News

It’s a Blue Sky Don’t Hold No Rain is a brand new release from Pok. It has been added to his Anthology album. It’s a Blue Sky Don’t Hold No Rain is now the new first track, although eventually there will be at least two more songs – as yet unfinished – that will come before it on the Anthology album.

It’s a Blue Sky Don’t Hold No Rain is one of the most historic, epic, amazing and important songs we have ever released. Pok wrote this when he was only seventeen years old and it is a remarkable creation from somebody so young.

We clearly remember the first time that Pok played his new song to some of the rest of the Wud posse. It was when he sat on a public bench late one dark evening, just down the hill from St Michael’s church, on Church Hill, Honiton. He was playing a 12-string acoustic guitar with only six strings on it.

Before It’s a Blue Sky Don’t Hold No Rain was released to Pok‘s growing Anthology album, it was performed by Laughing Sun, Spacegoats, Alchemeon, and by various of Pok‘s ensembles of friends.

One of the greatest moments of pure inspiration we have ever witnessed was the creation of the riffs section. It was way back in 1985, a few minutes before the recording of Laughing Sun‘s Cander version. You can enjoy Laughing Sun’s version of the song by clicking here.

It’s a Blue Sky Don’t Hold No Rain was played by the Spacegoats during their “Electric Elves” era, a term coined by Clive, around the turn from 1999 to 2000. You can enjoy their version of the song, performed live at Glastonbury Town Hall, by clicking here.

During the days of Alchemeon, Jim suggested reducing the number of times each riff was played to two of each rather than four, and we kept with Jim‘s arrangement in the Anthology version.

There are two Alchemeon recordings of It’s a Blue Sky Don’t Hold No Rain available for public listening. To hear the Winter 2008-09 version, please click here. For the Spring 2009 version, please click here.

We are all very pleased with the new Anthology version of It’s a Blue Sky Don’t Hold No Rain. It has taken somewhat longer than we anticipated to finish it. We have worked on it almost to the exclusion of everything else in our studios, ever since the release of Pok‘s Don’t Let It Pass You By, already six months ago. Many other things have had to wait for this epic to be finally finished.

There were several tracks of guitars, drums, bass, vocals and keyboards which were all scrapped and re-recorded during the course of creating this seminal recording.

Pok plays his Tanglewood acoustic and Gibson SG electric for the rhythm parts and is panned over to the right. Of the three guitar solos, Pok takes the second on his (subsequently stolen) Ibanez Roadstar II. It lies between the ‘riffs’ section and the ‘rain’ section.

On the left side of the stereo mix you can hear the Yamaha acoustic and Ibanez electric guitars of Fedax, who agreed after bribery to come out of musical retirement for a handful of Pok’s recordings. Fedax also plays the 12-string acoustic and takes the first lead guitar break, as well as the last guitar solo, which comes after the ‘rain’ section.

Josh worked particularly hard, constructing his keyboard parts by analyzing what Jim had done across several Alchemeon recordings, including several that remain in our vault and are not available to for public consumption. Eventually he put together a collection of parts that was a collage of a ‘best of Jim’ and a good dollop of Josh.

Josh used a number of different instruments, including a plonky old upright acoustic piano treated with much reverb and delay, his B3x organ (through a dirt pedal for the solo), a Fender Rhodes and a Wurlitzer. There are also some VST instruments – DSK’s Analog Matrix, Kriminal’s Twilight and the Waldorf Electronics A1.

Maxx is the glue and his somewhat understated bass sticks all of the strings to the rhythm section with beauty, precision and soul. Sven plays his golden spanglesome Slingerland jazz kit, which we didn’t damp too much. He had his eyes closed and a big grin as he made magic with three toms during the ‘rain’ section of the song.

We very much hope you will enjoy hearing this new version of this wonderful Pok classic. Please share it with your friends on social media so that they might enjoy it as well.

Soon we shall be working on Pok‘s next new release, as well as remixing and remastering more of his old classics that already make up his Anthology album. This became necessary once our studios had something of an upgrade, two years ago.

All of the Anthology tracks that have been reworked have been released at SoundCloud. You can hear them all by clicking here.

To read more about It’s a Blue Sky Don’t Hold No Rain and to read the official lyrics whilst listening, please click here to go to the page at the Explicit Music website.

If you would like to listen to it over at SoundCloud, please click here.

To download the song from Bandcamp, or to simply listen to it at that awesome website, please click here.

If you would like to visit Pok’s Anthology album page right here at the Wud Records website, please click here.

Due to technical issues, all Wud Records Twitch streaming has ceased. For now, at least. Hopefully normal service will resume soon.

Unfortunately the old and rather dodgy laptop we’ve been using in the control room of our studios has become exceedingly poorly and will need some care to make it run again, if that is even possible. It was about 20 years old and not terribly good, so in actual fact it is wonder that it has lasted as long as it has.

As such, it means that our studios are now completely offline and all Twitch streaming is on hold. Also, it means we are unable to refer to engineering documents, download samples, meet our musicians on live Skype, and all kinds of other inconveniences. So, all in all, this situation is rather confufulating.

Due to the very secure location of our studios, we had to install special equipment to allow studio internet traffic to pass through the main electricity supply cables. It is unusual, but certainly effective.

If the old laptop can be repaired, we shall resume streaming after setting everything up once more. This may take a while as our nearest computer repair specialist (who is a genius!) is about 30 miles away. One of the few disadvantages of being in a tiny village in an enormous forest at the edge of national park near where Austria, Germany and the Czech Republic all meet.

Should it turn out that the old laptop cannot be repaired, we have a potential contingency plan involving building another desktop. We have almost enough parts lying around from previous computer upgrades to the various machines in our organisation to make this a possibility. However, it will take time and work, so please bear with us on this front.

Instead of streaming, we will attempt to upload more videos to the Wud Records YouTube account for you to see and hopefully enjoy. New video is more likely to be announced on BlueSky and Twitter rather than in our News service, so please be sure to follow us on those platforms.

When we are able to stream again, we shall make a further news post as well as announcing it on BlueSky and Twitter.

During our dark screen time, feel free to follow us on Twitch now! Then you will be ready for when we are back up and running. You can follow us on Twitch by clicking here.

In the meantime, here is some music.

https://wudrecords.bandcamp.com/

A third of SNAFU, the first CD of Dark Company‘s forthcoming triple CD album A for Acronym, is live on SoundCloud by now. We hope you are enjoying this new album of songs by Dark Company. More songs will be added to the album in the coming weeks.

We have paused the release of the second third of SNAFU for a short time. This is because it seems likely that there will be other releases by different artists on our roster coming very soon. We are naturally very excited about this! More news will follow in the near future.

To be certain you don’t miss such events, please sign up to our mailing list. You can do so by clicking here. We don’t spam people or bother anyone very often.

You can also follow us on BlueSky and Twitter to see what is new in the wonderful world of Wud Records.

The six songs from Dark Company‘s forthcoming triple CD album A for Acronym released to the public domain so far are all work in progress. Each will require a fair amount of work to bring them up to the standard required for distribution to the major streaming services.

This will clearly take some time, as there are older Dark Company albums that will need to be finished first. However, for fans of Dark Company, we know you appreciate being able to hear their songs, even unfinished. SoundCloud is a very good platform for exactly this.

The second (VSF) and third (FUBAR) CDs of A for Acronym songs will be released gradually as well, once all of the songs from the first CD are publicly available for listening.

If you would like some teasers for forthcoming songs on Dark Company’s A for Acronym CD 1: SNAFU album, all of the lyrics have already been published at the Explict Music website. You can read them, along with other details, such as performers and fun facts, by clicking here.

If you would like to listen to A for Acronym CD 1: SNAFU by Dark Company, as it stands right now, here at the Wud Records website, please click here.

To listen to it over at SoundCloud instead, please click here.

The January 2025 Chart

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

However… in much the same way as nearly all social media platforms become ever more strangled under ever tighter controls, so too does the data from streaming services seem more comprised than in the past. As luck would have it, we believe that, aside from the lateness of the stats coming from some of our distribution services, the quality of the data has improved again recently.

We shall elaborate further with regard to each platform where our music is represented.

Bandcamp Is the Best Platform for Artists

If you are not yet a member of Bandcamp, we strongly suggest you sign up whether you are a musician or a fan of music, or both. 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!

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?

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.

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.

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.

We believe that the stats we see from Bandcamp are perfectly accurate. Yay!

HearThis

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

More news on this will follow in the future.

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

Much of our material at HearThis consists of either Archive tracks or oddities. Streams there are not particularly significant at present, although we do include them in the final analysis.

SoundCloud

A few months ago, SoundCloud decided, in their seemingly infinite wisdom, to downgrade their excellent ‘Stats’ for premium users (such as ourselves) to something that was so completely and unbelievably dreadful it was unfit for purpose. They call it ‘Insights’, and they are surprisingly uninsightful, despite the profoundly misleading nomenclature.

Somebody at the company thought it would be a good idea to take a system that worked spectacularly well in real time, and replace it with another that is riddled with inconsistancies and errors. One can even observe the data changing right before one’s eyes! Even some of the most basic functions, such as choosing particular date ranges, no longer works properly. Which idiot thought this was a good idea? In our organisation such sabotage wouild mean instant dismissal. “Put your keys on the table and close the door behind you.”

Whilst we still do not fully trust the information we get from SoundCloud, there has been a significant improvement in data quality recently. Perhaps one day the new ‘Insights’ system will even be as good as their ‘Stats’ system was before they fiddled with it, but we shall have to wait and see.

Shitify

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

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

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

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

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

As such, we are considering boycotting spotify entirely. More news on this to come soon.

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

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

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

Not only that, two of our songs have had “excessive” plays. This excess has resulted in punitive measures, which we are still protesting. It seems ridiculous, but that is what has happened.

One such song, Future Sadness Past from Dark Company‘s Signmaker album, has been removed from spotify completely. In order to punish us for having our song played “excessively”, the rest of the Signmaker album has also been removed from spotify.

The other missing track is Welcome to the Family by Flicker, from At Least 1000 Words. This track seems to have been hidden from the public.

Our distributors have so far been unable to help regarding these issues.

As such, we are considering abandoning spotify entirely in the very near future. They are, after all, extremely shabby corporate scumbags, and have treated our label, and every other independent artist, with absolute contempt. Perhaps because we have spoken out against their egregious policies. Repeatedly.

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

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

The data 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.

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 January 2025 Chart?

The latest system is based upon some of 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. Thank goodness for the Statistics module at university!

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 February 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 January 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. 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 January 2025 Top Ten?

There are three new entries, three re-entries, two fallers, one climber and one non-mover in the latest top ten.

Dark Company

Congratulations to Dark Company! They had a very good month indeed across all of the platforms we use, ending with them achieving the top four songs in our newest monthly chart.

The top three songs are all new releases exclusive to SoundCloud in January 2025, with the fourth being a new release in December 2024. All four songs are from Dark Company‘s A for Acronym CD 1: SNAFU album.

A for Acronym is a triple album that cosists of three separate parts. SNAFU is a loosely ‘rock’ colllection of songs, VSF is a loosely ‘reggae’ collection of songs, and FUBAR is a collection of songs that don’t quite belong in either of the other two categories.

More A for Acronym songs will be released soon. There is also a new page among Dark Company’s pages at this website for the A for Acronym: SNAFU album, which you can visit by clicking here.

A brand new entry at number one for January 2025 is Rainy Afternoon by Dark Company. This is a classic rock, or hard rock song, with a clean lead guitar and a shufflesome 12/8 feel.

Originally this song had a dirty lead guitar part, but it somehow didn’t sound right. Then when Zakk tried a clean sound, everything suddenly came together, as simple as that. When we recorded Barry’s growly rhythm guitar, it sounded amazing and very loud! We tried to keep it as loud as possible in the mix, without overdoing it.

Pete’s psychedlic lyrics feature the same melody, which repeats every two lines throughout the whole song. Different chord changes give the illusion of the melody changing, but it doesn’t.

Another new entry from Dark Company‘s A for Acronym album enters our January 2025 chart at number two. This is Pluperfect, another delicious piece of classic rock. It misses most of the lead guitar parts as they haven’t been recorded yet, but it still sounds pretty good like it is. There is even a cowbell, and as everyone knows, you always need more cowbell.

Pete’s vocal was a splendid take and the lyrics are jammed full of wonderful psychedlic imagery. “Sinewave eyeballs in a metal made head, robotic vision that can see through lead” conjures up a wonderful and complex picture in the mind’s eye in just two lines.

Some of Pete’s lyrics are a little difficult to make out, largely because of the slightly obscure nature of his vocabulary. In case you are having trouble deciphering his message, the lyrics have been included at Pluperfect‘s page on SoundCloud, as well as on its page at Explicit Music.

A third brand new entry from Dark Company is at number three. This was one of the least finished of all the demos and required a fair bit of stretching and fiddling to even make it into the song you can hear. It will need a lot of work to finish it.

Seen from Yesterday is a very odd song. It has elements of electronic and alternative rock, with growly dirty low guitars and programmed drums. The lyrics are rather bleak. “Keeping secrets is easy when there’s no-one to tell,” Pete begins. We think it will be awesome when it is finished!

Down from number one to number four is yet another song from Dark Company. Now, The Light is a powerful and bombastic slab of britpop, or hard rock, which smashes the listener in the face from the very first second. It has something of a hint of those two Manchester Gallagher brothers, on one of the best days they ever had.

Zak’s massive wall of guitar is loud sonic blast of pure joy, with the highlights illuminated by Maxx’s lazer precision bass. The chorus is an earworm you’ll be singing along with straight away and Sven’s drums are refined brutality at its best.

Now, The Light is in G major. The overdubbed guitar solo is highly effective and proves that sometimes the simplest things can work the best. There is a gratuitous Cmaj7 chord to listen out for, as well as one of the “bucket list” 7th chords that is always fun to squeeze into a song somewhere. The one you might spot here is a D7, the others being a G7 and a B7.

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 has claimed many of the top spots recently, including two on our new chart.

A re-entry at number five, and appearing for the first time since August 2024, is The Sidewalk Song. This was co-written with Mark Drower and is a very historic and classic old song. The Anthology version we made is based upon a Now recording that Pok and ourselves consider to be largely definitive. The Sidewalk Song is a gloriously bombastic hard rock piledriver in E major, full of youthful self confidence, swagger and braggadocio.

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

Enjoying its sixth consecutive month on our charts whilst continuing its gradual slide from number one in September 2024, Pok’s newest release, Don’t Let It Pass You By is now one position lower at number ten.

This is such a wonderful cheerful song with a strong positive message. It can bring a smile to the lips of the glummest and most grumpulated miseryguts you know. It would probably help if they like rock music, especially of the hard, classic, blues, country or psychedelic varieties.

Don’t Let It Pass You By may start with a gentle introduction in A major, but then it really kicks in hard when the song proper begins and the key changes to E major. There is plenty of Ibanez Roadstar guitar goodness across the mix, as well as some organ and synth, not to mention the tastiest rhythm section on the planet right now in Maxx and Sven to invigorate your dancing shoes.

Don’t Let It Pass You By is a very historic song, going right back to the early days of Laughing Sun in 1985.

We are very pleased with the latest version of Don’t Let It Pass You By by Pok. There is so much to love about this we recommend you just listen to it yourself, which you can do by clicking here.

The Bastard Sons of Dennis

The Bastard Sons of Dennis enjoyed another good month on the chart in January 2025, claiming three of the ten possible positions. All three songs come from their fabulous Cosy Lube Turtle album of Blue Oyster Cult covers.

Since the studio upgrade early in 2023, we have been working on improving the sound quality of everything we released in the last few years. Fans of our gruesome twosome can expect some exciting news regarding this album fairly soon. We are waiting on just a single file before making a big announcement.

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

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

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

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

January 2025‘s number seven song climbs one place from number eight. Astronomy is a profoundly beautiful and haunting creation. It was composed by the Bouchard brothers, Joe and Albert, and Sandy Pearlman. It is the final track of Blue Öyster Cult’s 1974 Secret Treaties album, and an absolute masterpiece of progressive rock composition.

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

A re-entry at number nine and making its first chart appearance since December 2023 is another song from the Cosy Lube Turtle album. This is the opening track, Dominance and Submission. Originally released by Blue Öyster Cult on their 1974 Secret Treaties album, The Bastard Sons of Dennis would indulge in various acts of tomfoolery during a live performance of this song. Derek would introduce the band and thank the venue and sound engineer. He would also encourage the crowd to join in with the cries of “Dominance!”, “Submission!”.

In the long pauses before “It will be time!”, Derek and Chuck would spin their guitars upside down. Stuck on the back of Chuck’s guitar was a large sign that read “Throw panties now!”, and on the back of Derek’s was a similar sign that read “If no panties, bras!” Very few undergarments were ever actually tossed onto the stage, apart from on one occasion when somebody had brought a big bag full of old knickers and distributed them to the audience. Both the stage and the band were hooptiously drangled in assorted random panties.

Flicker

Flicker had a good month in January 2025 and achieved a single entry on the new Wud Records chart. This tune is the first track on their incredible 2002 album At Least 1000 Words.

Farsight by Flicker is a re-entry at number nine and makes its first appearance since June 2024. Farsight is a delightful and whimsical piece of music, progressive rock or perhaps even indie jazz in style, highly melodic and decorated with samples from Captain Kirk’s USS Enterprise, cricket commentator Jonathan Agnew and the religious guru Maharaj Ji, among others.

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

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

Listening Options

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

Winter 2024-25 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 Winter 2024-25 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, 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!

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

How We Work It

If you would like the opportunity to be included in a future compilation, first you need to follow us on SoundCloud so we can follow you back. You can even enjoy hearing some of the music by our fabulous bands whilst you’re there. :)

We follow everyone back who follows us on SoundCloud, providing you have original music and you are not some kind of phony pointless scamming account.

There are many scammers who can allegedly make it seem that people have been listening to your music. The ‘plays’ come from bots and click farms. Nobody will engage with the music or even hear it. It is very easy to spot a track that has been boosted in this way, so just don’t do it. Spend your hard-earned musical coins on something useful!

We generally listen to at least seven songs, starting with the spotlighted tracks if there are any. After that we go to the most recent by clicking on your ‘tracks’. This way we can hear both the things you want us to hear the most (your spotlighted tracks), and then whatever you have been releasing to SoundCloud most recently. This enables us to get a rough feel of what you are all about and what you are doing. We also read your bio.

Our people listen to everyone we follow at SoundCloud on a first-in-first-out basis. It typically takes a few weeks for us to reach the newest additions. We always have a massive amount of music to listen to, and we use a quorum of a minimum three listeners, so please be patient and eventually you will be heard.

Winter 2024-25 continues a ninth year of Wud Records Musical Discoveries compilations. That means 98 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 Winter 2024-25 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/

A refreshed playlist for the Wud Records Archives Sampler has been published. We didn’t refresh the old playlist since we added the Demon Groove Lizards to the Archives a few years ago, and felt that such a change was long overdue!

The Archives section of our website is where we honour and remember the music of great bands from the past that we have known and loved. Once in a while, somebody who was actually a part of making the music in question discovers their music on our site. So far, everyone has been delighted to find it!

We hope that you, our listener, will listen to these bands and enjoy hearing them as much as we enjoyed following them and attending their shows back in the day.

The new Sampler Playlist contains one track from each of our Archive bands, to whet your appetite and tickle your ears, and hopefully engage your curiosity enough for you to investigate them further.

The outgoing, old playlist has the following songs:

Demon Groove Lizards – Halloween Jack
Critical Error – Walk on Water
Andromeda – Sad
Dayglow – Grain of Sand
Watershed – Capital City Hero
Guarana – The Real World
Search Party – Inner Time
Stephen Yates – Beautificus
The Chillun – The Wine
Recluse – Reactions
Goodstaff – Superstitious White or Black
Murdock – Nocturnal
Prism – Blindest Night
Pyg – The Way It Is
Ember – Aquamarine
Spacegoats – Born of Stars

The new, refreshed playlist has the following songs:

Andromeda – Nothingtime TV
Watershed – Living in the Gap
Dayglow – Grain of Sand
Goodstaff – Billie Holiday
Recluse – Promise the World
Guarana – Old Life
Search Party – One Direction
Stephen Yates – Gorilla Tango
Demon Groove Lizards – Bring Me Home
The Chillun – Your Fault Not Mine
Critical Error – The Wilderness
Prism – Amnesty
Murdock – Box Shots
Pyg – Amerikay
Ember – Aquamarine
Spacegoats – Born of Stars

There are more bands we would simply love to add to the collection, of which we have nothing but memories. If you should have anything at all that you can share, please get in touch!

These are the bands we are most interested in:

* Midriff (Plymouth c.1999-2001) – Chris Brian (guitar/vocals), Simon Patel (bass), Lee Ireland (drums) [Ordinary Song, Sobriety]
* Free Barrabas (Torbay c.2000-01) – Steve Sowden (guitar/vocals), ??? (bass), ??? (drums) [Rodeo]
* Swamp Thing (Brixham c.1988-90) – Marston Hawkins (bass, vocals), Rodney (uberwiddlesome virtuoso guitar), ??? (drums) [Swamp Rap, the Swamp Thing Fanzine]
* The Sicillians (Drewsteignton c.1986-8) – ??? (vocals, guitar), Dave Costello (lead guitar, bass), Pete Bravo (bass, trumpet), Tim Peirce (lead congas), Tim Irons (drums) [The Fifth Letter, Move On Up, Nice Green Ice Cream]
* The Vibration Doctors (Sidmouth c.1985-8) – Rick Austin (bass/vocals/didjeridoo), ??? (guitar/vocals), ??? (drums)
* Rough Cut (Ipplepen c. 1988-90) – ??? (guitar/vocals). ??? (self-built guitar/vocals), ??? (bass), ??? (drums)

Please also contact us if you should have any material by any of the existing Archive bands which may be of interest. The best email would be archive @ wudrecords . co . uk (without the spaces). We would love to hear from you!

Both the new playlist and the old playlist are on SoundCloud.

To listen to the old Archives Sampler playlist, please click here.

To listen to the new playlist, please click here.

To listen to the new playlist here at the Wud Records website, you will find it at the home page for the Archives, which you can reach by clicking here.