News

Pok: Wear a Feather in Your Hat

Posted by Wudmaster on 06/03/24

Wear a Feather in Your Hat is a brand new release from Pok the Bard. It has been added to his growing Anthology album.

Wear a Feather in Your Hat is a charming and entertaining piece of acoustic rock that gallops along at 180 BPM. The song was recorded using A = 432 hz.

Wear a Feather in Your Hat tells the tale of a group of travellers and their adventurers on the road in the USA. They encounter groups of native Americans and a man with purple skin. Then the whole scene shifts and transforms into something else entirely.

Pok plays all three guitar parts on his beautiful Gretsch acoustic. The lead part was improvised and recorded in one long continuous take. It was also the first take, as it happens.

Sven’s infectious drum track is truly a joy, and he had a blast playing it. He also added an assortment of percussion instruments that he had brought along to the session, just in case.

Maxx plays a delightfully understated bass that glues everything together perfectly.

Several more of Pok’s songs are nearing their completion. We hope to be able to release more of them in the coming days and weeks. Please be sure to follow our News service, as well as Twitter and BlueSky so that you know when they are released.

We tend to tell people about new releases at our Bandcamp Community first of all. If you want to be among the first to hear our new releases, you can join our community by clicking here. It’s free to sign up. Bandcamp is the best music platform on the internet for independent artists and small labels like ours.

If you would like to download or listen to Wear a Feather in Your Hat at Bandcamp, please click here.

If you would prefer to listen to it at SoundCloud instead, please click here.

To download Pok’s entire Anthology album as it stands right now, please click here.

Pok with the Gretsch acoustic he used for Wear a Feather in Your Hat.

Sue Nitti

Pok: Anthology album added to SoundCloud

Posted by Wudmaster on 05/03/24

Pok‘s Anthology album added to SoundCloud? Get away! It isn’t, is it?

Actually, yes it is. Pok‘s Anthology album has indeed been added to SoundCloud. The Sidewalk Song and The Dark, The Ring and The Knowledge are the first two tracks to be released there. They are the two most recent PokStar releases.

A new release will be announced very soon and that will also be added to the growing Anthology album at SoundCloud.

We shall start releasing more of Pok’s tracks to SoundCloud over the coming days and weeks. With SoundCloud, we’ve found it generally works best to leave a few days between releases.

Since the studio upgrade last year, we have been reworking a lot of music that was released in the last 20 years or so. The tracks on Pok‘s Anthology album are due for remixing and remastering now that we can hear them properly! It certainly helps, does that…

A number of Pok‘s other classic songs are nearing completion and we hope to be able to release more of them over the coming weeks.

Although we shall probably not be announcing here in the Wud Reecords News Service further SoundCloud additions of songs that are already released to Bandcamp, we shall certainly be letting you know on BlueSky and on Twitter. Make sure you follow us on both of those platforms.

We still have a few codes available for BlueSky. Send an email to info @ wudrecords .co.uk if you need one to sign up. Be sure to remove the spaces when sending your email.

If you would like to listen to Pok’s Anthology album as it stands right now at SoundCloud, please click here.

To download the album from Bandcamp or listen to it there instead, please click here.

Pok’s Anthology album can be enjoyed right here at the Wud Records website. Just click here!

For all things Pok, you can check out his LinkTree by clicking here.

The cover for Pok's Anthology album.

The cover for Pok’s Anthology album.

Wud Records: February 2024 top ten published at SoundCloud

Posted by Wudmaster on 02/03/24

The February 2024 Chart

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

We almost included data from spotify and the other streaming platforms, but unfortunately their data arrives too late from the distributors. We may delay the creation of these playlists for three or four days in the future, although this will be a team decision as we do like to have our recent hot tracks up on the website right from the first day of the month.

Truth be told, we dislike spotify rather intensely. 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.

Why Use Bandcamp?

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

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

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

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

How Did We Calculate The February 2024 Chart?

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

When somebody reposts a track, that gives it the opportunity to be heard by a potential new fan. This is always a tremendous help for creative souls!

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

Radio play and songs published at other platforms are omitted from the statistics. There may be further developments when our music is added to more platforms.

Archive tracks and bonus tracks are also ignored, as are likes and comments from people who clearly didn’t listen to the music. We have ways of knowing these things.

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

Thanks For All Your Help!

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

All the wonderful fans of our bands who supported us with downloads from Bandcamp are especially appreciated. You genuinely help us keep the fires burning and collectively we thank you for that most graciously. May you be blessed by the gods of rock n roll! :)

We would also like to say a special thank you to all the splendid people on Twitter who have been enjoying and reposting our tracks to their followers. All the support and positive feedback has been incredibly heartwarming for us all. It makes our endeavours here feel worthwhile.

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

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

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

Who’s In The February 2024 Top Ten?

Pok the Bard

Congratulations to Pok the Bard! We have started to release his Anthology album’s tracks to SoundCloud (further News coming soon) and doing so has made an immediate impact. Pok has claimed the two top spots on our new chart the very first time he has been eligible.

Straight in at number one this month is the first new entry from our PokStar. The Sidewalk Song was co-written with Mark Drower and is a very historic and classic old song. The Anthology version we made is based upon a Now recording that Pok and ourselves consider to be largely definitive. The Sidewalk Song is a gloriously bombastic hard rock piledriver in E major, full of youthful self confidence, swagger and braggadocio.

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

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

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

The Bastard Sons of Dennis

The Bastard Sons of Dennis enjoyed a splendid month on the chart in February 2024, claiming a mighty six of the remaining eight positions.

Two of the songs are from their fabulous Cosy Lube Turtle album, with their cover of Blue Oyster Cult’s Astronomy falling to its lowest ever position of three after remaining at the top position for a record ten consecutive months.

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

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

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

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

This month‘s number three song, Astronomy, is a profoundly beautiful and haunting song. 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.

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

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

The third entry from The Bastard Sons of Dennis is from their wonderful epic song The Furniture / Los Muebles. This is an extraordinary tale, which threads its way through the entirety of the duo’s Cherry Smoke Empire album. It tells the story of a dysfunctional family of fisherfolk from the Asturias region of northern Spain, who lost and then found some of their furniture following a flood. The Furniture (part one: overture) has charted many times and reenters at number seven.

The Furniture / Los Muebles was released as a single in January 2017. At twelve minutes and seven seconds in length, most record labels would consider it too long to be a single. It didn’t stop us though! For the Cherry Smoke Empire album, the song was split into nine separate parts and a different song can be heard between each part.

The acoustic progressive rock epic Sometimes from the Cherry Smoke Empire album by The Bastard Sons of Dennis makes a re-entry at number eight. This wonderful song was our number one back in January 2020 but has not charted since March of that year. The lyrics were inspired by JRR Tolkien’s literary masterpiece The Lord Of The Rings.

Sometimes appears on the album Need For Not by Levitation where it is called Resist. Mr Lijkkes and Mr Bickers were at Cardiff University together in the early 1990s and had a band called Plastic Snatch. “Look after your plastic!” as the public information film of the time reminded us.

Sometimes is a remarkably beautiful and memorable song which our duo first performed live in 1994. Mr Nation never heard the Levitation version until after The Bastard Sons of Dennis had recorded and released this wonderful song. The grisly tale of spiderlings was improvised and different every time. Fortunately, the version we recorded in the studio happened to be an absolute classic version of his tale.

The acoustic funk progrock masterpiece Good Times is another re-entry at number nine. This is an original song with an uptempo feel that made it a live favourite, and an occasional set opener for The Bastard Sons of Dennis.

Good Times is track two on the Cherry Smoke Empire album, lying between parts one and two of the epic The Furniture / Los Muebles. Good Times was inspired by a tale Q. Wim heard whilst hitchhiking. A man who gave him a ride told him a long and convoluted tale all about his broken life and this song was the end result of that tale.

The final re-entry in the latest chart is Ten Years Later, also from Cherry Smoke Empire by The Bastard Sons of Dennis. This is a song of uncertainty and indecision.

Ten Years Later features a scene in a busy cafe where two friends have met to talk about life. The song includes a bizarre and rather funny track of cafe-like mumblings, unrelated to the rest of the song, which was all recorded in one continuous take.

Mark Drower and the Everyones

It has been another very good month for Mark Drower and the Everyones. Two songs from their seminal Blaze Tape recording find themselves in the chart this month, and both of them in the top six.

Falling from number two to number four is I Know I Know You by Mark Drower and the Everyones. This is a beautiful song with a lot of history.

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 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. It 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.

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

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

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

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

Listening Options

If you would like to go to SoundCloud to hear the top ten songs from Wud Records in February 2024, as played, liked, commented upon and reposted by listeners, please click here.

If you prefer to listen right here at the Wud Records website, you will find that it is the new default music player. You will find it on all non band-specific pages at the site, including our Links collection and homepage.

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

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

Wud Records: February 2024 Musical Discoveries

Posted by Wudmaster on 01/03/24

February 2024 Musical Discoveries

A brand new playlist of all the favourite musical discoveries of the Wud Records team has been published at SoundCloud. All of the artists on it are amazing independent or unsigned artists who are making great music that simply aches to be heard.

These artists are not associated directly with Wud Records in any way. We simply accumulated songs that we all liked during February 2024 into one agreed playlist and published it on the first day of the new month.

Tracks have been arranged according to the number of plays at the time of publishing, starting with the fewest. Tracks that are early in playlists tend to receive more plays than later tracks. We are inclined to believe that the music which has had the fewest streams needs the best chance of exposure.

If you find some new favourites on there, why not shout about them on your social media channels? It costs you nothing to do so. The artists responsible for creating the music will welcome such word-of-mouth exposure. Many of your friends and followers would enjoy hearing the music too. At the very least… you might end up making an independent musician’s day.

Sharing Is Very, Very Important !!

Sharing is a massive help for independent artists. They don’t have big corporations and mainstream media saturating every channel with their product. Every independent share counts.

Giving something a ‘like’ is nice, but sharing exposes the artist to your followers. This means that anybody in your community can see and click on what you shared. They can potentially enjoy it as well. It enables somebody new to discover the artist and become their newest fan. You create the chance for that to happen.

Are you a musician whose SoundCloud track we liked, shared or tweeted during the last month or so? If you are, there is a possibility that one of your tracks that we shared might be on this new playlist.

Can you complete the challenge of listening to every track on a musical discoveries compilation? If you manage it, tell us! Tell the music makers involved. Tell the world on social media how you feel about what you heard. The people concerned would love to know your thoughts.

We appreciate the fact that in 2023 not many have the time, patience or attention span to listen to even one track all the way through, let alone a whole playlist. Anybody who listens to even half of a musical discoveries compilation is somebody of exceptional stamina.

As such, we tend to big up on Twitter the people who manage to listen to a whole playlist. If you want a bit of free promotion from Wud Records on Twitter, you know what to do.

Towards the bottom of the page is a list of the artists and tracks in the compilation. The artist name is clickable and links to an external website where you can find out, hear and see more of the artist in question. Sometimes finding these links can take quite a bit of research as many artists are not especially skilled at linking all their pages together.

A disclaimer! Clearly we cannot take responsibility for any of the content or functionality of these pages. If you find that something isn’t working as it should, please let us know what’s up and we’ll try to find a remedy.

The links we use are for future-proofing. If the artist decides to leave SoundCloud or removes their track from that platform, you might still be able to enjoy hearing them elsewhere with a cunning click of the mouse.

If you are the artist and would prefer us to use a different link to the one we added, or if we got something a bit wrong, please send an email to info @ wudrecords . co . uk (without the spaces) so we can fix it for you.

Generally we try to use the artist’s own site where possible. This helps drive a little traffic to the artist’s website, which might not receive many visits compared to e.g. facebook or spotify. We also tend to link to something a bit more future-proof than “Listen to our latest single!” as we hope these playlists will be around for a long time to come.

We only linked to SoundCloud as a last resort when we were unable to find anything else, as users can already click the track and go to the artist’s SoundCloud page for themselves.

Free Promo For Great Music

We hope that a lot more people will find and listen to the wonderful songs on this new playlist of musical discoveries. Each and every track has something that we felt was special or interesting in some way. In many cases it was a tough job to choose just one track from an artist.

The playlist is very eclectic, so there is probably something on there to suit every taste. If the track you are listening to isn’t quite doing it for you, skip to the next one and perhaps that will please your ears more. Sometimes similar tracks end up next to each other, and sometimes extremely different tracks do, so we recommend you just try it for yourself.

In addition to the latest compilation being our pinned tweet on Twitter, every week on Twitter we boost a previous Musical Discoveries playlist and a featured track from that playlist. The featured track is chosen by the Wud Records team and is one which is a real favourite amongst us.

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

On Twitter we encourage people to vote for the next featured track. These votes are added to the votes cast by our team. All the featured tracks form an additional compilation, which we also tweet frequently.

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

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

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

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

How We Work It

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

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

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

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

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

February 2024 continues an eighth year of Wud Records Musical Discoveries compilations. That means 90 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 February 2024 Musical Discoveries over at SoundCloud, please click here.

To enjoy the new playlist of great music here at the Wud Records website, please click here.

If you would like easy access to all of the previous musical discoveries playlists, please click here and bookmark the page.

Remember that we publish a new playlist absolutely full of largely undiscovered musical treasures every month and who knows – one might even include you!

Flicker: Nádraží!

Posted by Wudmaster on 12/02/24

Nádraží! is a brand new release by Flicker. It has been added to their growing HappySad album.

Nádraží! is the fifth HappySad track to be finished and the first in 2024. This is clearly fabulous news for everyone concerned!

We hope that you will love this tune as much as we do. Nádraží!, at just 2:26 in length, is a quick, hard-hitting, uptempo heavy rock instrumental.

Nádraží was recorded using A = 432Hz, instead of the usual standard concert pitch of A = 440Hz. There is a lot of information available online for anyone interested in the fascinating whys, wherefores and history of these two tuning frequencies.

It was composed in late 2000 and early 2001, before George went to Prague to visit his friends there.

Several of the tunes that he had composed very recently at that time had no title, so he asked a few of his Czech friends for ideas as to what they should be called.

The title Nádraží!, or ‘Railway Station!’, was suggested by David. The word ‘Nádraží’ means ‘station’ (especially of the railway variety) in Czech.

This all came about following an amusing and perfectly harmless linguistic blunder. A confused visitor to Prague raised his glass in a bar to some friends and cried “Nádraží!”, causing much giggling.

The correct phrase would have been “Na zdraví!” – literally, “To health!”. It’s an easy mistake to make when visiting the Czech Republic.

Nádraží! is in the key of A minor and the tempo is within the allegro range, at 138 BPM. The guitar is played on Nicodemus. Maxx plays the Plank and Sven plays mostly Tama and Zildjian.

The guitar and bass parts were recorded using the Neural Quad Cortex. George used two factory presets from the QC and he changes pickup configurations as the piece develops. These patches were called We Love Herbie (left) and Piece of Mind (right).

Maxx created his own patches from scratch on the Quad Cortex, as he likes to do such things.

Nádraží! is slated to be track #13 on the HappySad album and is currently exclusive to Bandcamp. We plan to add it to SoundCloud soon, and other platforms in good time.

If you would like to listen to or download Nádraží! from Flicker’s growing HappySad album, you can do so by clicking here.

To download the whole HappySad album as it stands right now, please click here instead.

Nicodemus and the Marshall. The edit is "a comment on the quality of the playing".

Nicodemus and the Marshall. The edit is “a comment on the quality of the playing”.

Pok: The Sidewalk Song

Posted by Wudmaster on 04/02/24

The Sidewalk Song is a brand new studio release that has been added to Pok‘s Anthology album. The song is over 40 years old, and one of the most historic songs in the Wud Records pantheon of amazing music. It remains largely true to the original. Several of its classic recorded versions from deep within the Wud Records cassette vault were used for reference.

The Sidewalk Song is a fun, tongue-in-cheek, bombastic rock song that describes youthful exuberance, confidence and bravado in a world that is opening up and full of exciting possibilities. The song has a typically fun hard rock atmosphere with fantastic performances throughout.

It was first created by Pok and Mark Drower, and was subsequently performed by Now and Wud, with Ken adding his own special flare to proceedings. You can enjoy the Wud version from a live session in the glorious summer of 1985 by clicking here.

This is in essence a very simple song, with just four chords – E7, A7, G and D. Wonderfully straightforward for tyro musicians to jam along to. There is a shout of “G!!!”, as became traditional, to warn everyone that the first G of the song was approaching.

Typical of many of Pok’s songs, it has a long intro that builds slowly. It begins from a base of just guitars, with the riffing guitar playing a fretted note on just the one-beat, and harmonics on all of the other beats. The rest of the band gradually join in to create a glorious raucous crescendo for the choruses: “The sun don’t shine for you, it shines for me!”

The breakdown was improvised and never quite the same twice. Pok used a classic recording of Now with Mark Drower on vocals as his main template, and we added a bit of percussion to keep things fun. During the breakdown, Pok plays guitar left and right whilst the main riff is handled by Fedax playing the cleaner centre riff to anchor the section down.

For the rest of the song, Pok plays Betty the Bastard (an instrument of destruction built originally by Tokai based on the Gibson SG) panned into the right channel, and also plays all the lead breaks on the same guitar.

Fedax is panned left and plays Nicodemus, paying careful attention to the various combinations and permutations of E7 and A7 voicing that were stipulated long ago by the fledgling Masters of Drone way back in the early 1980s. Precise details can be found at the page for The Sidewalk Song at the Explicit Music website, as well as on the song’s Bandcamp page.

If you would like to download or listen to The Sidewalk Song at Bandcamp, please click here.

To listen to The Sidewalk Song at SoundCloud, click here instead.

If you would like to own or listen to the entire Anthology album as it stands right now, please click here.

Pok on guitar in 1984.

Pok on guitar in 1984.