News

A compilation of live tracks from Guarana is the latest playlist to be restored and added to our collection over at SoundCloud. We have attempted to arrange the songs into the order that the band might have performed them in a live set.

Guarana were the masters of funk rock and had a huge live sound with Danny’s cunning usage of inventive open-string chords. They found themselves exiles in Exeter after leaving Guernsey to conquer the north island.

These versions may not have the polish and finesse that the majority of their performances had, but they certainly give a flavour of the sound and feel of the band. You can hear how wonderful their songs were and appreciate the craft of their songwriting creativity. There are not many bands that write even one song that will make all the hairs on your back stand on end, but Guarana had many of them in their repertoire.

We are not sure exactly how these recordings were made but we believe they all come from the same show and that they came straight off the desk as the bass is a bit quiet, the guitar sounds a bit dead, the vocal is a touch loud and the kick drum has a few rather eyebrow-raisingly high peaks.

We remember Danny le Pelley was the jovial, amiable singer, guitarist and frontman of the band, but unfortunately we don’t even know the names of Guarana‘s bass player and drummer. Their bass player had some rather impressive dreadlocks and played a beautiful Warwick bass, and their drummer may have been Asian and played with great style and accuracy.

Guarana used to have a tall French guy accompany them to all of their gigs with a video camera, so somewhere out in the universe there will be a lot of footage of their live shows. We would love to host more of their work, so if anybody has any more Guarana material, including sound recordings, photos or videos, we would love to hear from you.

Danny very kindly gave us a couple of CDs of Guarana back in 2002 whilst we were in the throws of trying to finalise Flicker‘s album At Least 1000 Words. There is a little more material from those recordings that we will be able to bring you at some point in the coming weeks. Developments on the above fronts will be relayed to fans via our News service and on Twitter.

If you would like to listen to Guarana: Live! here at the Wud Records website, please click here.

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

A brand new playlist of all the favourite musical discoveries of the Wud Records team has been published at SoundCloud. None of the bands on it are associated with ourselves in any way. There are not even any of our bands’ songs included in this one. We simply accumulated the songs that we all liked into a playlist and published it at the end of the month. We plan to do the same thing in subsequent months.

Are you a member of SoundCloud? We always follow back if you have your own tracks and we always listen eventually, even if it takes a few weeks. So if you would like a bit of free publicity you could follow Wud Records over there.

If you are one of the bands from which we recently liked, shared or tweeted a track at SoundCloud, there is a chance that one of your tracks might be on this playlist.

We hope that some more people will find and listen to these songs. We enjoyed them and it would be great if the artists in question could have a bit more exposure for their great work. So please listen, enjoy, share and check out some of these wonderful bands. The playlist is very eclectic, so there is probably something on there to suit every taste.

If you would like to listen to this special playlist over at SoundCloud, please click here.

The top ten tracks for August 2016 from Wud Records have been published in a new playlist at SoundCloud. Tracks have been arranged from one to ten according to their popularity.

We shall publish further such playlists on a monthly basis. These playlists will take into account plays, likes, downloads and reposts at SoundCloud and Bandcamp. Tracks that are only published at Bandcamp will be omitted from the SoundCloud playlist.

August 2016 was just a tiny fraction less busy than our record-breaking month of July at SoundCloud. We’d like to thank everybody who helped to make it so by listening, commenting and reposting our bands’ tracks there. Only you, the listener, can influence our September 2016 playlist, so if there is a track you particularly like, keep playing it!

When we have a bit of spare time we will make further Top Ten playlists going back to when Wud Records first joined SoundCloud. The way their site is structured makes it easy for us to do so, so well done to SoundCloud for being so splendid in that regard. The Wud Records charts used to be a popular feature a few years ago and it is great to be able to bring them back. So far we have published one retrospective chart, for June 2016. We shall let you know when we publish others in our News service and on Twitter.

Congratulations to Dark Company, whose song Medicines was our number one track in August. Medicines has been a massive track for us, for over 20 years.

If you would like to go to SoundCloud to hear the top ten songs from Wud Records in August 2016, as played, downloaded, liked and reposted by listeners, please click here.

If you prefer to listen here at Wud Records, you will find that it is our new default music player and you will find it on all non band-specific pages at our site, such as our homepage or our News pages.

Search Party are one of our favourite Archive bands and we still love their songs. As luck would have it, we happened upon some old photographs and a few bits and pieces of artwork that were used as elements of various CDs and cassettes from back in the day. We felt that fans of Search Party would be interested in seeing these as well as listening to their wonderful music, so a new photo gallery has been created here at Wud Records for exactly that purpose.

We believe there may be some more Search Party material lurking deep in our sonic vaults, although so far it has remained elusive. However, if any more does turn up, we shall bring it to you here in the Archives section of Wud Records and let you know about it in our News service and on Twitter.

If you would like to look at these photos whilst listening to the mighty Search Party, you can do so by clicking here.

The Tracks album by Pyg, Devon’s purveyors of the finest caustic folk, has been repaired. Tracks is now available for your listening pleasure here in the Archives section of Wud Records. It has also been added to our fabulous collection of albums at SoundCloud.

The 1999 Tracks album consists of seven different songs. There are two different versions of the beautiful Let’s Dance, one with Martin playing a dulcimer which he made himself (he’s a very clever chap like that) and a bare mix with no dulcimer.

This line-up of Pyg consisted of Martin Dearmun (vocals, acoustic guitar, dulcimer), Malcolm Learmonth (electric guitar, bouzouki), George Davies (bass) and Tony Price (drums). All of the songs were recorded by Martin of Transit Recordings at Fig Tree Farm near Butterleigh, deep in the heart of rural Devonshire. The set of photos with the plastic pig were all promo shots for this album.

Pyg were mostly a really good live band and their studio recorded material never really managed to entirely capture the essence of their live power. They played a loud kick-ass brand of what they termed ‘caustic folk’, quite a rocky variant of folk music, perhaps in a similar vein to The Levellers or The Waterboys but with a harder, edgier approach. The songwriting duo of Martin and Malcolm crafted wonderfully thought-provoking and hauntingly beautiful songs that stay in the memory once heard. The rhythm section of Tony and George was formidable in its virtuosity and the two of them had an awesome reputation. The synergy of these parts made a band that rocked bars, festivals and parties on many occasions and their reknown was international even though their sound was quintessentially English.

Besides the Gruntings album from 2001 which is still broken at this moment in time, we have a number of live songs by Pyg lurking on some cassettes deep in the vaults. When we manage to upload these songs, we shall inform you in our News service and on Twitter.

If you would like to listen to the Tracks album here in our Archives, please click here.

Should you prefer to listen over at SoundCloud instead, please click here.

The wonderful Propaganda album from Devon power trio Recluse is the latest of our Archive recordings to be restored here at Wud Records and added to our collection at SoundCloud. Propaganda is the first of two stunning albums by Recluse, the other being Ride That Fantasy, which is still broken. We aim to restore it in the next few days and when it is done it shall be announced in our News service.

Back in the day we were lucky enough to catch a few live performances of Recluse, and they were all outstanding. Their live shows were full of captiviting songs and precocious instrumental virtuosity, all from three young musicians who were utterly charming, well spoken and polite. They seemed an unlikely band of troubadours when we met them for the first time as they arrived to set up for a soundcheck at a venue in Torquay. Our jaws dropped in wonder at the show that followed from Recluse, who were the headline act on that night and on several subsequent occasions. We saw them perform live about five or six times and each performance was a fabulous experience.

Propaganda was released in 2000 and features eight songs by frontman, singer, guitarist and the main driving force behind the band, Alex Painter. He also plays bass, saxophone and cello on the album. This eclectic collection ranges from raw hi-energy nu-metal/post-punk (Let Me In, Until the Summer Comes, Parasite) to gutsy blues (Signals) to the beautiful, wistful and melodic (Reactions, We All Survive) to classic progressive live favourites (Shameful Smile, Chosen Few).

Sadly for the universe, Recluse seemed to grind to a halt when Alex went to University in Salford to read a music degree. We are lucky to have the memories of them playing live and these few recordings of some of their songs, which you can now enjoy too.

If you would like to listen to Propaganda by Recluse here at Wud Records, you can do so by clicking here.

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