News

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.

The next four Dark Company songs have been upgraded and uploaded to Dark Company’s Alien Heat album.

We are attempting to finish off as much as we can of these songs. When the repair people finally reopen their workshop, we will be able to record the guitars and basses and release the songs soon after. At least, that is the plan.

There are sixteen songs on the Alien Heat album and we are upgrading and uploading them in batches of four. The latest four songs to receive an upgrade are Abnormal, Where Are You, Easy Street and The Joker.

Abnormal is a classic song that has been well loved for a long time. The biggest challenge is to find a good place in the stereo mix for everything to sit. The parts that were a bit buried have been brought out and the parts that were a bit too dominant have been mellowed back. The bass is still rather patchy at present as bits of it were recorded on different days by the looks of things. It still needs guitars and bass to be finished and a few small tweaks, but it is generally sounding quite good by now.

Where Are You is still missing a couple of guitar lines and some of the parts are arguably not arranged correctly. We are still debating the arrangement issue. However, the missing parts are agreed upon all round. Being a classic rock song that was initially composed in a tiny bedroom in 1989, then built on a sequencer in 1993, we had to mix it quite differently from how it is was before. Where Are You still needs a few tweaks to the mix and for the guitars and bass to be recorded properly, but other than that you will certainly get the general idea.

Sven visited our studios a few weeks ago. He laid down some new and fantastic drum tracks, including the one for Easy Street. Josh also gave the synths a good bashing. The results of their labours are a massive improvement on what we had before. The song now sounds far more coherent. Again, the guitars and basses need to be properly recorded and there are a few subtle tweaks that need to be made once they are present. We are also considering including a few sounds from the EDP Wasp.

The Joker needed something of an overhaul as well. We shall probably go back to the Atari and make a couple of subtle changes there before the final version is released. There is a bit more piano than there was before and overall The Joker sounds a whole lot better, although the mix still feels a bit wonky and needs more work. Again the guitars and bass need to be recorded properly. Neither of these instruments seem to sound quite right, but they are OK for now.

Further upgrades are coming soon. A couple of the next four remaining songs are already in pieces on the slab and progressing well. Uploads of the next four upgraded songs will be announced on Twitter and in our News service

If you would like to listen to the Alien Heat album, as it stands at present, right here at the Wud Records website, please click here.

Should you prefer to listen to Dark Company’s Alien Heat album at SoundCloud instead, please click here.

Should you fancy listening to bootleg recordings of live original versions of these songs by the band Alien Heat, please click here.

To enjoy an interesting demo version of The Joker that was released as a bonus track on Dark Company’s rereleased Signmaker album, please click here.

If you would like to listen to Abnormal by Dark Company, please click here.

If you would like to listen to Where Are You by Dark Company, please click here.

If you would like to listen to Easy Street by Dark Company, please click here.

If you would like to listen to The Joker by Dark Company, please click here.

The Chillun photo gallery is a new gallery of photographs of The Chillun. It has been created and added to The Chillun’s pages in the Wud Records Archives. It is a real pleasure to see The Chillun in action again. They were such a fabulous band back in the day, with a big following.

Recently our old friend and undisputed grand ubermeister of the camera lens Cliff Smith, of Cliff Smith Photography fame, came upon some folders of his old photos. He very kindly got in touch and sent us a few photos of The Chillun that he had found. They are all rather historic photos as The Chillun were performing from around 1982 to 1988.

We are very hopeful that more photos of The Chillun will be found and sent to us in the future. As and when they appear, we shall add them to The Chillun photo gallery. Of course, we shall let fans of The Chillun know of any such finds in our News service and on Twitter

The Chillun were a fantastic blues and rock band that played all around the Exeter area in the 1980s. They were a magnificent quartet who always put on a great show. The Chillun were perhaps best known for their residency at The Port Royal in Exeter, where they played every other Sunday night for a couple of years.

Charismatic rakish frontman Andrew “Angus” Russe wrote many of the band’s songs. He sang and played the Stratocaster guitar. Nick Banwell played solid bass and did backing vocals. Martin “Boggy” Gorman was the band’s drummer and what a fine player he was.

Steve Clarke was the keyboard player who also contributed backing vocals, often with a Nigel Tufnell style finger in the ear. His other quirk was to use an old ironing board for a keyboard stand. You might be just about be able to spot this phenomena in The Chillun photo gallery. Steve left the area – and the band – in about 1984. The Chillun continued from that point on as a three-piece.

You can listen to the songs by The Chillun that we have collected and published whilst enjoying looking at photos of them in their new gallery. Just click here to go to the page.