News

The November 2023 Chart

The top ten tracks for November 2023 on Bandcamp and SoundCloud have been published in a new compilation.

We almost included data from Spotify and the other streaming platforms, but unfortunately the data arrived too late from one of our distributors. Maybe next month!

How Did We Calculate The November 2023 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.

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.

If we were to start including streams from Spotify, and other platforms that our distribution companies reach, the only artists to chart would be the ones being distributed. There is a certain disparity between the amount of streams that come from our distributed albums compared to what we put on SoundCloud and Bandcamp, even though our figures there remain good. Perhaps things might change and in the future we might include more platforms. But for now, it remains as it is.

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 December 2023 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 November 2023 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 oursevles 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 November 2023 Top Ten?

The Bastard Sons of Dennis

Congratulations to The Bastard Sons of Dennis! They dominated the chart in November 2023, claiming five of the top ten positions, including four of the top five. All of the songs are from their fabulous Cosy Lube Turtle album, with their cover of Blue Oyster Cult’s Astronomy holding on to the top position for an eighth consecutive month. Can anything top it next month?

Cosy Lube Turtle has been available on Bandcamp for some time. About a year ago we released the Cosy Lube Turtle album to SoundCloud as well. Recently it was sent for global distribution.

Since the studio upgrade earlier this 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 have finished the remixing and remastering of Cosy Lube Turtle now. The new and improved Cosy Lube Turtle album was re-released early in October. We are considering holding a Cosy Lube Turtle listening party at Bandcamp.

This month‘s number one 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 climbs three places to number three. 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.

Up one from number five to number four we see another song from the Cosy Lube Turtle album. This is the opening track, Dominance and Submission. Originally released by Blue Öyster Cult on their 1974 Secret Treaties album, The Bastard Sons of Dennis would indulge in various acts of tomfoolery during a live performance of this song. Derek would introduce the band and thank the venue and sound engineer. He would also encourage the crowd to join in with the cries of “Dominance!”, “Submission!”.

In the long pauses before “It will be time!”, Derek and Chuck would spin their guitars upside down. Stuck on the back of Chuck’s guitar was a large sign that read “Throw panties now!”, and on the back of Derek’s was a similar sign that read “If no panties, bras!” Very few undergarments were ever actually tossed onto the stage, apart from on one occasion when somebody had brought a big bag full of old knickers and distributed them to the audience. Both the stage and the band were covered in them.

Falling from number two to number five is the next Cosy Lube Turtle song. It is a cover of Blue Öyster Cult‘s Wings Wetted Down, from the 1973 Tyranny and Mutation album.

Wings Wetted Down is a masterfully crafted piece of songwriting, with its clever key changes and all its vocal and instrumental melodic hooks. It is considered a deep cut among BÖC fans. The version performed by The Bastard Sons of Dennis is largely true to the original, with the addition of a riff section that Derek solos over.

Another faller, from number four to number eight, is the next song from the Cosy Lube Turtle album by The Bastard Sons of Dennis on the latest chart. She’s as Beautiful as a Foot is another Blue Öyster Cult cover, which originates from the Long Island quintet’s 1972 eponymous album, Blue Öyster Cult. The original version is highly psychedelic.

When covered by The Bastard Sons of Dennis, Chuck tunes his guitar to DADGAD. The twinkly noises at the beginning are created using an old computer fan and its assorted janglesome danglesome appendages. She’s as Beautiful as a Foot was often performed first in a set of Bastard Sons of Dennis songs, due largely to the tuning.

Flicker

Flicker had another good month with three entries on the new Wud Records chart. All of them come from their incredible 2002 album At Least 1000 Words.

At Least 1000 Words was remastered and re-released recently. It has also been distributed worldwide to sites such as Spotify, YouTube, Amazon, iTunes, Deezer, Tidal, and so on.

If you wish to download the album At Least 1000 Words by Flicker, we absolutely 100% recommend doing so from Bandcamp.

Whilst several of the other platforms also offer a download, they charge a lot more and take a much bigger percentage of that higher price. This means that you pay more, the band recevies less and a big greedy corporation takes a big chunk for itself, just because it can. It’s a lose-lose situation, unless you happen to be a big corporation who can rip people off however they want.

Buying the album 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.

Up six places from last month‘s number eight is Farsight by Flicker. Farsight is a wonderful piece of music, progressive rock or indie jazz perhaps in style, highly melodic and decorated with samples from Captain Kirk’s USS Enterprise, Jonathan Agnew and Maharaj Ji, among others.

Farsight was originally an Ug Brothers creation that came about very late in that band’s existance, and didn’t make it to a live show before they folded in 1995. For the full backstory, we recommend the tune’s page at the Explicit Music website.

Welcome to the Family is another climber, from number seven to number six. Welcome to the Family is a wonderful latin-jazz-rock-fusion instrumental. It builds from its acoustic guitar beginings to a heady climax of guitar feedback and noise. There is a lovely bass solo from Dave, who also plays all the keyboard parts with outstanding aplomb and sensitivity.

Welcome to the Family was inspired by The Godfather by Mario Puzo and a new chord from a Portuguese sea shanty. It is one of Flicker‘s most enduring and popular releases.

Oily Road Hideaway just manages to cling on to the number ten spot in this month’s chart, falling seven places from three. This is a delightful and catchy latin jazz dance. Oily Road Hideaway is the only track from Flicker‘s first album with programmed drums. It also has twin bass guitars playing in unison, with Dave panned to the left on his Fender and George panned to the right on the Plank.

A very unusual instrument called a string fish appears towards the end of the tune. This is a home-made creation, from the workshop of Pyg frontman Martin Dearmunn. A string fish is a little like a pair of dulcimers or zithers, joined together at an acute angle. The strings are vertical and played with fingers, like a harp. To play a scale, the player must alternate between the left and right side, like a kalimba.

Flicker‘s second album, HappySad, is under construction and you can listen to it as it stands right now by clicking here. Several more tracks are likely to be released in the coming weeks and months, so please keep an eye and an ear on our News service and Twitter.

The Subterraineans

Short and Sweet is an amazing, beautiful, wonderful, epic classic rock song. It re-enters the new chart at number seven.

A massive favourite for many years, Short and Sweet used to profoundly affect people listening to it whenever The Subterraineans played this song live. Like many of Dean’s songs, it is a rather poignant prophetic prediction of Dean’s ultimate fate and how he felt about his struggles.

Short and Sweet is well over eight minutes long and feels much shorter somehow. Jerry’s bass sounds a bit uncertain at the start, but he always played it that way so he must have had some idea what he was doing!

The main reason for the success of The Subterraineans these last few months is the recent remastering and re-release of their Demo from 1987. The difference in sound quality of the recording after its enhancement in the new studio is remarkable.

The Subterraineans Demo was recorded on a 4-track cassette portastudio in 1986 and 1987, and mixed onto cassette. The audio degraded even further over the intervening 36 years. Even though it was never going to match today’s standards of perfect high fidelity, we felt that this recording was worthy of addition to our catalogue at Bandcamp.

Dean tragically committed suicide in 1994 by jumping from the Clifton suspension bridge in Bristol. He was just 29 years old. He received absolutely no professional help from the uk medical or social professions. With a little professional help he would surely still be here with us today. He was a unique and charming character and his passing was a great loss to the world.

As such, we have decided to donate all proceeds of the sale of this EP and its individual tracks, beyond the first euro, to The Samaritans. They do amazing and difficult work, trying to prevent more people jumping to their deaths from that notorious bridge.

Mark Drower and the Everyones

The 215th new entry to the Wud Records charts 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.

* None of our other acts made it onto the November 2023 chart. *

Listening Options

If you would like to go to SoundCloud to hear the top ten songs from Wud Records in November 2023, 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 November 2023 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.

November 2023 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 November 2023 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.

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.

November 2023 continues an eighth year of Wud Records Musical Discoveries compilations. That means 87 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 November 2023 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!

The Dark, The Ring and The Knowledge is a brand new release by Pok the Bard!

If you enjoy songs whose lyrics tell a story, you will love this. And what a tremendous tale it is, with some extraordinarily quotable lines of everyday wisdom as well.

Pok wrote The Dark, The Ring and The Knowledge in 1985. It was based on an allegedly true story told by a friend of Pok and the wider Wud posse.

She apparently lost a piece of jewelry and then found it again, years later. It was lying on the tarmac of a country lane, many miles from where it had vanished. She was prone to rather odd events.

Pok plays a delightful fingerstyle acoustic guitar on the Tanglewood. His lead parts were performed on Marsha, a beautiful Ibanez Roadstar II that was subsequently stolen.

Pok is accompanied on drums by Sven’s delightful dancehall shuffle and Josh on piano and organ, which he played both at the same time and almost in one take.

Sven and Josh overdubbed their percussion parts and Maxx completes the ensemble with understated and precision bass that works perfectly.

The Dark, The Ring and The Knowledge includes a curious trick of timing, where a couple of beats and a couple of bars seem to go missing. It works just the same every time it goes around, so you might be able to spot it.

The song has a psychedelic or progressive folk feel, akin to the likes of Bob Dylan and The Grateful Dead.

The Dark, The Ring and The Knowledge is the latest addition to Pok‘s growing Anthology album. There are several more songs to finish and we tend to feel that Anthology will likely run to two or more volumes when it is completed.

Several more of the songs are quite near completion. We shall inform fans of Pok of their release via our News service and social media, so stay tuned!

To download Anthology from Bandcamp, or just listen to it as it stands right now, please click here.

If you would like to listen to the album right here at the Wud Records website instead, please click here instead.

To listen to or download The Dark, The Ring and The Knowledge as an individual track, please click here.

Bonus tracks for Cosy Lube Turtle are in the throws of being prepared. This is something of an unexpected development!

If you already bought the Cosy Lube Turtle album and are waiting for a free download of the upgraded, remixed, remastered version, please hang on a little while longer! When the bonus tracks are all complete, we shall be sending out the codes to everyone who already purchased a copy of the album.

So what happened? Well, we had something of a surprise recently when an old friend of our label, Dave Danielli, got in touch.

He said that he had been recording some bass guitar parts for the Cosy Lube Turtle album on his new DAW system. He even sent a couple of them.

This was a tremendous and joyous surprise! The stems he sent are beautifully performed and recorded and we are going to add them in to all of the songs.

Dave was never a member of The Bastard Sons of Dennis so we have decided to include his wonderful musicianship as bonus tracks.

For any of you who have heard Dave’s playing before, you will know just what a prestigious talent he is. Not just a master bass guitar virtuoso, Dave also composes. He plays many other instruments and produces music as well.

You can hear Dave’s extraordinary bass prowess in the music by Flicker and The Ug Brothers here at the Wud Records website, as well as his multiple talents being in great demand elsewhere. He features also in our Archives, playing drums for Pyg and the Spacegoats.

Cosy Lube Turtle is a delightful album of acoustic Blue Öyster Cult covers. Each has been lovingly interpreted by The Bastard Sons of Dennis.

All tracks are considered to be ‘deep cuts’ by the Long Island quintet’s cult following. All ten of the songs are found on Blue Öyster Cult‘s first three studio albums.

Like Derek and Chuck, Dave has also held a deep and decades long love for the music of Blue Öyster Cult.

So far five of the bonus tracks for Cosy Lube Turtle are done. We shall let fans of The Bastard Sons of Dennis know of further developments via our News Service and on Twitter, BlueSky and Mastodon.

If you would like a free download code for the Cosy Lube Turtle album, including its bonus tracks when they are ready, you can download the album from Bandcamp right now by clicking here.

If you would like to enjoy listening to these wonderful songs before downloading, please click here instead.

Al Shalliker, songwriter and guitarist extraordinaire, and the main man behind the awesome Plymouth reggae band Watershed, has finally found us and been in touch. We’ve been hoping this would happen for years!

Watershed were a truly awesome reggae, soul, funk and psychedelic band. They formed at the end of the 1980s and enjoyed a long odyssey, releasing numerous albums and EPs and playing countless shows across the whole length and breadth of the uk.

Now Al is working on a second solo album and trying to find the best way to post the old Watershed material to the worldwide web. Apparently he still has plenty of it! Naturally we are absolutely delighted to learn this.

Wud Records is going to try to help Al to digitally distribute his awesome collection of Watershed material to all the major streaming platforms.

We plan to create new pages for the various Watershed albums, EPs and live recordings. They will appear in Watershed’s pages right here in the Archives section of the Wud Records website. Exciting times ahead!

One of the greatest musical treasures we can imagine is still in Al‘s possession. When we knew him and Watershed the best, around 1990-91, Al used to keep a box of cassettes under his bed. They were all bootlegs of Watershed, recorded straight off the desk from live shows. Every show was recorded, so there were many cassettes. They were later catalogued by the band’s keyboard player, Dave Gregory.

Dave sadly passed away in 2013. What an extraordinary and eccentric character he was. Softly spoken, always kind, a gentle man and a gentleman. He read a degree in music from Bristol University, where he majored in violin and piano. His deep knowledge of music made him an absolute joy to jam with. Rest in peace, Dave. :(

A few years ago we uploaded Watershed’s wonderful Life, Times and Dreams EP to SoundCloud, along with the final quarter of a live show they performed on xmas eve in 1990.

We always feel very cheeky when uploading other people’s music without asking their permission first. So far, happily, every single one of them has been very pleased about discovering themselves at our website!

Recently we discovered that Al Shalliker, songwriter and guitarist extraordinaire, had released a solo album of his songs. They sound completely different to anything Watershed ever did.

If you enjoy singer songwriter acoustic treasures, you will love Al’s solo album very much. With its minimal production and Al‘s razor sharp lyrics, it’s a tremendous listen.

Several of its tracks are longlisted for inclusion in future Musical Discoveries compilations.

You can enjoy hearing the Silver Linings album at Al’s website and order a copy on CD or vinyl from there as well. Simply click here and his website will open in a new tab.

This new Watershed archiving project is still in its infancy and there is a long way to go. Al is searching for a local DAT machine at present. We shall bring you news of further developments via our News service, and on social media such as Twitter/X, BlueSky and Mastodon. Make sure you follow us there to keep up to date.

If you would like to read all about Watershed and see some video and links for them, please click here.

To enjoy the atmosphere and music of a live Watershed show, please click here.

If you’d like to listen to Watershed’s fantastic Life, Times and Dreams EP, please click here.

To order a copy of Al’s awesome Silver Linings album, please click here.

Flicker photos discovered? Really? Some real actual Flicker photos discovered? No! Pull the other one!

Well, it’s true. Some fabulous Flicker photos have indeed been found, sent and added to the Flicker gallery. And they are rather classic ones!

We have been after exactly these Flicker photos for many years and are truly delighted that some of them have finally been unearthed! They were snapped by photographer extraordinaire Cliff Smith in January 2001, a short while after he took several of the other photos of Flicker that are already in the Flicker gallery.

The Flicker swirly was also photographed on that particular evening. You can see how the swirly was constructed from the picture of the UFO fibre optic lamp.

There are three photos of Flicker down in “The Frumperal Way”, also known as the underpass at the exe bridge roundabout in exeter. There were green frumperals, blue frumperals and red frumperals.

The municipal council’s research concluded that abstract artwork, possibly inspired by magic mushrooms, might appeal enough to those who would wantonly vandalise the underpass with grafitti, to abstain from their sprayings and scribblings. It was largely very successful, as the abstract mushroomy artwork seemed to have enduring appeal to all and sundry.

There was indeed a massive reduction in the amount of grafitti. The friendly colourful frumperals only needed to be repainted every few years, rather than the potential grafitti paradise’s blank canvas of bland magnolia, which needed to be resprayed virtually every week. The project was therefore a tremendous success, as well as the frumperals looking really cool. It had the added benefit of making elderly people using the underpass feel less scared.

The word ‘frumperal’ was created by Dan, when he was maybe one or two years old. It means a particular type of rather haphazard drawing. One could even say some random scribblings. It went a bit like this…

“What’s that you’ve just drawn, Dan?”

“That’s a frumperal! Draw a giraffe, Dad… Draw another giraffe, Dad… Draw another giraffe, Dad… Draw another giraffe Dad… Oh, that’s not a giraffe!”

“Is it a frumperal?”

“Yes. It’s a frumperal!”

Soon after, whilst pushing Dan’s pushchair through the underpass: “Look Dad! Frumperals!”

“Oh yes! Haha!”

And then, whenever out walking near the exe bridges: “Let’s go the frumperal way, Dad!”

“OK Dan, let’s go!”

A few years ago, perhaps around 2016 or so, exeter was the traffic light capital of the uk, with more traffic lights per square inch than any other town or city on that island. The exe bridge junction, where one can find the frumperal way, had the distinction of sporting more traffic lights than any other junction in Europe.

Funnily enough, the uk also had the slowest traffic in Europe, on average. And of all the cities in the uk, exeter had the slowest of them all, with an average speed of just over 4 mph, according to a report by the AA. So well done exeter, the most traffic lights and the slowest traffic. In Europe! Perhaps there is some correlation between those two statistics.

Flicker are planning a fourth album of music, which shall be called The Frumperal Way. Several demos of its tunes already lie in the depths of the Wud Records machines, waiting to be polished and made shiny and beautiful. A few of the Ugstrumentals are included among them, as well as various other compositions. Some of the Flicker photos discovered and newly added will most likely be used in the album artwork.

During the upload, we realised that there were still no pictures of Lucy Welsman (cello) or Emma Williams (flute) in the Flicker gallery. They have now been added as well.

Meanwhile, in other Flicker news, a number of tracks for their growing second album, HappySad, have been developed further. We are hoping that at least one more will be released this year. It might even be quite soon!

If you would like to see or hear more of Flicker, there are lots of their links in their Linktree, which you can access by clicking right here.

To listen to their first album, At Least 1000 Words, on Spotify, click here.

To download it from Bandcamp, please click here.

To listen to or download the band’s second album, HappySad, as it stands right now, please click here.

And of course, to admire all of the new Flicker photos discovered recently, that have been added to their gallery, please click here.