News

Today we transcribed some Now lyrics by Mark Drower from the 1982 Inauguration bootleg. These lyrics have been published at Explicit Music. They are also included in the Inauguration by Now SoundCloud page. Fortunately Mark did a very clear vocal performance with precise enunciation, which made the job easier.

Mark had such a fantastic voice, so expressive. His acoustic guitar rhythms were hypnotic and compelling, and being a self-taught guitarist he played some fantastically unconventional things. His lyrics were always interesting and direct. It is such a shame he had no interest in continuing his musical journey. We feel very lucky to have been able to capture some of his awesome talent on tape all those years ago.

Jon Kneebone’s drumming was also unique and highly expressive. He was definitely a whacker rather than a tappper and made a big sound. He would attach a headless tambourine to the pole of his hi-hat, an idea he had from watching his hero, John Bonham.

If you would like to listen and read using the Wud Records website, you can do so by clicking here.

If you prefer to do it over at SoundCloud, please click here instead.

The homepage for Dark Company here at Wud Records has been updated. We felt that it needed to be done following the band’s recent loss of singer, frontman and lyricist Speedy Pete Greatorex. The rest of the band are determined to keep the flag flying for Dark Company.

There are no plans at present to replace Pete in any capacity for the time being. The Dark Company recordings that exist will be upgraded with new parts in time. These will be mainly guitar, bass and drums. We shall be doing more work towards mastering and releasing their songs and albums in the coming weeks and months. We shall let you know of any such developments in our News service.

Dark Company were working on a triple CD of new songs when Pete departed. We have reasonably good recordings of his vocals for all of the songs that were going to be used. The album has a provisional title of A for Acronym. We will be keeping the material under wraps until some of the band’s earlier works have been released.

If you would like to read more about Dark Company and their current status, you can visit their Wud Records homepage by clicking here.

The Opatov Session by Dr Watson is the latest playlist to be repaired. We also updated that page here at Wud Records and added all of the lyrics and some other information to the various pages that now exist at SoundCloud.

Quite a lot of the old style Flamplayers have now been replaced with the new SoundCloud players and the results have been remarkable. We have come to realise that the music of Wud Records has become truly global. We are being played mostly between 60 and 110 times daily with nations from every continent represented on our map. So wherever you may be reading this, thanks for taking the time and we hope you are enjoying the music you’re hearing! :)

Dr Watson was George on guitar and vocals and Phil the Fiddle on violin. They played many, many times on the famous old Charles Bridge in Prague during 1997 and in several of the bars around the city. They often drew big crowds with their antics and musicianship and absolutely refused to play anything by The Beatles, no matter how many times those songs were requested.

The Opatov Session was recorded live in George’s hotel room one afternoon using a very basic cassette machine provided to him by the language school English House in Albertov. We have left the running order of the tracks the same as they were on the tape. There was sadly no beer at the time so this performance definitely suffered at least a 15% reducer because of the prevailing dryness.

This collection of 17 tracks represents just about everything that Dr Watson were playing at that time. Aeroplane was still quite a new piece and would later be performed by Flicker, and Broken Tubes was eventually given a new lease of life on Dark Company’s Mind Dance album after the digital version called Horizontal Hold appeared on Can of Worms.

If you would like to listen to The Opatov Session by Dr Watson here at the Wud Records website, you can do so by clicking here.

To listen instead over at SoundCloud you can click here.

The Cute But Weird Ugstrumentals by The Ug Brothers is the latest collection of songs to be repaired. The old Flamplayer playlist is gone and has been replaced by the new SoundCloud playlist.

These are pre-bounce instrumental mixes from the old four-track cassette portastudio that the band used to record their Cute But Weird album. The Ug Brothers wanted to keep these for posterity, as back in those days editing audio was a destructive process. This meant that although much of the material on these mixes made it onto the final cut of Cute But Weird, not everything did. Space needed to be made for vocals and other things.

Ugstrumentals are, of course, instrumentals by The Ug Brothers. There is a whole album of their Ugstrumentals both here at the Wud Records website and over among our playlists at SoundCloud. These were used for lyric writing and rehearsal purposes by the band and eventually led to the birth of Flicker.

In case you feel like singing along to these tracks, which are in effect karaoke tracks of the Cute But Weird album, we included the lyrics on each song’s page.

If you would like to listen to the Cute But Weird Ugstrumentals by The Ug Brothers here at Wud Records, you can do so by clicking here.

Instead, if you wish to listen at Soundcloud, you can listen here.

The finished version of the Cute But Weird album is available here for your listening pleasure, where you can download it as well.

The unfinished Bad Habits album from Dark Company has been repaired and added to our playlists over at SoundCloud. The mixes that have been published are all fairly early versions of the songs and most of the tracks have had more recent upgrades. The upgrades are lurking somewhere in our vaults and may – with luck – reappear sometime soon.

However, at least there is now some sort of representation of the Bad Habits album once again, albeit not the best possible one at present. Fans of Dark Company can at least hear those songs as they grow towards being completed. When we find better mixes we shall upload them and inform Dark Company fans through our News service.

Bad Habits was the first new album of Dark Company material for several years after the band disbanded in 2002. Bad habits die hard, we are told, so it seemed like the best title for this album, especially as reforming the band was seen as a somewhat contentious issue among certain friends of co-founder George. Bad Habits marks the beginning of Dark Company IV, which continues with the Noir album and the as yet unpublished A for Acronym triple album.

It is impossible to say right now when Bad Habits will be finished and released as there is so much work to be done here at Wud Records with limited time and few staff. We do plan to finish it someday, after earlier Dark Company albums are completed and released.

If you would like to listen to Bad Habits as it stands right here at Wud Records, you can do so by clicking here.

If you prefer to listen to it at SoundCloud, you can do so by clicking here instead.

The Ug Brothers have had an old playlist of theirs repaired and added to SoundCloud, along with a few fun facts for each song. It is the only surviving recording of their first incarnation, which lasted for just a few weeks at the end of 1986. This collection features seven songs that were pretty raw.

It may have been the very first rehearsal of The Ug Brothers with drums and amplifiers and noisy things like that. The song Aquarian Spirit seems quite tight and bouncy, so it may have been played a few times before. It seems to be a song that Graham knew well and he may have even quite liked it at the time because George had written it about him.

The cassette we lifted the recording from runs out before the end of Same Old Road Again, a song that was performed live many times by Rough Terrain and appears on their Howell Road Demo and Exit Stage Deaf compilation.

Graham, Marc and George were all present but strangely Dean was not. Dean was the official singer of The Ug Brothers and a massive pot-head, so he may have been too stoned to make it to the rehearsal. It seems unlikely that it was a ‘musicians only’ rehearsal as there are vocals from Graham and George. It’s no longer possible to be anything other than speculative as to what the story there truly was.

You can listen to this recording of The Ug Brothers live In Session 20/11/1986 here at the Wud Records website by clicking here.

If you prefer, you can listen to it at SoundCloud by clicking here.