Day 411
Un Día Soleado: a new digital single by Enzo Raffler from Argentina. His solo project name, which translated would be “Another Sunny Day”, tells a lot of his influences. The two new songs are very nice jangle bedroom pop. They are “Amigx Invisible” and “Sentirnos Tristes (No Está Mal)”.
Peter Loveday: I got this Youtube link the other day and really enjoyed it. It is one of the songs that Peter (with Naomi Wedman and Sarah Davison) played in Barcelona last March. This song is “Sunshine on Stone”. Peter Loveday was once in the fantastic Brisbane band Tiny Town.
The Darling Buds: I discovered a song called “Jump In” by the classic indiepop band. I don’t think it’s been released previously (but correct me if I am wrong). It appears on a compilation flexi disc released by R*E*P*E*A*T Records (hard to type this name!) and I really liked this track. Sadly the other tracks in the flexi are not my taste of music. But The Darling Buds one is! So I am hoping to see a new release by them in the near future, and to include this song.
Hadda Be: back in February I recommended their single “Another Life” and today I recommend their album “Another Life”. Yup, same name. We can preview three tracks out of the eleven that will be included, “Another Life”, “Wait in the Dark” and “This Won’t End Well”. The Brighton/SE London is releasing this record on April 30 on Last Night with Glasgow, a label that has been putting some nice records as of late but has some very bad customer service in my experience.
Kero Kero Bonito: “Civilisation II” is the band’s new EP which acts as a sequel to 2019’s “Civilisation I”. The band on this EP continues to explore vintage hardware to create the three songs that make up this EP. It is not as catchy as their albums, but still a very nice listen.
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I was looking for info about the 90s French (I think) band The Jellybabies. But I ended up remembering an early 80s UK band called The Jelly Babies that sounded very nice to me.
I have to thank my friend David from Barcelona who had shared their song “The Pleasure of Her Company” that was released in the band’s one and only release, a 7″ that came out in 1981 titled “De Nada EP”. That made me remember them.
Released by Stroke Your Pets Often (JB 001), probably their own label, this EP had 5 songs. The A side had “Roller Skate” and “The Rascal” while on the B side we find “The Pleasure of Her Company”, “Niki Laudas Car” and “INto the Valley of Death Rode the Five Brave Jelly Babies”.
Only 500 copies were made of this EP. The labels were just hand stamped. There are five different wraparound sleeves. On the back of the sleeve you see the same information. Danish was on vocals, Alan T Wireless & Beaver on guitars, Steve on bass and Ant on drums.
I have some CDs that feature the band like the “Messthetics Greatest Hiss” compilation CD released by Hyped to Death in 2008 or the “Messthetics #107 – DIY ’78-81 London III” released by the same label in 2009. ON the first one the band had “Candy Bricks” and “Soylent Green” while on the 2nd comp they had “Roller Skate” and “Living it Up”.
But that’s not all, they had the song “I Like Boats” on the cassette comp “It’s My (The) Age 2” released by Compact Cassette Echo and “Roller Skate” appeared on the bootleg comp “Killed by Death #1234” released by Redrum Records in 2000.
Thanks to the Messthetics comp’s liner notes we know some more details about the band.
For example we know the song “Soylent Green” came from a tape called “Sod Romance – Here Come the Fire Engines” and “Candy Brick” came from another tape called “Almost Live”. I don’t have any details about these tapes. Were they compilations? Demo tapes? “Living it Up” is a live recording.
And here are some interesting details I’ve picked from there:
The Jelly Babies were named after the favoured food of the fourth and then-current Doctor Who. The “De Nada” EP was recorded at Dirt Cheap studios. The lyrics from “The Rascal” were lifted off a children’s book, “Roller Skate” were lyrics from a friend that wasn’t in the group, “The Pleasures of Her Company” had lyrics by Paul’s father who was a 60s popstar it seems. The story of the different sleeves is that each member of the band and each of them did their own sleeve, so there were 5 different ones. This EP was reviewed by NME and Sounds.
Alan T. Wireless went afterwards to be in the band Alan Tyler and the Lost Sons of Littlefield. Alan was also the was the last to join the band. After he joined the band went to the Dirt Cheap studio again but the recordings from that 2nd visit haven’t seen the light of day it seems.
Later on the band morphed into the Fire Engines (not the Scottish band FYI) and then into the Sputniks A Go Go. After Alan left the band morphed into the Bachelor Party. Later on Paul Beveridge started a project called Birdlife UK, Steve Solo went into the Bastoids and also Stetson Stan.
What else we know? We know Paul Beveridge used to run a fanzine called Crash Smash Crack Ring where he wrote mostly about The Fall. It seems the band start happened with a tape called “Posing at the Scala”. On this tape Paul and Steve contributed most of the songs with ‘imaginary’ bands like The Ocean Bandits, Technosnort, The Red Plagues and more. After this the band formed and recorded their first tape “Sod Romance – Here Come the Fire Engines”. This tape included practice sessions and rough-mixes of their EP songs. Okay, so we found out the story of this tape. Would be nice to hear it sometime.
I found too a small bio Paul wrote in 2008. Here he mentions a song called “Digging Graves in Budapest”. Seems it was never recorded. The other good details is that the band hailed from Rainham.
And that’s what I found out. This song is very nice, jangly and poppy. Wonder if they had more songs like this… these were the sort of obscure songs I loved putting on mix CDs.
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