Tír Na HiFi

Listening and viewing this brilliant live concert from 2005. The image below is from the just rereleased vinyl version on MOV which is winging its merry way to me as we speak :) As recommended as they come....

Been listening to L'Amour by Lewis and despite the awful joke cover and the joke title/name combination, is a really terrific record.
Like a cross between ambient Eno, Cocteau Twins and Blue Nile.
Album was supposedly released in 1983 by an Alberta stockbroker/conman named named Randall Wulff who has not been heard from since.

There is a good write-up at http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19389-lewis-lamour/ and I'll paste a bit in here:

"The liner notes for Light in the Attic’s new reissue of L’Amour, the only known album by an artist known as Lewis, read more like a murder mystery than a making-of. In 1983, a guy named Randall Wulff showed up at Music Lab studio in Los Angeles with a white Mercedes convertible, a beautiful girlfriend, perfect hair, and a handful of ethereal synth-pop-folk tunes. Wulff then hired photographer Ed Colver, best known for documenting the West Coast punk scene, to shoot the starkly monochromatic album cover. By the time Colver realized the check had bounced, Wulff had disappeared. There were rumors that he had gone to Las Vegas or possibly Hawaii, but most likely he had returned to Alberta, Canada, where nearly twenty-five years later a vinyl collector named Jon Murphy came across a copy of L’Amour at a flea market."

It's available on Qobuz and I believe on Spotify - well worth checking out.

Any other records with such bizarre histories out there ?

Mark

Started listening to an album of early rarities by Capt. Beefheart this morning and I haven't been able to listen to anything else since! So out came some of the albums in my collection for a quick listen. No chance! A quick listen turned into a complete immersion into the Capt's ouevre as you can gather from the selection below. I mean where did this guy appear from? Outer space? More to follow this weekend methinks :) Any Beeefheart stragglers here?

Me oh my and my toe still curls and points to the ceiling :) The Capt. n' his merry band of stragglers continue to blow everything to smithereens :)

I've loved and cherished the music of the good Captain for as long as I've loved Zappa's music, Dermot.  Despite my appreciation for Clear Spot, The Spotlight Kid and Doc At The Radar Station, my personal favourites have always been the two masterpieces, Trout Mask Replica and Lick My Decals Off, Baby.  I often think that nobody had a greater understanding than Beefheart of the blues (particularly its inherent sexuality and lasciviousness - recall "I wanna lick you everywhere it's pink" from the title track from Lick My Decals Off, Baby).  Despite the creative expansiveness of his work, a love of the blues lies at its heart and is key to a fuller appreciation of the man's work.  This is music that is as influenced by Elmore James and Robert Johnson as it is by Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler.  Many people are put off by the surrealistic wordplay but it is important to look beyond that and to try to locate the pulse and groove of the music and to identify its roots in the blues.  Once you've assimilated the musical pulse, listen to how the Captain vocalises and phrases his words to produce something that is overwhelmingly emotional. And then listen to those carefully crafted surrealistic lyrics, and how natural a response they are to the musical content.  The sum total is a truly singular and deeply human music that compels me and provokes me and which moves me inexpressibly to tears.  Perhaps the reason for this is that there are so many sense memories of my struggling with and gradual appreciation of and eventual love of this great music which are triggered each and every time I listen.  I vividly recall buying Trout Mask Replica during a visit to London in 1990 and poring over the gatefold LP sleeve on the tube ride back to my hotel and buying Lick My Decals Off, Baby as an expensive CD import in Virgin Dublin the same year (perhaps the same shopping visit where I picked up Tim Buckley's Starsailor).  I was 18 that year and I listened long into the night to this extraordinary music which touched me to my very soul (and which still does) and which opened my ears to all kinds of musical avenues.  How much I learned as I struggled  with this music and foolishly believing time and again that I had "mastered" the music and then being caught off-guard the next time I listened and discovering that all I had of the music was the shallowest of understandings.  Believe me, you will come to the end of yourself far sooner than you will exhaust all the great music's possibilities.

mcq wrote:I've loved and cherished the music of the good Captain for as long as I've loved Zappa's music, Dermot.  Despite my appreciation for Clear Spot, The Spotlight Kid and Doc At The Radar Station, my personal favourites have always been the two masterpieces, Trout Mask Replica and Lick My Decals Off, Baby.  I often think that nobody had a greater understanding than Beefheart of the blues (particularly its inherent sexuality and lasciviousness - recall "I wanna lick you everywhere it's pink" from the title track from Lick My Decals Off, Baby).  Despite the creative expansiveness of his work, a love of the blues lies at its heart and is key to a fuller appreciation of the man's work.  This is music that is as influenced by Elmore James and Robert Johnson as it is by Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler.  Many people are put off by the surrealistic wordplay but it is important to look beyond that and to try to locate the pulse and groove of the music and to identify its roots in the blues.  Once you've assimilated the musical pulse, listen to how the Captain vocalises and phrases his words to produce something that is overwhelmingly emotional. And then listen to those carefully crafted surrealistic lyrics, and how natural a response they are to the musical content.  The sum total is a truly singular and deeply human music that compels me and provokes me and which moves me inexpressibly to tears.  Perhaps the reason for this is that there are so many sense memories of my struggling with and gradual appreciation of and eventual love of this great music which are triggered each and every time I listen.  I vividly recall buying Trout Mask Replica during a visit to London in 1990 and poring over the gatefold LP sleeve on the tube ride back to my hotel and buying Lick My Decals Off, Baby as an expensive CD import in Virgin Dublin the same year (perhaps the same shopping visit where I picked up Tim Buckley's Starsailor).  I was 18 that year and I listened long into the night to this extraordinary music which touched me to my very soul (and which still does) and which opened my ears to all kinds of musical avenues.  How much I learned as I struggled  with this music and foolishly believing time and again that I had "mastered" the music and then being caught off-guard the next time I listened and discovering that all I had of the music was the shallowest of understandings.  Believe me, you will come to the end of yourself far sooner than you will exhaust all the great music's possibilities.

Well I have to say Paul, that write up was well worth waiting for! Lovely reminiscence too about your early years. Mirrors exactly all of ours. With the exception of the hotel bit ;) Those of us who really wanted to break out of the pop/country straitjacket. No offense intended to all you country lovers. I mean all we had was showbands, musty dance halls and radio Luxembourg with a bit of John Peel thrown in. The excitement we experienced in discovering artists like our friend the Captain in that far off pre Internet/pre YouTube era was priceless. Though, of course, we didn't know how precious that whole mystery/slow time was. Now we do...

Anyway back to the Spotlight Kid. I remember a Beefheart convert who excitedly explained to me how 'he got him' so to speak. Just to treat him as a Blues man and it all makes perfect sense! Exactly as you've tried to explain above Paul. That's why the Grow Fins Vol. 1 is such a revelation. There for all who have ears is proof that the Captain was a true blue Bluesman before he put it all through the Beefheartian blender thus leaving his music out of reach for those who didn't 'get' him. Some of that is revealed on the YouTube clips I posted elsewhere.


Finally the only reason I left out the 'Lick My Decals Off Baby' album was simply because I couldn't find an image of the cover I have - mine is a '2 Originals Of' vinyl set (The Spotlight Kid/ Lick My Decals Off Baby) - which has the original cover you posted above on the inside. So I took a photo and posted it below. Of course I'm assuming it is from the LMDOB album and not 'The Spotlight Kid'....

Anyway it's definitely one of my favourites along with the ubiquitous 'Trout Mask Replica' and the stunning 'Safe As Milk' which literally leaps out of the speakers in its Mono guise, which I'm very lucky to posses, though it's a Castle Communication cheapie coupled with 'Mirror Man'. It really does sound amazing! Not forgetting the marvellous Grow Fins series and, of course, 'Clear Spot'

I don't care much for the latter albums. Read : I simply haven't gotten into them as yet! But, you're right Paul, we will never really get to the bottom of his set of mysteries. Maybe when the Martians finally land it'll make more sense to them :)

Dinner music

tweber wrote:




Dinner music

What's the first album Shane? I don't recognise it...