recorded Aeroplane, no violinist was forthcoming so Lucy approximated Phil’s parts rather beautifully on cello. Dave added bass and drums and a swishy synth to end.

The band tried to record a plane taking off at exeter airport, but there were no planes taking off that day so a sample was used in the end. The whole story of the day’s sample capturing adventures/misadventures is a rather splendid tale all of its own, and you can enjoy it by clicking here.

The Bastard Sons of Dennis

The Bastard Sons of Dennis enjoyed a splendid month on the chart in May 2024, claiming three of the ten possible positions. All three of the songs are from their fabulous Cosy Lube Turtle album.

Cosy Lube Turtle has been available on Bandcamp for some time. Towards the end of 2022 we released the Cosy Lube Turtle album to SoundCloud as well. Recently it was sent for global distribution.

Since the studio upgrade early last year, we have been working on improving the sound quality of everything we released in the last few years. Another album by The Bastard Sons of Dennis, Cherry Smoke Empire, is currently on the slab.

A progtastic full-band mini-album by the dynamic duo is also in the early stages of finalisation. Sadly we tend to feel that further recordings of their many remaining Blue Oyster Cult covers seems an unlikely prospect. This is mostly due to “discommunication, disorganisation and general untogetherness”, as the legend who is Paul Bateman once said of them when they were in Rough Terrain.

We finished the remixing and remastering of Cosy Lube Turtle in the autumn just gone. The new and improved Cosy Lube Turtle album was re-released early in October. We are still considering holding a Cosy Lube Turtle listening party at Bandcamp at some point when everything can be arranged.

Then Came the Last Days of May drops five places from number two to number seven. This song tells a true story of how three university friends of Blue Öyster Cult’s guitarist, Donald ‘Buck Dharma’ Roeser, were brutally murdered in a drug deal that went horribly and tragically wrong. The version by our dynamic duo adds a twist to the versions heard on Blue Öyster Cult’s eponymous studio album and the live On Your Feet Or On Your Knees album from 1975.

Derek would sing “Now and then a duck” instead of “truck”, which caused fans of the duo to bring toy ducks with them along to live performances. Chuck’s solo is largely based on the live On Your Feet Or On Your Knees version, and his little whistle at the end (which didn’t always come out quite right in a live show) came from the character Tom Good in the uk tv sitcom The Good Life.

This month‘s number eight song, Astronomy, is a profoundly beautiful and haunting song and another re-entry. It was composed by the Bouchard brothers, Joe and Albert, and Sandy Pearlman. It is the final track of Blue Öyster Cult’s 1974 Secret Treaties album, and an absolute masterpiece of progressive rock composition.

The version of Astronomy by The Bastard Sons of Dennis is more produced than their live performances. They would often end a show with Astronomy, introducing it as a song that was famously covered by Metallica. “We wrote it, of course; ahem, cough…” Chuck would quip.

The final re-entry to the new chart at number nine is Teen Archer by The Bastard Sons of Dennis. Chuck uses a drop-D tuning and the song always had a wonderful uptempo energy when the duo performed it live.

Teen Archer comes from Blue Öyster Cult‘s awesome 1973 album Tyranny and Mutation. It has a fun and infectious groove to it that The Bastard Sons of Dennis do a splendid job of recreating on two acoustic guitars. There’s even a comedy percussion section as a nod to Albert Bouchard‘s drum break.

* None of our other acts made it onto the May 2024 chart. *

Listening Options

If you would like to go to SoundCloud to hear the top ten songs from Wud Records in May 2024, 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.

The May 2024 chart has its very own dedicated page among the charts pages of this website. You can listen to the new compilation on its page by clicking here.

Each of the previous charts also has its own page in the charts section of this website. If you would like to see all our old charts, or for any previous month you are especially interested in, all of them can be accessed easily by clicking here.