News

Autumn 2025 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 Autumn 2025 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 three months 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 2025 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 occasionally 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, for the start of the month at least, every week on Twitter we used to boost a previous Musical Discoveries playlist and a featured track from that playlist. Occasionally we still do, although that platform is a poor shadow of what it once was. 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 used to tweet frequently and occasionally still do.

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 even more delinquent 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!

Due to the increasing proliferation of AI slop posing as music, it is becoming more difficult to actually trust what we hear. Was it something that was created by humans or robots? We will try to filter out the AI as it is our intention to continue to support the human composers and musicians, rather than something generated from an algorithm.

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.

Autumn 2025 begins a tenth year of Wud Records Musical Discoveries compilations. That means 101 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 Autumn 2025 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 three months and who knows – one might even include you!

Important!

Episode #96 was the last monthly Musical Discoveries compilation for the time being.

We have moved 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.

For further information, please read this: https://www.wudrecords.co.uk/news/wud-records-future-of-musical-discoveries/

Also Important!

After we have completed 100 compilations of the wonderful music we have found, the Musical Discoveries, what is the future for this series? What would you like to see and hear in future compilations, if there are any? Shall we stop now? Does anybody actually… care?

We put the continuing Discoveries to a vote on X (formerly Twitter) and of those who voted, the result was 77 in favour and 5 against. So that would be 94% positive, more or less, despite the apparent lack of interest.

So for now, at least, we shall make a few more. But for how much longer remains to be seen. More here: https://www.wudrecords.co.uk/news/wud-records-musical-discoveries-what-next/

Wud band pages updated at the Wud Records website? Seriously?

Yes, it’s true! We have updated some of the pages for the band Wud here at the Wud Records website.

This update has been long overdue! When we first launched the website in 2008, a few of us lurking behind the scenes made a few pages for the various legacy bands and wrote a paragraph or two, so that at least something would exist. The idea was to go back and finish off writing those pages… someday.

Now, most of the Wud band pages that are present have been updated. We even uploaded some new photos to the Wud Gallery – the black and white photos taken by chief audio engineer Ian Dent at Daylight Studios in Honiton, on the day that the Daylight Demo was recorded in the spring of 1985.

In the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s, the hardcore of Wud Records made a decent living from music. Then things started being squeezed. Venues paid less, and some venues would only book musicians if they paid the venue for the privilege of being allowed to play there.

Other promotors and venues would only pay musicians using a strange currency called ‘exposure’ – “We won’t give you any money for your show, but think of all the exposure you’ll get!”

We’ve tried paying for groceries, vehicle repairs, legal services and a plumber in ‘exposure’, but none of them would accept this peculiar currency. Instead they said they needed to be paid in money or they’d call the police. It seemed ‘exposure’ was a thing only musicians could receive, but not spend anywhere. So we took out our wallets and paid them with money, whilst wondering exactly where we could spend this mysterious ‘exposure’ which we had accumulated an abundance of.

In 2025, almost nobody makes a living from music alone. More and more of our people started day jobs and families. Nowadays there is only one person among the Wud Records entourage who earns a living exclusively through music, and we are not allowed to use this person’s real name for contractual legal reasons. Let’s just say this is an old friend in great demand worldwide for touring and session playing for their awesome talents.

With time being so squeezed and there being so much that needs to be done all the time, many projects have been put on the back burner, to simmer quietly until they can be completed.

Some time ago, we decided to try to focus more on the music that would be quicker to conclude. This includes everything with Pok the Bard and The Bastard Sons of Dennis. Then we would shift our focus to Flicker and Dark Company, who require more time.

It also needs to be said that we still give a little of our attention to both Flicker and Dark Company, and there will be more from both of them coming in November and December. Watch this space!

One of the jobs that still needs to be done is to finish off writing the many incomplete pages for legacy bands here at the Wud Records website. Curiously, the recent fiasco with SoundCloud has helped move that forwards.

We slowly started to move our music off of SoundCloud and onto HearThis, Audius and Audiomack, starting with the oldest recordings.

So far we have managed to move the songs of Mark Drower and the Everyones and Now. During this process, we started combing through the artists’ pages at our website and giving them a spring clean.

The status of these pages are as follows:

* Mark Drower and the Everyones – all pages good! Hooray! \,,/(^_^)\,,/ Perhaps someday somebody will come forward and give us some more to include.

* Fooog Dinboffin and the Release – very little present. Recently we dug out some cassettes from the cassette mine. We listened and found three songs (among many) by this duo which could perhaps be made public. Expect some news before the end of the year! ;-)

* Now – all current pages complete, with plans to add more. There are several cassettes of Now‘s music in the cassette mine. If we find anything decent, groundbreaking, historical or cool there, it will be uploaded.

* Sirius Rising – there is not much Sirius Rising here at our website. We found seven cassettes and they have been uploaded into the machinery of our studios. So far, four of the cassettes have been analysed. From these, there are four songs that are perhaps reasonable. The tapes are a tough listen and we tend to have them playing when other studio work, such as maintenance or graphic design, is ongoing. We intend to upload the music once all seven cassettes have been analyzed. Announcements will be made here in our News service, our Bandcamp Community, and on BlueSky and Twitter.

* Lemming Meringue – all pages seem complete. Hooray! We will probably update the gallery at some point – more news on this will follow in due course.

* Wud – their homepage, gallery, Daylight Demo and Wudsongs pages have all been updated recently. One of the Wud band pages became incorporated into the Wudsongs page. It thus became superfluous, so it has been removed. The Wud band gallery will be updated in due course. We are working with old photos, when there is time between all of the other work that is ongoing. There are also numerous cassettes of Wud to be mined for their goodies. One page remains to be finished – the Wud Band Biography. Hopefully soon.

The Wudsongs album is still being finalised at HearThis, with the new and enhanced photos we have been working on as cover art for the tracks. We didn’t make a proper cover for the album yet. If things go well, it will be released at Bandcamp, and there will be many gallery updates at the Wud Records website before the end of this year. There are literally hundreds of photos, so this work will be ongoing for some time.

Another of our backburner projects that is worthy of a mention is the uploading of all the video footage we have to the Wud Records YouTube. We managed to edit and upload a couple of videos this year and hope there will be time (and mojo) to make and upload more for your enjoyment.

Some of us will enter retirement from work in the coming years, and that will certainly be a time when these things can move forward. Meanwhile, the beat goes on.

Cruelty to Blues is a new album release from Wud Records! Ten Blue Öyster Cult cover songs recorded by The Bastard Sons of Dennis, with Dave Danielli on bass. So much to love!

We have known Dave for many years. He was the bass player in The Ug Brothers, and played a big part in the making of Flicker‘s 2002 album At Least 1000 Words.

Dave has loved the music of Blue Öyster Cult for even longer than we have known him. When he heard the Cosy Lube Turtle album by The Bastard Sons of Dennis, he simply had to reach for his bass.

Shortly afterwards, Dave got in touch. He sent us a couple of his basslines and we loved what he had done.

Over time, he made basslines for all ten songs. These were incorporated into the recordings we had already made. Each song was given a few tweaks, before being remixed and remastered, again. There is even a little bit of keyboard added to Astronomy, courtesy of Len Denier (another name for our keys man, Josh Reynes).

Now that everything is finally done, we are very pleased to let you know that the album has been released to Bandcamp. We shall be sending free download codes to everyone who already bought the Cosy Lube Turtle album.

Dave has sent us a couple of albums of his music and we shall be looking into the possibility of hosting them for him. More news on this to follow via our News service, Bandcamp Community, BlueSky and X (formerly Twitter).

In other news regarding The Bastard Sons of Dennis, their Cherry Smoke Empire album is currently on the slab in our control room for remixing and remastering. There is another EP in the works, and we are trying to locate the best live versions of the various songs The Bastard Sons of Dennis performed that we can find.

Cruelty to Blues is slated for worldwide distribution, although some of the details need to be hammered out with the distributors before they are willing to release it. We decided the release couldn’t wait any longer.

The tracks from Cruelty to Blues will start to slowly appear at SoundCloud. We prefer to leave a bit of time between each release at that platform, as that is how the platform seems to function best for us. These are not new uploads at SoundCloud, they were secret tracks waiting to be released.

If you would like to visit the new Cruelty to Blues page here at the Wud Records website, please click here.

To listen to Cruelty to Blues or to download it from Bandcamp, please click here instead.

The September 2025 Chart

The top ten tracks for September 2025 from Wud Records have been published in a new compilation at SoundCloud.

Changes are underway at Wud Records…

Regarding the new chart, we shall elaborate further with regard to each platform where our music is represented.

Bandcamp Is Still the Best Platform for Artists

If you are not yet a member of Bandcamp, we strongly suggest you sign up, whether you are an indie label, a musician or a fan of music, or all three. Do it now! It’s free to join. Just click here. :)

For any independent artist or label wanting to sell music or 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 about what the best site is for independent artists and labels. Bandcamp are simply Numero Uno. Finito!

When you subscribe to a music streaming platform, you don’t actually *own* any of the music. You’re just renting a bit of bandwidth on their distribution service, and most of the rent revenue you are paying for it goes to big corporations rather than the artists you love. It’s a terrible business model, both for artists and fans alike.

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. Remember VitaminIC, MySpace, FriendsReunited?

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. About 80% to 85% of what you spend at Bandcamp goes directly to the artist or their label, and is paid daily.

So it’s always a good idea to download from Bandcamp whenever possible, as they are the best site for supporting artists. For us, one download of a €7 album is worth about 3300 snotify streams.

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. Again, this goes to the artists themselves, not some greedy anonymous megacorporation who only care for money, not the music you love.

There is also a rather fabulous Community feature at Bandcamp, and you can join ours by clicking here.

SoundCloud

Let’s begin by telling the sad tale of a disaster, which has been a catalyst for a number of the changes that are happening.

The entropy magnet, which we thought had been left back in the uk, returned with a vengeance in July.

Just as we were enjoying the best month we ever had on SoundCloud, our account was unexpectedly deleted by mistake. It was either a robot or a sleepy Sunday lunchtime employee that did it. We will probably never know. The account was subsequently restored, but it is still badly damaged. We lost 3998 followers in one moment of madness.

We are hoping that SoundCloud will reply to one of our emails, but they still have not. SoundCloud’s spectacularly poor customer service is unacceptable.

Be that as it may, whilst we still do not fully trust the information we get from SoundCloud and its Insights system, there has been enough improvement in data quality in the last couple of months for it to be useful again.

Shitify

We have removed all of our music from spotify. We highly recommend you do the same, if you have any there. We also highly recommend that you cancel your subscription, and move your playlists (and so on) to a more ethical streaming service.

We don’t say this lightly. Nor do we say so from a position of ignorance. There are many very good reasons to remove all your music from spotify and to cancel your sub. Do it now!

For more information, please refer to this news post: https://www.wudrecords.co.uk/news/wud-records-boycott-spotify/

Deezer, Tidal, YouTube, Amazon, Apple Music, etc.

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

The data for these services filters through to us via our distributors, although we are not very trusting of it. At best we can get a general feel of what is going on across all of the streaming services this way.

HearThis, Audius, Audiomack

We have started organising our music at HearThis since the recent debacle with SoundCloud. Unfortunately, their stats are not terribly helpful.

The same recent debacle with SoundCloud has also been the catalyst for ourselves taking the decision to add our music to both Audius and Audiomack. Both platforms came highly recommended, although their stats, like at HearThis, are also not especially informative.

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 reposts 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 September 2025 Chart?

The latest system is based upon the general tendencies and trends that have occured over the last calender month, as well as specifics where they are available. These have been amalgamated together to make the new Top Ten.

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

Only you, the listener, can influence our October 2025 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 September 2025 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. Just one download of a €7 album is worth about 3300 snotify streams. By buying a download, 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, 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 September 2025 Top Ten?

The latest top ten features seven acts. There are four songs from Pok the Bard, and one each for Mark Drower and the Everyones, Dark Company, Flicker, the Band of Georges, Now, and & co. Four of the songs are new entries, five are re-entries and one is a faller.

Now that all of the Band of Georges material has been released, it looks like our charts are starting to return to something more like normal.

Pok the Bard

Congratulations to Pok the Bard! We have started to release Pok‘s Anthology album’s tracks to SoundCloud (as mentioned in this News post) and doing so has made a big impact. Pok claimed four of the top spots on our new chart. One song is a brand new release, the other three are all songs that have been remixed and remastered, then re-released. This is all planned and ongoing work following our 2023 studio upgrade.

This month‘s new number one is a brand new release from Pok, called She’s Beautiful. This is an absolute delight of a song, which Pok composed when he was just a teenager. It was performed by Laughing Sun before being recorded and added to Pok‘s Anthology album. The version on Laughing Sun‘s Cander recording was the template Pok used for the newest version.

She’s Beautiful is indeed a beautiful song, as well as being highly historic. Pok plays all of the lead guitar apart from an eight-bar section where Fedax plays a short solo, based upon his Cander solo in 1985. Fedax would have played the Ice Maiden, but she needed a little attention. As Marsha had new strings, and was a close relative of the Ice Maiden, Fedax played his parts using Pok‘s guitar.

The next brand new entry from Pok is at number three. This song is Freight Train/Pains, a strange alternative folk rock tale, which Pok took from his 1983 book Golden Temple and the Laughing Sun.

Freight Train/Pains describes the freight train which is the exact same train as the one mentioned in the song Cunning and Tricks.

There are no drums because the whole of Freight Train/Pains was recorded very fast on a day when Sven was not present. Pok plays George‘s acoustic guitar, which is strung with 9-guage electric guitar strings. The electric guitar is Pok‘s Tokai, Betty the Bastard.

Number four is also a brand new entry from Pok the Bard. Fooog’z Bloooz is piece of instrumental rock. It was created from a riff that dates all the way back to the days of school and Achilles Heel.

This particular version of Fooog’z Bloooz features Pok playing acoustic guitar, and all of the electric guitar parts. For the electric guitar he plays Betty the Bastard, a light yet gnarly and characterful Tokai SG with a very thin neck and body. Betty is one of Pok‘s longest-surviving instruments, whose voice can be heard on numerous Anthology recordings.

Straight in at number eight we have Summer ’83, another new entry from Pok the Bard‘s Anthology album. It was composed during the course of the 1983 Sidmouth International Folk Festival, up at the campsite on the top of Peak Hill.

Summer ’83 starts out as a sweet and gentle folk song with acoustic guitar and banjo, and then suddenly changes in unexpected ways into something much more psychedelic. Summer ’83 was almost called “To The Sun”.

Mark Drower and the Everyones

It has been a very good month for Mark Drower and the Everyones with a song from their seminal Blaze Tape recording re-entering the chart this month.

I Know I Know You by Mark Drower and the Everyones last charted in March 2024. It was helped to its re-entry at this month‘s number two by becoming the global number ten in the acoustic category at HearThis.

I Know I Know You was composed by Mark Drower for the King’s School Ottery St Mary Project Week of 1982. As such, I Know I Know You is one of the oldest recordings in the Wud Records pantheon of fantastic songs.

I Know I Know You is a beautiful song with a lot of history. It features a teenage Pok on lead guitar. It was performed live during the performance of the play Everyone by Frederick Franck, as well as by other bands that came later, such as Wud. The song came in Act One, directly after the scene where Everyone talks with his Friends. The drop-D tuning Mark often used on his acoustic is still known as Drower Tuning by many of the wider Wud posse.

Dark Company

A good month for Dark Company sees them occupy number five with a re-entry from their Signmaker album.

After almost three years out of the charts, Killer by Dark Company makes its first comeback since November 2022.

Killer remains a very popular song. It was the very first song that Dark Company finished recording, at the old Silent Running Studios in Exeter back in the summer of 1991. It has a hybrid reggae and rock vibe and is a song that Pete wrote for George, whose dilemma was to stay or go. He stayed.

The drums are provided by an old Boss DR220A drum machine and the song also features the wonderful tenor saxophone of Rowena Parsons. Killer is the opening track on Dark Company‘s first album, Signmaker.

Flicker

Flicker have been absent from the charts recently. This month they return with a track from their incredible 2002 album At Least 1000 Words.

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.

Band of Georges

A few months ago, we absolutely could not have anticipated the level of dominance over the charts the Band of Georges has had recently. Why? We were not even expecting to release any of these songs at the start of March!

The Wud Records website was launched in 2008, replacing the old Wud site which simply disappeared soon afterwards. Ever since before the Wud Records website went live, various people tried to persuade George to allow his old Tascam 244 portastudio demos to be released. He always refused, point blank. There was no arguing with him. It was just: “No.” And that was that.

And then, suddenly, he seems to have had a change of heart. He allowed a few of us to listen to his demos, which we thought were surprisingly good. Certainly a lot better than we had anticipated, given everything he had said about awful they were. Whatever it was that happened, we are delighted that it did. Because now, we have been allowed to release all of the volumes of his early songs in their demo form.

We have done very little work to these recordings. They were just lifted from their master cassettes and digitised in our studios, and normalised to 0dB. That was it. Everything sounds just as it was. The cassettes, nearly 40 years old, have stood the test of time very well.

The newest chart features one song from Volume IX Side A. There are no pages for the Band of Georges at Explicit Music at this time, although some may appear following further negotiations.

Each released song from the Band of Georges has a comment or a memory from George on its album’s page here at the Wud Records website. Some of that information, along with other facts regarding each song, appears at its page on SoundCloud. There is likely to be extra information given on the two separate pages, so we recommend you check out both.

I Pass You By falls to number seven from last month‘s number two. It is a song that was inspired by George’s train journey from Exeter to Torquay, which runs alongside the sea for a few miles. It is generally regarded as one of the most beautiful train journeys in the uk, and the world. The song starts with the sound of an old Intercity 125 passing the window of the house where one of George’s ex girlfriends used to live.

Now

Now enjoyed a revival during the month of September at Wud Records. This was probably due to the fact that we uploaded some of their songs to Audius and Audiomack, and organised Now’s songs at HearThis into a playlist. We also created new artwork for their Inauguration EP.

A re-entry this month at number nine is Party Man by Now. Party Man was in the very first SoundCloud chart back in October 2015, and has not featured since! A remarkable turn of events indeed.

Party Man is a song that Mark Drower composed for a school drama group performance of George Orwell’s 1984. As it was, the performance never took place and the songs were never developed very much. They were, however, magnificent songs, even though the recording and performance on Inauguration was not especially outstanding.

Now‘s Inauguration is the second oldest recording we have. It was made just a few weeks after The Blaze Tape by Mark Drower and the Everyones. As such, its place among our legacy bands’ recordings is mostly for purposes of historical interest.

& co

Repossession (RMX) by & co is another re-entry, at number ten.

The strangely named outfit known as & co make remixes in a trance, EDM or dub stylee from Dark Company songs. There are several such mixes on their Signmaker album, as well as a whole album of & co music called Drifting Stars. This album features remixes of songs from the Dark Company albums Rage in Heaven, Alien Heat and Ghost of the Art.

Repossession (RMX) makes its first appearance on our charts since August 2017, which was the month we left the uk forever. Repossession (RMX) was exported to HearThis some time ago and the entire Drifting Stars album has been repaired there.

The original song Repossession comes from Dark Company‘s Ghost of the Art album. This one is one the easier remixes to recognise, as Jeff used some of the original keyboard parts when he built the remix.

The Ghost of the Art album is still work in progress, as is Drifting Stars, the album which Repossession (RMX) comes from.

* None of our other acts made it onto the September 2025 chart. *

Honourable mentions should be made to the songs that didn’t quite make the chart this month. They are:

* So Begins the Crying by Wud, which peaked at #22 on the global rock music chart at HearThis.
* It’s Just a Game by the Band of Georges, which had a big popularity boost from being added to a SoundCloud playlist by a third party.
* Medicines (RMX) by & co, which was also popular at HearThis.
* (It’s a Long Way to) Jackson by Now, which was relatively popular at Audius.
* Born, by Alchemeon, from their Winter 2008-09 collection, which enjoyed some streaming success at Bandcamp.

Listening Options

If you would like to go to SoundCloud to hear the top ten songs from Wud Records in September 2025, 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 September 2025 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.

New Inauguration artwork for Now has been created! It has been uploaded to all of the relevent pages where Now’s Inauguration can be heard.

So what prompted us to make new Inauguration artwork, after all of these years?

One of the things that has been going on behind the scenes in the world of Wud Records includes rescanning a lot of old photographs, and scanning a lot of photographs that were never scanned before. These will be used to upgrade and enhance the various photo galleries at the Wud Records website.

There are some photos that we shall only share privately with our artists and the wider Wud posse, and there are some that will never be shared. All the same, this work is ongoing in between everything else that we are doing.

Many of the photos in our galleries were scanned way back in 2000, for the old Wud site. Back then the order of the day was tiny files and connecting to the internet via dialup modem.

Recently we started removing our music from SoundCloud, following a ridiculous debacle that took place in July. We have still not been contacted by SoundCloud regarding the issues we faced.

Our account was finally repaired yesterday, 68 days after it was deleted by SoundCloud thinking we were spam, when we simply reported that we were the victims of spam.

There are many fake accounts on SoundCloud who just want your money, and the best thing is to just block them. We remain profoundly dissatisfied with the way we were treated by SoundCloud over this whole fiasco.

We realised that our label needs to diversify its music platforms in case of further difficulties.

As such, we have started to organise our music at HearThis. We have also joined Audiomack and Audius, and have begun to upload our music to both of those platforms as well.

We decided to start with the oldest music we have and move forwards through time, uploading the things that were created subsequently.

Doing this has reminded us that there is no music uploaded yet for two of our most venerable legacy acts – Fooog Dinboffin and the Release, and Sirius Rising. We have mined the cassette vault and are trying to find recordings that are reasonably decent and representative of these two bands. Uploads will be incoming soon, so watch this space!

Music for The Masters of Drone will appear later.

The Blaze Tape by Mark Drower and the Everyones, and Inauguration by Now, are the two oldest recordings we have. You will find both albums at HearThis, Audius and Audiomack. The Blaze Tape is also available for download at Bandcamp.

Because The Blaze Tape has its own artwork already, and Inauguration didn’t until today, we felt it would be a splendid idea to make some. One of the photos we scanned recently is a school photo from 1982, with all of the teachers and pupils of The King’s School, Ottery St Mary, in the shot. It’s way too big for our scanner, so we did it in several chunks.

Lurking within this enormous photograph, we found Mark Drower (the only photo of him we have), George, and Jon Kneebone, who were the principal players in Now‘s Inauguration. Pok was also present, even though he did not play during the Inauguration recording, so we included his photo too. These four were cut out of the big school photo, digitally enhanced, then used for the cover art.

Sadly we could find neither Pete Rippin nor Sarah Hopgood in the photo. Although Lucy Bradshaw-Smith was present, having five photos would have been a bit awkward for the design Sam had in mind.

For the lettering we chose a font that was a little like the original drawing of the word ‘Now’ that George did back in the day – and then twisted it. George’s original was a bit like AC/DC’s logo. There were a great many wet socks and aching feet back in 1982, so we chose a sort of wet-sock brown for the outer glow of the lettering.

We may release Inauguration to Bandcamp as well in the coming weeks. Should this happen, we will let you know via our News service, our Bandcamp Community, and on BlueSky and X.

We’re going to be writing to our fabulous followers in person soon. If you would like to be included, please sign up to our mailing list. It only takes a moment. There area only two fields to fill in and our data is never shared.

If you would like to admire the new artwork and listen to Inauguration at HearThis, please click here.

To admire the new artwork and listen to Inauguration at Audius, please click here.

Should you wish to admire the new artwork and listen to Inauguration at Audiomack instead, please click here.

You can check out Inauguration at the Wud Records website as well, by clicking here.

She’s Beautiful by Pok the Bard is a brand new release! It has been added to Pok’s Anthology album.

She’s Beautiful is a very historic and wonderful creation. It seemed appropriate to release it now, following the recent 40th anniversary of Laughing Sun‘s Cander recording.

The version of She’s Beautiful on Cander has always been considered the definitive version of the song, despite all of its improvisation. The Cander version was truly inspired, and very much the template used when making the version of She’s Beautiful for Pok the Bard‘s Anthology album.

She’s Beautiful began in exeter’s grotty city centre bus station, of all places. As Pok was waiting there for his bus one day, a girl who he knew and admired from school happened to walk past. That simple event was the spark that led to this amazing song.

Pok always says that his songs are very simple, because – he says – he composes mainly using straightforward major or minor chords. If one of them has a seventh, that is an event! Although… he has shown us many wonderful esoteric chords over the years, so that’s best taken with a pinch of salt. And exactly which basic major or minor chord may come next, and when exactly it comes, can be a puzzle for other musicians.

It is true that there are no bars with odd numbers of beats lurking to trap the unwary in She’s Beautiful, but there are numerous tempo changes. These range from 66 BPM to 122 BPM, and can easily cause any musician who is not focused to stumble and fumble for a moment or two.

When the rhythm guitars were recorded, Fedax would have played the Ice Maiden, but it needed a bit of attention. Marsha had new strings and was a very similar instrument – both of them being Ibanez Roadstar IIs from 1985. Rather than waste Pok’s time repairing the Ice Maiden, Fedax simply played his parts on Marsha instead.

Marsha was subsequently stolen a few years later. What a shame, she was a lovely instrument.

Pok directed the bass part for She’s Beautiful from the very beginning and his choice of notes was both surprising and delightful. Instead of the bass playing A – D – E, he wanted it to play A – E – F#, creating an unexpected tension and a unique vibe, effectively making a C major chord with an F# as its root.

Sven does typically wonderful Sven things behind the kit and nails all the different feels with great expertise and skill.

In other Pok news, we have remixed and remastered both Fooog’z Bloooz and Freight Train/Pains. They are both available for your enjoyment at Bandcamp and SoundCloud and they are both sounding much, much better!

The next song to join them will be Summer ’83. It has been remixed and will be remastered in the next few days. We shall let you know when it is re-released via BlueSky and X.

More of Pok’s songs have been progressed a little in our studios. When the next one is ready for release, we shall inform all of Pok‘s fans in our News service, as well as our Bandcamp Community and socials. Be sure to follow us so you don’t miss out!

If you would like to download or listen to She’s Beautiful at Bandcamp, please click here.

To download the entire Anthology album as it stands right now, please click here.

If you would like to stream She’s Beautiful from SoundCloud, please click here instead.

Please note that we are in the throes of abandoning SoundCloud and our music will not be there for very much longer. See this News post for more details.