News

The recording of the final Space Goats concert of the last millenium has been restored and reuploaded to the Wud Records website and to the now rather large collection of playlists over at SoundCloud.

This particular recording is from the Space Goats Live at Glastonbury Town Hall on 18th December 1999. Outside and inside the hall it was freezing cold, the roads were extremely treacherous from the snow and ice, and the hall itself had a vast natural reverb, similar in magnitude to the Taj Mahal. Due to the conditions and the time of year there were very few revellers to witness the occasion, which was a great shame.

George on bass remembers the flute being so loud in the stage monitors that he had to retreat back to his amplifier and then crank it up somewhat in order to hear anything at all that he was playing. The bass is not very loud in the mix as a consequence because the recording comes directly from the front-of-house desk. He claims that his girlfriend of the time had kept him awake literally all night the previous night in a most pleasurable way as she was not keen on him joining yet another band, so he was absolutely exhausted by the time he arrived in Glastonbury for the rehearsal – never mind the actual show in the evening! George also says that there was a set list written for the show, but Pok decided to change it all about on the hoof so the actual running order turned out to be completely different after the set opener Born and nobody really knew what was coming next.

We have arranged these songs in the same running order that they were actually performed. There is a fair amount of gribulage and general confufulation between tracks and Pok never properly seems to settle down. It is unusual for him to sound this tense when performing live and it affected his performance during the show, with many of his vocal lines more spoken than sung.

The band had only had one rehearsal, and that was a little earlier on the same day, and you can hear this in the band’s performance, although an untrained ear would never notice such details. All the musicians were very intent on listening to each other and keeping the whole thing going, which they did superbly under the circumstances. Also on the bill that day were Gandiva and The Ripple Effect.

All in all this set was a complete departure for Space Goats from their previous sound. It was a change similar in magnitude to when Bob Dylan played electric guitar for the first time at the notorious Manchester concert on 17th May 1966. Pok described the transformation as being akin to “electric elves”, whilst Clive described the band’s new sound as “cock-rock” and was none too impressed with the way things were going.

Whilst this particular line-up of Space Goats was a one-off, they performed again a few weeks later at Exeter’s Art College. Hills had come down from London to join up with the band and there were several more singers. Clive had departed and so had Dave, replaced by another drummer who was more of a whacker than a tapper. Jim Viz from The Invisible Opera Company of Tibet had also added his considerable skills to the band for this show in January 2000. That would then be the lot for the time being for the electric Space Goats.

Some of these songs will be included upon Pok’s forthcoming Anthology album. We believe he will be returning to our studios next month to continue work on its construction. We shall update Pok‘s fans of such developments in our News service.

If you would like to listen to this latest addition to our Archives here at Wud Records, please click here.

If you prefer to listen to Space Goats Live at Glastonbury Town Hall on 18th December 1999 over at SoundCloud, please click here instead.

The Benign Inquisition album from Dark Company has been updated both at SoundCloud and at Explicit Music. Benign Inquisition is an extremely eclectic album of songs ranging from hard rock to triphop to new wave to weird dark alternative experimental electronica. Dark Company wrote these songs around the turn of the century. The band then had several years break following the completion of the writing of this particular album in 2001. The subsequent album, Bad Habits, was created after a long break, seven years later.

Benign Inquisition is at present still in its early stages of finalisation, with many of the guitar, bass and drum parts needing to be recorded properly rather than just the guide tracks that you can hear if you listen to the album in its current state. We call these alpha mixes, and they are little more than demos, with some of the final parts in place along with a rough idea of the sounds and the arrangement. We like to publish these so Dark Company fans can hear the wonderful songs that this band have made.

Improved recordings of the live instruments will be made sometime in the future after earlier Dark Company albums have been released. This album will need to be mixed and mastered properly before its final full release. Further updates of such developments will be published in our News service.

The actual upgrade works that have been completed recently consist of accurate lyric transcription, addition of some fun facts, and a variety of legal issues for which we collaborated extensively with Explicit Music, our licensing partners. There will no doubt be additions to the facts and other such information in the future when the musical parts of the recordings themselves are performed properly, accurately and beautifully.

If you would like to look at the updated pages for Benign Inquisition at Explicit Music, please click here.

If you would like to listen to Benign Inquisition here at Wud Records whilst reading all the new data added to Explicit Music, please click here.

If you would like to listen to it at SoundCloud instead, where all the information for each individual track has been replicated, please click here.

The Real World EP by Guarana has become the most recent Archive playlist to be repaired and added to the Wud Records collection at SoundCloud. Further music from Guernsey’s finest melodic funk rock trio will be added in the next few days.

Guarana were one of the best live bands we have ever seen, putting on a great show with their wonderful and memorable songs. There are few acts that we have ever seen or heard capable of the sheer powers of evocation that Guarana could produce. You could tell which audience members were listening to the music by the spellbound trance-like expressions on their faces as the band took them on a spiritual and emotional journey through their set.

The Real World EP consists of three songs that were consistently played in Guarana‘s live sets. The Real World, the title track, is the first track on the CD, followed by Cathy Says and finally Gods.

Please note that we do not own the copyright to any of the Guarana material. The copyright is owned by the respective creators of those songs. We have published them because we love their music and believe that these songs still need to be heard by the world.

If you would like to listen to The Real World EP here at Wud Records, please click here.

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

Hooray hooray hooray hooray hooray! Finally! The Wud Records default music player has been fixed and is now available to be enjoyed on every non band-specific page at our website. It has been broken for a couple of years at least, so to finally have it working again has raised spirits in the camp tremendously.

The playlist consists of the top ten tracks at SoundCloud and Bandcamp in the previous month. We shall update the default playlist each month with the ten most popular tracks as downloaded, played and liked by listeners. Tracks that are published exclusively at Bandcamp will be omitted.

This means that you can influence our playlist for the next month. If there is a track (or tracks) that you particularly like, keep on playing them and perhaps they will appear! We shall, of course, be announcing the publication of all future new monthly playlists both in our News service and on Twitter.

Last month’s chart was dominated and topped by Dark Company, with Flicker, Clonk! and Wud all making appearances.

You will find the new default playlist at many different pages here at Wud Records. If you happen to want to listen to it at SoundCloud instead, please click here.

Wud Records have published a brand new compilation of tracks from bands featured in our Archives. This new compilation features just one track from each of the bands that are in the Archives. The featured track may change from time to time and may not necessarily be typical or representative of that particular band’s creativity.

As there are now several repaired Archive playlists we felt it was worthwhile doing this. There are a number of bands in our Archives after all, and we felt that it would be a good thing to have a collection where the listener could enjoy something from each of them.

There are still several more Archive playlists which need to be repaired and we will be adding new Archive material as well in the coming weeks and months. To keep on top of all details of any such developments, you can subscribe to our News service by clicking here and follow us on Twitter by clicking here, where notifications of such updates will be published.

We are still looking for material from some of our favourite bands that is missing from the Archive pages. The details of these bands are published at the Archives landing page. If you have anything by any of the acts that are mentioned, please contact info@wudrecords.co.uk as there is some great music from bands that existed in days gone by that we would love to have the privilege of hosting.

If you would like to listen to this new Archive compilation here at Wud Records, you can do so by clicking here.

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

The Eponymous demo compilation from The Chillun has now been repaired and added to our growing list of Archive playlists over at SoundCloud. This compilation is a combination of two cassette demos by The Chillun. The first, Booze and Blues – Yer Actual Demo is from 1982 and the second, from 1984, is simply titled Demo.

These songs were salvaged from 30-year-old cassettes. As luck would have it, six of them seemed to survive reasonably well. The passage of time has not been terribly kind to the other two songs – Baby Too and Sleighride. We managed to clean the recordings up a bit using the wonders of modern technology and they are not too appallingly frightful, but sadly they come nowhere near the crackle of raw power and excitement of a live performance.

The Chillun were one of the finest blues and rock bands this planet has ever heard. Drawing packed crowds wherever they played, The Chillun wowed their audiences with great playing, wonderful songs and an unrivalled sense of fun and showmanship. Hearing these songs brings goosebumps, even now.

We hope one day to have better and more recordings of this magnificent band from Exeter in the 80s. News of these developments will be published in our News service and on Twitter should they happen.

Singer, guitarist and frontman Andy Russe (aka Angus) kindly allowed us to publish his band’s work here in our Archives. He also wrote a splendid and fascinating autobiography of The Chillun. If you would like to read it, please click here. You can listen at the same time by playing songs from the embedded SoundCloud player.

If you would like to hear the Eponymous compilation by The Chillun here at Wud Records, please click here.

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