Tonight at 8pm US PST (tomorrow 4am UK time) I’ll be the featured guest mixer on the 45 Live Radio Show, hosted by Greg Belson on Dublab in LA. The hour-long mix takes in Rock, Pop, Psych, Hip Hop, Electronics, Breaks, Funk and more. My mix starts 32 mins in but Greg drops some ridiculously rare gems too.
I’m doing / have done a couple of things for Resonance FM – London’s great station of the weird, wonderful and avant garde. Last week Robin The Fog, aka Howlround, came errrr… round and we spent a hugely enjoyable three hours going through the odder ends of my collection. It rapidly descended into, ‘have you heard this? you haven’t? oh my god, check this out’ etc. etc. We’ve all been there but Robin’s and my tastes are quite acutely tuned to a specific end of the musical spectrum marked ‘miscellaneous’. This is all for a new series on his and station cohort, Hannah Brown‘s ‘Near Mint’ show about ‘excessive record collecting’.
He left with over an hour of audio and a lot more of me wittering on about German concept albums about the body, a children’s alphabet in space LP, one-off record booth finds and cut up psychoanalysis experiments. We touched on old favourites like Ken Nordine, John Rydgren and Marshall McLuhan too but our shared love of Sesame Street‘s more experimental side wasn’t discussed. Below are some examples of some of the delights we explored and you can hear the show next Tuesday, February 9th at 6pm. NOW! (Well, part 1 anyway)
The week after that I’ll be joining both of them. as well as host of the station’s Luck Cat show, Zoe Baxter, at the West Norwood Book & Record Bar to help raise money for the station as part of their annual funding drive. There will be a raffle with prizes, some from my own collection, but most of all, there will be great music (see flyer above for details).
Pete Fowler aka The Monsterist has started a crowd funding drive to publish a book of the best of 25 years of his sketchbooks called ‘Decades of Lead’ via Unbound. There are various levels from eBook to hardback, signed, sketched and ever an option to go for a curry and have a studio tour with Pete.
And they keep coming, looks like there’s a lot of mileage in the Kylo / Han / Leia / Darth family unit. More here…
The last nine examples of my daily ‘Kosmischer Debris’ series over on Instagram – random artwork ideas, design experiments and more
French promotional catalogue / magazine for the CBS / Epic labels from 1969, comes with a 3 track 7″ of Spirit, Al Kooper and Sly & The Family Stone tracks.
You’ve probably seen this doing the rounds, it’s justifiably so. So many words spring to mind… NSFW too.
The second of my ‘Freaky Formats’ features just went up on The Vinyl Factory site. This second installment focuses on Op Art sleeves which speak for themselves really. Check it out and there’s a link to the first one about 3D covers too, there are more in the pipeline so look for them roughly monthly…
Only two and a half weeks until the Big Fish Little Fish ‘Out of this World’ Mini Vault event in Waterloo. Saturday 6th February | 11am – 2pm. Robin Hexstatic played this last year and I’ve been looking forward to it for ages because it has a space theme. If you’re unfamiliar with the BFLF concept it’s a day time party for families with under 10 year old children that goes under the banner ‘2-4 hour party people’. Kids have lots of activities to get involved in, can get dressed up, there’s a parachute dance and the parents can relive tunes from their clubbing heydays.
They’ve got a whole heap of extras at this one including Korg synth and gadget workshops. Info and tickets here
The last one I did at the (admittedly free) Southbank was a roadblock that had to be stopped halfway because of the number of people trying to get in. It all ends mercifully early and you emerge, blinking into sunlight to realise it’s not breakfast time but not long until dinner.
Love this poster for ‘Valley of the Sasquatch’ by Brandon Schaefer. Definite ‘The Wicker Man’ overtones.
Malcolm McLaren would have been 70 years old today, here’s a collection of articles surrounding his seminal ‘Duck Rock’ album release in the early 80s from Sounds. Click to enlarge
I’ve added a small news piece about the Double Dutch girls to the interview above to fill space. Big interviews were frequently cut up and placed at different points of the paper and I’ve cobbled this one back to a double page spread.
Above: The Garry Bushell-penned review of ‘Duck Rock’ which is rather damning – see the three ads below that were run in the paper the next week, all deftly extracting a rather different angle using quotes from the piece. There’s a definite whiff of Paul Morley on the tagline at the bottom and this would have been around the time when he and Trevor Horn, the album’s producer, would have been setting up their ZTT label.
It quickly became common knowledge that McLaren had ripped off several compositions and taken writing credits on the album (something he had already done with Bow Wow Wow and would do again with ‘Fans’). Not even two months after the album’s release the writs were already flying.
Back in 1981, Fred Vermorel – never one to mince his words and badly burned by his experience with Malcolm over the extremely dodgy ‘Chicken’ magazine – laid into him over two pages. It’s hard to justify what McLaren was intending with this publication (and I wouldn’t try) and thankfully we’ll never find out. There’s also a piece about the pirate fashions McLaren and partner Vivienne Westwood created that they launched Bow Wow Wow with.
The last nine Kosmischer Debris images from my Instagram – follow me there for daily experimental graphics + found records, art and more… https://www.instagram.com/strictlykev/
Great use of music, looks like DC is going to have the hit it needs by making the bad guys the heroes
More of these adorable Calvin & Hobbes / Star Wars mash ups from Brian Kesinger. Follow him on Instagram.
I’m lost for words, there’s so much to say here and I just don’t have it in me to write how much Andy’s work means to me, sitting alongside his brother Matt’s music and helping shape me as a teenager. Gutted.
Some great late 90s footage of Req One, She One and Jase (Jason Brashill) aka The Dusty Knights painting in Brighton in this new Mongrels release by Kid Acne & Benjamin. You can pick up a copy of the limited six track 10″ here, complete with signed, numbered screen-printed covers.
I found the record above at a carboot sale around 1987 in a muddy sports ground in South Park, Reigate. It was shortly after I had started to ‘dig for breaks’, inspired by hip hop and sampling, in as much as a skint 17 year old could ‘dig’ in a small town 30 miles south of London with only an Our Price, a Woolworths and one other indie record shop to excavate. I had no idea what this was but, with a cover like that and on a label called Weird World, I wasn’t about to leave it in the box.
There were no track titles and for good reason; ‘Shake Your Ass’, ‘Bad Fuck’, ‘Suck It’ and ‘Spread Your Cheeks’ were some of the delights contained within. But I knew the signs were good: black artist, 70s release, the word ‘Disco’ put me off a bit but there were all those other LPs on the back too. Who was Blow Fly? The dude in the mask and home made super hero (villain?) suit presumably, and why were all these women naked around him? The ‘For Mature Adults Only’ sticker needn’t have been on there, it was pretty obvious that this wasn’t for kids.
I got it, probably cost 50p, and never showed my parents that particular cover. It contained enough profanity to sink a ship as Blow Fly took established songs and changed the lyrics to suit his dirty mind. The classic ‘What A Difference’ took ‘What A Difference A Day Makes’ and turned it into ‘… A Lay Makes’ while ‘Suck it’ paraphrased ‘Do It ‘Til You’re Satisfied’. Purile stuff for sure and the blueprint for every Blow Fly album I’ve ever heard since but hilarious stuff to a teenage boy. With no internet it was impossible to find out more about the masked man and it wasn’t until I started touring the States in the late 90s, buying from a wider range of records, that I found out who he was and picked up the other albums on the back cover.
The Fly was the alter-ego of Clarence Reid, record producer and songwriter since the 60s, who had started changing the lyrics to hit records for a laugh at parties. Recording an album of them, he created the Blow Fly persona to protect his respectable career name and the rest is history. ‘Disco’ isn’t his best album (and he got sued good and proper for that ‘What A Difference…’ cover) but I’ll remember it with the most affection as it was the first one I found and for introducing me to his weird world. RIP Clarence Reid aka Blow Fly.
If you haven’t seen this video, which is going viral fast, then don’t delay – hilarious. The one below is pretty good too.