News

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 The old Flamplayer playlist is gone and has been replaced by the new SoundCloud playlist.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.

A eulogy to Pete from Dark Company, who passed away recently, has been composed and published. As he was such a prolific writer as well as being an extraordinary larger-than-life human being, we made a special playlist of just 51 of his many, many songs and posted the playlist to SoundCloud. The eulogy contains this playlist and notes regarding each of its songs.

Each song was chosen because it was either a favourite of his, it showed off his skills as a writer or performer, or was in some way typical of the man or descriptive of the way he was and went about life. It was a hard job to keep the list to just 51 songs.

There are many demos of unfinished works lurking on our machines that will form a forthcoming triple-CD Dark Company album. Provisionally titled A for Acronym, none of these rough tracks were included. One day they will be released, after other Dark Company albums are finished and released. We will let you know more about these things in our News service.

The eulogy to Pete we called Pete’s Area 51. It can be found among Dark Company’s pages, and you can go there now by clicking here.

Dark Company Pete’s funeral took place this morning at Topsham cemetary. It was a beautiful private ceremony for close family and friends. The tone was just right and both the Minister and Pete’s daughter Sammi spoke beautifully and eloquently. Music came from Bob Dylan, Dark Company and Black Sabbath.

Had Pete been there in body he would have been very proud of his daughter and he would have felt that the entire service was just right. Everybody who turned up to the service were the people Pete would have most wanted there, so heartfelt thanks go out to everybody who made it so special. Dark Company‘s biggest fan, Tessa (aged 16 months), felt compelled to inform everybody of a flock of passing birds by pointing and exclaiming “Yu yu yu yu yu!” quite early in the proceedings, which brought a big round of smiles to the congregation and helped everyone relax a little. Pete surely would have enjoyed that moment. He was very fond of Tessa.

In order to honour Pete’s memory, a special playlist of his songs has been created at SoundCloud. All of the songs represent his character, his philosophy, his dreams and beliefs and some of the personal experiences he had. There are a small number of songs that were added because they were his favourites. We kept the number down to just 51 songs and arranged them in a chronological fashion, by album, with every album represented.

Here is the link to the compilation playlist:
https://soundcloud.com/wud-records/sets/pete

Playlist notes have been placed in a new Dark Company page here at Wud Records. There are 51 tracks, so we called it Pete’s Area 51.

You can reach it by clicking here so that you can read and listen at the same time.