New week. New month. April. Three posts this week as usual. And I feel I will start a new challenge pretty soon. Last year I challenged to write about bands that hailed from as many different countries as possible. I will challenge myself to an easier challenge though, bands that start with each letter of the alphabet. On Friday I’ll post letter A. If you think of any good interesting challenges let me know too. It gives me some sort of direction when researching bands. Anyways, what’s new?
Kammahav: many years ago I interviewed the great Swedish band Victorian Tin. Just a few days Christian wrote me telling me he had joined forces with Tony Jenkins from Everlasting Records and Plum to write a 4-song EP! The 4 songs are available to stream on Youtube and other platforms and they are brilliant. All of them, “Everlasting”, “A Magical Place”, “Repeat” and “The Moment”. Hope this gets properly released soon!
The Sensitive: “Forever Twee” is the name of this wonderful song by this band from Indonesia I think. It seems this song is part of a split release with the band Hong on the Heaven Punk Records label. Previously the band had released a couple of 3″ CDRs that seem to be out of print.
Agent Blå: the Gothenburg band will be back with a new album called “Morning Thoughts” that will be available in vinyl and CD. It is coming out on May 10th and it will bring to us 9 new top songs. So far we can only preview one of them, “Child’s Play”, which sounds pretty good. Can’t wait to hear the rest.
Blue Orchids: the legendary Manchester band continues making music and what music! The band is releasing a new album on June 9th titled “The Magical Record of Blue Orchids” and we can preview one of the songs even though I wish I could listen to them all right now! That is because “Love is a Wave” sounds terrific and I can’t have enough. The album will be available on vinyl and CD.
Laveda: from Albany, NY, comes a duo that I know nothing about. They have one song on their Bandcamp called “Dream. Sleep.” that sounds brilliant. It is dreamy, it is fuzzy, it is poppy. I look forward to more songs by them in the near future. I hope that happens. One is way too little.
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And I was thinking that Alpaca Sports was the only “Alpaca” band I was ever going to meet. Well, many many years ago, in the 80s, in New Zealand, there were the Alpaca Brothers. And they were on Flying Nun Records of all places. How am I only hearing of them now?
Now I’m searching for a copy of their one release: a 12″ 5-track EP that was titled “Legless”. From what I understand, down there, in the antipodes, “legless” is a slang for drunkenness. The black jacket of the record gives a mysterious feel to what one will find in it. There are 5 songs as I said. Two are on the A side, “Hey Man” and “It’s No Joke”. The B side has three, “The Lie”, “Zither” and “Wilderness”. All of them recorded at 5 Liverpool Street during three consecutive ‘screaming skull nights’. Then it was produced by the band and Terry Moore at Progressive Studios in Auckland. Worth mentioning too is that the record came with 4 cartoon postcards. The photos on the back sleeve were created by Steve Cournane and Tony Goomes.
The band was formed by Nick Wilkinson on bass and vocals, Steve Cournane on drums and vocals, Bruce Blucher on guitar and vocals, Peter Gutteride on keyboard, Ivan Purvis and Norma O’Malley on vocals.
Aside from this release the band has appeared on 4 compilations. I’ll start by the latest which is the least interesting as it happened 20 years after the release and it is more of a retrospective comp where we won’t learn much about from. Their song “Hey Man” was included in 2006 on the 4CD compilation “Flying Nun 25th Anniversary Box Set” released by Flying Nun of course (FNCD500).
More interestingly in 1984 they contributed the song “Gnarled Tree” to a tape compilation called “Big Southern Hits” that was put out by Every Secret Thing (EST 13) and Art Raith Productions (RAITH 41). On these same labels (EST 26, RAITH 126) they put out another song, “Chippendale House 8.8.85” on the tape comp “Inbetween Music”. Now with that name this was probably not a song but part of a gig at that venue. We’ll have to investigate.
Lastly, in 1996, they had “Hey Man” on the triple CD compilation “But I Can Write Songs Okay” that came out on Yellow Eye Music (EYE 005-007)
Looking on Discogs at other bands the members might have been involved I notice that Steve Cournane was in Buildermash, C.L. Bob, The Verlaines and The Windy City Strugglers. Bruce Blucher was in Brown Velvet Couch, Cyclops, Pointy Little Stick and Trash. Peter Gutteridge, who sadly passed away in 2014, was in Snapper, The Chills, The Clean, The Great Unwashed and The Puddle. Norma O’Malley on Chug, Look Blue Go Purple and The Puddle. Wow.
The blog “thebigcity” has an article about the band with some interesting information. They mention that the band had a wonderful song “The Infinite Trick”. I would love to hear that track. That the band later changed names to Trash Hotel but recorded just as Trash.
When searching for more info I read that at some point the band added Paul Cahill to the line-up. That they were based in Dunedin and played many times in Auckland. That comes from the Audioculture site where they have a feature on Bruce Blucher. The article is mostly about what happened next, after Alpaca Sports. They do share a video of the band playing “The Lie” live at Windsor Castle on May 10th 1985. Then looking in this same account I find that there is also footage of them performing “Hey Man” at the same gig.
There is not much information about the band available on the web. But it is definitely pretty interesting that most of the members went to much more successful bands. More well-known at least. But I’m curious about their Alpaca Brothers period. Why the name of the band? Had they been involved in other bands before? Why only the one release? Who remembers them?
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Listen
Alpaca Brothers – The Lie
