Music Things

Hello Readers!

Some of you may have noticed a creepy old man is writing about obscure music.

Clearly, this is me fooling around, making fun of old prog rock and generally attempting to create an alternate fake history of music.

There's a couple of reasons for doing this...

Firstly, having spent years reading Mojo, Shindig and Record Collector, as well as endless music biographies, I felt there was some mileage in taking rock history, throwing it in the air and sticking it back together again the wrong way round, a little like The Beatles did with the tape loops of Circus Organs on the song "For the benefit of Mr.Kite" (nerd fact #1)

The other reason is my general dislike of the approved orthodoxy of accepted rock history, in which the winners take home the spoils and the musical past is presented as a nice, neat timeline from Elvis to Nirvana, with Prog rock being overtaken by punk, The Beatles invented the rock album and major labels profiting from reselling the same tired music endlessly.

Programmes like The Seven Ages of Rock reduce the confusing mess of popular music to a simple story of a handful of groups from the USA and Britain. What about South American Tropicalia, or Japanese 60s "Group Sounds"?*

So, Fakerock is an attempt to send up the excesses of Rock n Roll and poke fun at pop pretentiousness.

I'm going to make with the funnies, but if anyone reading this joined in with creating the imaginary Shameless covers and wants to take a stab and creating album art or even some music, I'm open to it.

Eventually, the random bands I make up will start connecting, hopefully leading to a completely made up world of Rock, with all the "limo in a swimming pool", drug ravaged groupie chasing parodied in fine style.

And Now a Shameless Plug for my real music things...

I make trippy mix tapes, using loops of old psych rock, afro-rock and weird easy listening music, overlaid with crackly radio noises and random snippets of speech.

Together with Dominique (My awesome girlfriend!) we produced these in limited runs of 50 discs, with handmade, numbered, individual sleeves. One was to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Newport's only independent record shop, Diverse Music, we spent a month making booklets from mount board, writing sleeve notes and hand decorating the covers. Any comments about having too much time on my hands have already been dealt with, everyone tells me that.

Here's the links...

Diverse Birthday Mix



Mix Tape for Peche Mignons CLub Night



More to follow...





*Curious readers should hunt down an MP3 of The Golden Cups destroying Hey Joe. It's a joy, sounding like a gang of bratty teens who haven't worked out how to control their fuzz pedals yet.