News

The top ten SoundCloud tracks for May 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 June 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 May 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 third 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 will 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 Dark Company song re-entered the May 2021 chart at number nine, after a long time absent. This is Sailor from their work-in-progress album Noir.

Sailor is an incredible piece of progressive rock, not least due to the bass part. Maxx heard the song once while we set up his levels. He then played the whole thing, recording it in one take – on the first take. It’s total genius what he did.

A club remix by & co of Dark Company‘s classic and historic song Prisoner was again enjoyed profusely around the world during the most recent month. Prisodub remained on the May 2021 charts unmoved, still in position number eight.

Prisodub, along with many of the other tracks currently on the unfinished Drifting Stars album by & co, was created largely by Jeff. He took a few elements from the original sequencer versions of various Dark Company songs on the Atari and made them into the dance tracks we managed to salvage from cassette.

A new entry for Alchemeon was with Orb at number two. 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 recieving 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 four. 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.

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 Blown Away, Oily Road Hideaway and Welcome to the Family have all been tremendously popular and appear in positions three, five and seven respectively.

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.

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 climbs from last month‘s number nine to this month‘s number six, while The Furniture / Los Muebles (part 1: overture) falls from seven to ten.

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 May 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 right 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 May 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 May 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!

Seven Screaming Diz-Busters is a new release by The Bastard Sons of Dennis. It is the latest track to be added to their Cosy Lube Turtle album. It is also the final track, which means… the Cosy Lube Turtle album is finally complete!

Cosy Lube Turtle is an album of Blue Öyster Cult covers, which The Bastard Sons of Dennis were well-known for performing. Cosy Lube Turtle represents about half of the Blue Öyster Cult covers that were included in their repertoire.

Seven Screaming Diz-Busters was perhaps their most well-known and best loved Blue Öyster Cult cover. We are all very pleased to be able to release a recorded version of the song at last.

If you would like to see The Bastard Sons of Dennis performing Seven Screaming Diz-Busters live, here is link to a video on their YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M93gHi3DNFM

Other Blue Öyster Cult songs which were covered by The Bastard Sons of Dennis and which were not included on the Cosy Lube Turtle album include:

* Transmaniacon MC, I’m on the Lamb but I Ain’t No Sheep/The Red & the Black (a fabulous amalgamation combining both the eponymous album version and the Tyranny and Mutation version), Screams, Cities on Flame with Rock and Roll (‘straight’ version and ‘swing’ version) and Workshop of the Telescopes from the 1972 eponymous album;

* O.D.’d on Life Itself and Mistress of the Salmon Salt (Quicklime Girl) from Tyranny and Mutation;

* Career of Evil and Flaming Telepaths from Secret Treaties;

* and Veteran of the Psychic Wars and Don’t Turn Your Back from Fire of Unknown Origin.

There were several other Blue Öyster Cult songs in the works as well.

The Bastard Sons of Dennis occasionally dipped a toe or three into the waters of songs by acts such as Led Zeppelin (even performing a couple of live renditions of Kashmir), XTC, Julian Cope, Frank Zappa and King Crimson.

The Bastard Sons of Dennis were often favourably likened to Tenacious D.

At this moment in time, we are not sure if The Bastard Sons of Dennis will ever do anything again or not. Its two members both left the uk and now live in separate countries.

The advent of covid seems to have propelled forward the notion of musicians recording and performing together online using modern technology. Whether or not this will become a reality for The Bastard Sons of Dennis remains to be seen, although the idea has been discussed. It is, let’s say, a definite maybe.

Additionally, an album of five original songs from The Bastard Sons of Dennis lies dormant in our machines. It is difficult to predict when these songs will become awakened, or even if they ever will. They are beautiful songs but will require work from all involved parties to make it happen. We shall be pleased to announce any future developments in our News service and on Twitter.

We are planning to upload Cosy Lube Turtle to the Wud Records SoundCloud in the coming days and other music streaming platforms when they go live.

If you would like to listen to or download Seven Screaming Diz-Busters as an individual track, please click here.

If you would like to enjoy the Cosy Lube Turtle by The Bastard Sons of Dennis right here at the Wud Records website, please click here.

If you would like to listen to or download Cosy Lube Turtle from Bandcamp, please click here.

The top ten SoundCloud tracks for April 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 May 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 April 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 second 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 will 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 Dark Company song re-entered the April 2021 chart at number four. This is Phase Out, the opening track from their work-in-progress fourth album Can of Worms.

One of the most interesting things about Phase Out is the slightly unfathomable time signature play. It sounds very natural but in reality is very, very odd. A slow five or a faster six? The controversy rages!

A club remix by & co of Dark Company‘s classic and historic song Prisoner was enjoyed profusely around the world during the most recent month. Prisodub hit the April 2021 charts in position number eight.

Prisodub, along with many of the other tracks currently on the unfinished Drifting Stars album by & co, was created largely by Jeff. He took a few elements from the original sequencer versions of various Dark Company songs on the Atari and made them into the dance tracks we managed to salvage from cassette.

Flicker had another splendid month at SoundCloud, occupying four of the positions on the latest chart. Three are taken up by tunes from their wonderful 2002 album At Least 1000 Words. In recent times Blown Away, Welcome to the Family and Oily Road Hideaway have all been tremendously popular and appear in positions two, five and ten respectively.

Slightly surprisingly, a very dodgy demo of a tune called Mihuno! has been very popular recently and remained on the April 2021 chart for a second month. Mihuno! is a little way down the road for us as it is slated to appear on Flicker‘s third album The Snail Gauntlet, so only the dodgy demo is available for now.

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.

The Freaks (Shall Inherit The Earth) by Alchemeon drops to number three from last month‘s number two. 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. 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 April 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.

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 April 2021 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 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 it 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 April 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!

Upgrades to the Alien Heat album? Seriously??

Here is some splendid news for fans of Dark Company. We are attempting to finally finish and release Dark Company‘s awesome Alien Heat album. There is still a lot to do, but every step is a step closer to finishing it.

Due to the seemingly neverending lockdown, we are still waiting for our specialists, who are about two hours away by road, to reopen their workshop. A couple of vital pieces of vintage gear, which cannot be repaired easily, need to be fixed before the final parts can be recorded.

In the meantime, we have been finishing off as much of the mixing and the other parts of the songs as we can. That way, when the equipment is usable in the studios again, it won’t take too long to finish everything off.

Things always seem to be very busy here. It has been a few years since a new version of an Alien Heat song was released, despite various odd bits of work going on behind the scenes every now and again. We felt it was about time that we shared our recent workings with Dark Company‘s fans, especially with the recent popularity of Dancing In The Dark on SoundCloud.

The four upgraded Alien Heat songs are Dancing In The Dark, The Winds of Heaven, Prisoner and Traveller.

Before the latest lockdown kicked in, the amazing Sven Stiglund came to record some new drums for Dancing In The Dark and The Winds of Heaven. He did a truly fantastic job! We are somewhat in awe of his incredible drumming skills. Sven will be back for more soon.

Essentially, all that these upgraded tracks now need is guitars, basses, mixing and mastering. More upgrades to the Alien Heat album will be coming soon, with Jigsaw and The Joker currently both in the works.

We shall probably be uploading upgraded songs in batches of four, as there are 16 songs on the Alien Heat album altogether. Further developments will be announced in our News service and on Twitter.

Feel free to enjoy listening to the newest versions of these wonderful Dark Company songs. You can follow the lyrics and read the fun facts and backstories at the same time as listening if you wish.

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

To listen to the upgraded Dancing In The Dark, please click here.

To listen to the upgraded The Winds of Heaven, please click here.

To listen to the upgraded Prisoner, please click here.

To listen to the upgraded Traveller, please click here.