Band of Georges: everything is now released

Everything is now released from the 4-track portastudio cassette demos of the Band of Georges. It’s taken a few months to release the songs at the rate of one per day, on most days at least, and it has been fascinating to hear all of this material. Some of it has gone viral, which was a surprise considering the lo-fi nature of the demos.

There was a little music more to add to the collection, such as the version of Won’t You Come Around My Way at the start of the B-side of Volume IX, but unfortunately the rest of the Volume IX and the Volume X cassettes have degraded way beyond what can be repaired. We have to be thankful – and feel lucky – that so much of this work has survived as well as it has on cassettes that are almost forty years old.

Whilst it is true that everything is now released, as far as we can tell, we plan to release a few additional compilations. These will comprise the songs that made up the sets of various bands. Now, Wud and Rough Terrain are slated for inclusion.

We also plan to make a compilation of all the songs that were meant for the untitled concept album.

It would appear that there may have been something of a cassette accident that took place during the mixing of Volume IX. It was almost certainly recorded over some other demos that George made, of just himself and his guitar, playing the most basic versions of his songs and talking about them a bit. We might release these (many!) tapes someday, but it won’t be soon. Anyhow, a number of these songs seem to have been recorded over, which is a great shame from an archival point of view.

The rest of the cassette which was Volume IX has a number of such songs. They are hard to hear due to the poor quality of the recording (possibly at Pentillie Crescent in Plymouth) and the previously mentioned cassette degradation. George wrote the names of the songs that remain in pencil on the cassette cover. You can see them if you look hard enough.

Volume X only has two songs – a full band version of I Know I Know You, based on the Wud version, which was originally recorded by Mark Drower and the Everyones.

Then there is a song by Senga called Feels Like I’m Flying. Senga herself sings beautiful harmonies on this wonderful song she created as a teenager.

It really is a pity that these two songs have degraded so badly. Perhaps one day we will be able to visit the original Tascam 244 cassettes, or perhaps some AI program will be able to restore them. Who knows.

Although George had written many more songs, he never got around to recording them in this format. There were various reasons for this.

Firstly, it took a massive amount of time for him to program the Boss DR 220A drum machine, and he found it a slog that degraded his creativity.

It was also 1991 by now, and that was the start of Dark Company. You can hear the Boss drum machine on Dark Company’s Signmaker album, and then after that, the band’s home studio received something of an upgrade. George subsequently sold the drum machine to Flo, who was a fine bass player and owned a small brewery in rural Devonshire.

There may be further developments regarding the Band of Georges, but they are not a priority for Wud Records now. We will try to negotiate terms for publishing with our partners at Explicit Music.

We also plan to upload some scans of some of the documents. We have a great pile of photocopies, which means the originals must exist somewhere. It would be better to scan and upload the originals, so that is the plan.

As everything is now released from the Band of Georges, and as some of it has done very well, is also likely that we shall release this music to other platforms, such as Bandcamp. More news on this will follow in the coming weeks.

During the release of the Band of Georges material, SoundCloud threw a massive spanner into our works. It was just over a month ago that a SoundCloud robot deleted our entire account after we reported some spam on one of our pages. Around 24 hours later the Wud Records SoundCloud was restored, but it has been very badly damaged. We lost 3998 followers, and not one word from SoundCloud themselves.

SoundCloud have not once contacted us to tell us what they plan to do about repairing our account, which they broke. This is despite ourselves maintaining a top level premium account with them for almost eleven years. No word of apology. Nothing. We find this unacceptable.

We are looking into both HearThis and Audiomack, among others, as alternatives. They are the frontrunners, along with Bandcamp of course. If SoundCloud don’t want our monthly subscription any more, we can give it to a company that actually cares about its users.

Next month we shall release some of the material that we have been working on over the last few months. You can look forward to new songs from Pok the Bard, Dark Company, The Bastard Sons of Dennis and Flicker. There will also soon be news forthcoming regarding the platforms where you can stream our music.

If you would like to listen to any of the songs by the Band of Georges, please click here to choose a cassette to enjoy.