The Well Suspect Radio Show. TWR

It necessarily follows, that when Richard Searle (bass player from Corduroy)  was asked to present his own show on TWR – it would be chaotic.  

       

The Well Suspect Radio Show (named after Well Suspect Records, the label re-launched by Richard - in the same year that he launched a skateboard company and got his band back together) manages to cram more into a two hour slot than other shows manage in months.

  

Co-presented by Erika Ts, expect classic Northern, beat instrumentals, garage greats, wigged-out psych and soulful easy listening, peppered with nonsensical features and 'profound' banter.

Regular contributors include Brian Blessed, who drops his favourite New Wave tunes and Joanna Lumley who prefers sixties fuzz.

Richard has asked us not to mention that he was the bassist in Doctor and The Medics throughout their early Top Of The Pops period (he wrote a book about it, The Memoirs of Damage and Vom, so that he wouldn't have to talk about it) so we won't, but  regular 'fans' of the show  taunt him throughout in the TWR chatroom – listen in and join the mayhem.

 

The Well Suspect Radio Show is weekly, Tuesday afternoons 2-4pm (UK time) on TWR totallywiredradio.com, with a mixcloud catch-up archive.

You are invited.    

*Update. The Well Suspect Radio Show has moved time, day and frequency. The new monthly slot is 6-8pm on the third Thursday of the month. Same chaos.

CORDUROY - Winky Wagon 2. (The Rest Of The Psy-Fi Years)

A great outcry; a follow-up desired; the first insufficient to needs; a second volume of the funky outfit’s acclaimed psy-fi experiments required; another collection of filmic grooviness; of cartoonish, wigged-out beats, of yacht-rockish psychedelic pep; Corduroy fans insisted on more

Winky Wagon 2. (the follow-up to Winky Wagon) the final in the acclaimed series; the best of Corduroy’s ‘Major label’ recordings, plus previously unreleased radio edits and bonus Japanese album tracks - never before pressed to limited edition red vinyl

 

Released on Acid Jazz Record's sister label Well Suspect Records; this fun and funky compilation is a collection of Corduroy's 'Brit-pop' album The New You and the beat heavy late 90s album Clik! but crucially including previously unreleased radio edits of singles that never saw the light of day, plus two bonus tracks previously unreleased (other than on Japanese CD versions of the albums) and never before on vinyl; see the great animated cartoon video below for 'You Got Me', one of the Japanese tracks.

 

 

 

This is another great release from Well Suspect Records and a must for Corduroy fans.

 

Skill!

CORDUROY - Winky Wagon (Best Of The Psy-Fi Years)

Corduroy legend holds that having recorded the three 'classic' albums for Acid Jazz Records, our illustrious heroes parted with said company and released a further two albums on a 'major' record label, investigating themes, techniques and technologies previously unexplored; this period of the band’s brave journey became known as the 'psy-fi -years'.

Exhausted, Corduroy disbanded shortly after.

      Prophecy foretold that, two decades later, the group would reform and reunite with Acid Jazz; and furthermore that the fabled 'psy-fi' recordings would be compiled by the sister label, WellSuspect Records, into a twelve track, sky-blue-vinyl collection, featuring choice tracks from the major albums, singles and B-sides. This limited edition selection is entitled Winky Wagon.

Experimenting with exotic eastern flavours, easy-soul, yacht-pop, Brit-beats and amped-up funk, the compilation captures Corduroy expanding their signature thematic instrumental palette with melodic, irresistible and beautifully crafted songs.

Out now on at www.wellsuspect.com on limited edition sky blue vinyl and CD.

Skill!

Corduroy - Rare Stock

Acid Jazz Records have just released a Corduroy rarities album to coincide with an extensive U.K tour which the band are undertaking (the first in twenty years) to promote the groups most recent studio album, Return Of The Fabric Four.

Rare Stock is the compilation title and it is very interesting indeed, featuring previously unreleased material, 'lost' album tracks, shelved singles, demos, remixes and, incredibly, a recording of the band's very first rehearsal. ModSpeed got it's hands on a copy for review.

First off is Clockwork Man (Louder Faster Version), a heavy riffing, funk-pop radio-friendly number; part of a fourth album recording session for Acid Jazz that never saw the light of day at the time.

Man Alive is a protest song, catchy and smouldering with hints of trip-hop and virtuoso vocals.

Goober Grape, a mod jazz instrumental recorded to a reel to reel tape recorder in the bands living room during a band practise session, the groups first ever practise session, which sets the groovy template for the bands debut album DadManCat.

Summer In My Eye (Eddie Piller Remix) is a percussion heavy Latin re-tweak featuring Snowboy on all things with skins, by the Acid Jazz Record label boss; the original song features on the High Havoc album.

Finally Atlanta is another catchy and brooding song that spins a disturbing yarn about celebrity stalkers and fanatical fans. 

Mini (Ashley Beedle Remix), possibly Corduroy's most famous song, from the Out Of Here album, remixed for dance-floors.

The Mandelbrot Set is a psychedelic, nursery rhyme-esque, ditty about fractals, mathematics and creation; far out man.

Hikky Burr is a irresistibly funky version of the Quincy Jones number, again from the antiquated rehearsal tape that was played to Acid Jazz which secured the band their record deal; lo-fi and brilliant.

The Impossible Smile (Demo); a demo of a song for the bands fifth studio album Clik!, with slightly different lyrics and a lighter feel than the finished version.

Get Ron Carter is a short cool jazz influenced workout that didn't make it to an album release.

Very Yeah (Sing-Song Version); a version of the famous instrumental from High Havoc, with added vocals and scheduled to be a single; the single was subsequently shelved in favour of Motorhead.

E-Type (Demo), only on the CD version of the compilation, not on the vinyl, is the audio from the video E-Type that can be found on youtube.

All in all a very strong body of work.
Check them out live if you get the chance.

 

Corduroy - BLaCkMaiL

Corduroy have released another track from their very excellent new album Return Of The Fabric Four ... Blackmail. 

On seven inch vinyl, available now from Acid Jazz Records, with remixes by Italian producers Calibro 35 and Northern B-Boy Smoove. 

The video below is the Corduroy version from the album. Watch carefully ... to the end; it is self-explanatory. 

Take careful note of the instructions, failure to comply may lead to terrible consequences. 

Corduroy - Return Of The Fabric Four

So, the first studio album by Corduroy in eighteen years is finally out, and as promised, here's a track by track report on this much anticipated record. 

The overall approach harks back to the early, classic, largely instrumental, Acid Jazz releases, (think DadManCat and High Havoc); beautifully recorded in Deptford's 2-Bit Studios, the sound is undeniably retro, with throw-back influences and vintage recording techniques, yet refreshingly forward looking thanks to the extravagant yet economic four-piece, drum/bass/guitar & keys, arrangements. Citing punk, easy-listening, TV and movie themes, jazz, funk, mod and British R&B, it's been a long wait and it's been well worth it.

Side 1.

Magic Mountain. The album opener, the best cheeky-kids-television-show-theme-tune that never was, named after a seventies skate-park and already reviewed, with video, here.

The Cleaner. Jazz influenced and super-spy cool, Steve McQueen in Bullitt meets the Pink Panther theme, driven by a sixties bass riff, swinging cymbals and Farfisa melody.

Return Of The Fabric Four. The album title track, Quincy Jones meets Johnny Pate, funky on the feet and cunningly syncopated; a mission statement.

Sambarella. Latin grooves like Sergio Mendez in Basil 66', sweet vocal Ba Ba Ba's in a sweeter plate-reverb Jus. Effortlessly groovy.

Blackmail. Relentless and claustrophobic, punky bass with vibrato guitar line, electric piano designed to cause insomnia and make the guilty pay up. Video here.

Snake Appeal. Beatnick lounge-room beats, Osca Peterson grand piano and Electric Prunes fuzz-tone guitar. Easy like dry Martinis in the sun ... two olives.

Side 2.

Saturday Club. The Who meets The Kinks meets Small Faces; reviewed with video here. 

Waltz For Christoph. Named after the baddie in Spectre, a jazz waltz for Christoph Waltz;  for head-nodders, chinstrokers and stylish actors when they enter the room whistling.

Sign Of The Cat. A small tune with big ideas, twelve-string melodies, inscrutably funky bass with a supple psychedelic keyboard backbone. 

The Slingbacks Solution. Tribal drumming that kick-starts a funny foot-stomping, hand-bag kitsch, twelve-bar number with a twist... crazy!

Jumping Spider. More bounce than a super-ball; Devo meets Jean-Jacques Burnel, itchy guitar runs and a thousand keyboard trajectories....and then it's gone.

Botany Five-O. Seaside funk for the dapper-clad soul boys, Bill Withers meets Ronnie Laws with fast clavi-chords and jazz groove guitar solo finish.

'Corduroy are: Ben Addison, Scott Addison, Richard Searle, Simon Nelson-Smith.
Produced by Corduroy and Andrew Jones, all songs written by Corduroy, sleeve illustration by Ben Addison, released on Acid Jazz Records. Richard plays Danelectro Bass guitars.'

Oh...and it's on white vinyl.

   


 

CORDUROY - Saturday Club

Every once in a long while, a song appears from nowhere to capture the heart and soul of would-be music lovers, beaten to the ear bone by karaoke chart crooners and auto-tuned bedroom rap, waiting for fresh and exciting sounds to recapture the life affirming joy that only really great music can offer; Saturday Club is such a song. Corduroy are truly back!

This, the second track to materialize from the much anticipated Return Of The Fabric Four album (see earlier post for Magic Mountain) is an effortless mod-drenched celebration of the weekend and all those who live for it. 

Driven throughout by a relentless, Louis Louis-esque electric piano riff, British R&B guitar chords, vintage drumming and bass licks from heaven, the vocal is euphoric and soulful .... and then there's the middle eight; a jazz keyboard solo, skillfully played over guitar power chords. It shouldn't work but it does and it's genius. 

Saturday Club is out now through all the usual digital outlets; we'll have to wait until late May for the vinyl.

CORDUROY - Magic Mountain

Nineteen years ago one of the seminal bands of the nineties Acid Jazz scene split up; that band was Corduroy. Their story is well documented (see this article for the full history), but the short story is that after countless tours and five studio albums, the band parted company and went their separate ways; never, it was widely assumed, would they return. So when an Acid Jazz Records press release was circulated this week announcing the release of Corduroy's brand new studio album, a great many people were very excited.   

Scheduled for 25^th May 2018, Corduroys first studio album for nineteen years is entitled Return Of The Fabric Four.

A full review the album will follow soon, but in the meantime here is a teaser track, available now through the usual digital sources, Magic Mountain.

Corduroy / Private Jones. Records Store Day single.

The first release on the re-launched Well Suspect Records label is a double A side Record Store Day, limited edition (500 copies), white vinyl seven inch single, featuring Private Jones' audacious cover version of The Jam's I Got By In Time; and a previously unreleased version of Chowdown recorded live by the funky beatnik outfit, Corduroy in 1992.

Taken from the forthcoming Well Suspect compilation, Generation Mod (SUSS04), Private Jones have re-imagined Paul Weller's punky rocker, featured on The Jam's debut album 'In The City', as a Tamla Motown stomper; expect to hear this on on talcum powder sprinkled dance-floors; a DJ box essential.

The flip side is a recently discovered live recording of Corduroy, from one of the Acid Jazz groups' earliest gigs, playing one of their live favourites, Chowdown. This funky instrumental captures the band at the beginning of their career, playing in a small and sweaty basement club in London's Soho. One for the beardy hipsters..video below.

This is bound to be a highly sought after item, so get down your local record shop very early on Record Store Day (April 16th); or if you don't fancy losing out to the in-crowd, here's a link.

The Memoirs of Damage & Vom (Misadventures in Doctor and The Medics)

Dicky Damage (Richard Searle) and Mr Vom (Stephen Ritchie) were aboard the fastmoving punk-psych juggernaut that was Doctor and The Medics; a heady roller-coaster ride that famously peaked, when music industry moguls deemed fit to hype the band to Number One in the charts with a version of Norman Greenbaum's classic Spirit In The Sky, in the summer of 1986. 

      This memoir is a re-telling of their story, the rhythm section (Damage on bass, Vom on drums), that started from humble in-crowd nightclub origin, to television saturation, massive shows, and industry infamy.

The two friends parted company at the tale end of the Eighties, Searle went to to join proto Brit- Pop-clothes horses Boys Wonder, later to morph into Acid Jazz funksters Corduroy. Ritchie, having played with punk originators The Boys, eventually settled behind the kit of Germany's stadium rockers, Die Toten Hosen. Circumstance contrived to re-unit the duo some twenty years later, an eclectic low-fi indie rock album was the result, Perfect Crime, released under the moniker Wet Dog, on Ritchie's own Drumming Monkey Records. This collaboration inevitably served to re-stoke the flames of former glories, memories faded from the forgiving mists of alcohol and denial; two years in it's conception, a hundred beer soaked 'memory sessions' later, The Memoirs of Damage & Vom is the result set to ink.

The usual rock n' roll antidotes are present, groupies, substance abuse, lives put in danger etc, plus others that frankly are not for the squeamish, but the overall impression of this collection of funny stories is that of being a 'how to – and how not to succeed - in the music business' manual. The Medics achieved great things during the decade, the book details a route from garage-punk oiks to Top Of The Pops darlings. But their inevitable fall from grace was the result, apparently, of poor decision making and ego.

The humour is dry, and on occasion hilarious. The pace is fast and often bewildering, but if you only read one rock memoir this century, read this one...you might learn something.

Richard Searle – The Memoirs of Damage & Vom (Misadventures in Doctor and The Medics) with Forward by Stephen Ritchie, is out now on ebook and paperback.

CORDUROY (lost album) 'London England Live'

Amidst the exaggerated swagger of ‘Lad-Rock’ and the self-conscious ‘Brit-Pop’ excesses of the mid-nineteen nineties, the NME Reader’s ‘Best Live Act’ awards, placed an Acid Jazz combo, Corduroy, amongst its top five...not bad for a band of who’s stage set largely consisted of instrumentals. 

Formed in December 1991,and signed to Acid Jazz Records in January 1992, the south-London four-piece’s live performance was energetic and infectious; rubber-band bass runs, buzz-saw guitar lines, creative funky drumming and a relentless soundscape of Hammond organ and melodic electric piano, combined into an adrenaline rush that was exciting, filmic and cartoonish. 

The ‘fabric four’ became an instant hit on the international live circuit, their shows a frenetic celebration of grooviness and fun.  The recordings featured on this disc are highlights from two informal home-town shows (by invitation only) for friends, musicians, and record label in-crowd. Capturing the adrenaline and audacity of a band clearly enjoying the party; these tracks are a memorial to the giddy Acid Jazz years (bum notes and all), and the place where it all started - London England.

    Track listing:

1. E-Type
2. The Frighteners
3. High Havoc
4. Something In My Eye
5. Chow Down
6. Clockwork Man
7. Skirt Alert
8. London England
9. The Corduroy Orgasm Club
10. Motorhead

 

  You are invited!

Corduroy Boy: Best of the Bohemian Underground Movement

A curious story this, one which spans the best part of a decade and borders on the lines of being an elaborate practical joke.

      A freshly employed A&R man, at East London’s Acid Jazz Records, was working on his first project (a compilation of funky organ numbers) when someone opened an envelope containing a band demo (complete with a professionally printed sleeve); the disc contained just one tune (a funky organ number) which was played in the office, everyone agreed that ‘it was good’ and should make the playlist for the comp.

      A similar coincidence occurred whilst compiling his next project, a psychedelic album; again a nicely presented CD arrived in the post, a different band this time (psychedelic), and again the track made the cut.

       This happened over the course of the next five compilation albums. No one became suspicious that whenever a new album was released, it just so happened, that a new and unheard of band materialised just in time to be included on the final running order. That was until somebody received a mechanical copyright statement, a detailed list of all of the composers featured on the label that year; one name appeared over and over again, the A&R man’s name (the former bass player from Corduroy) -  Richard Searle.

It transpired that this, ‘Corduroy boy’, had included himself, at least once, on every release that he had compiled for the label, sometimes featuring as many as six times on the same album, always under different names and never repeating the same name twice. No clues were given other than the occasional line of label copy (in small print) near the end of the sleeve credits, such and such is ‘a member of the Bohemian Underground Movement’.

      No tracks were ever released by this mysterious Bohemian Underground Movement as such, it being the ‘umbrella’ organisation to which each of the non-existent bands belonged; it's official acronym,‘bum’, was silly, slightly rude and totally fictitious.    

This ‘digital only, double CD, greatest hits box set’ (so it says on the press release) contains twenty-four of the thirty or so tracks released by B.U.M through Acid Jazz Records; it is relentless in its ambition, profoundly weird in its execution, and a very strange listening experience in total.

  

Stylistically the selection ranges from garage freak-outs (The James Coburn Cool, Groovy Ruben, Jenson Interceptor), whimsical folk songs (Wicca’s World, The Mauve), kitsch instrumentals (Action Band, Kitchener) to funky head-nodders (Soldiers Of Soul, Executive Sweet) but always with an air of the strange about them, a hint of the ridiculous. Some tracks are simply beyond categorisation (The Jugs, nut). There are comparative ‘easy listening’ moments amidst the weird time changes and psychedelic onslaught (Thrush, Illusion of Groove) but all in all, this expansive collection, although undeniably entertaining, smacks of the absurd.
       Maybe that’s the point, if you are in with the joke, then you too are a member of the mysterious Bohemian Underground Movement.

The very best of the Bohemian Underground Movement is available here: