Remember that starting tomorrow I will be posting all Den Baron orders! The official release date is July 1st! Very exciting!! And remember too that not this Friday, but the next one, I’ll be in Spain, so if you need any records and you want to save shipping let me know! I will have a new 7″ to announce too after I return from my holidays. Good times at Cloudberry HQ right now!

Kinoue64: another band that I have featured in the past graces the blog. That is because the Japanese shoegazy band has a brand new EP of three songs called “風 ” which sounds really good. These are all instrumental tracks, but do check out the 3rd track which is really good. I wish they had vocals in them!

Earth Earth: another Japanese band! The shoegaze/dreampop scene in that country seems to be in a great moment. I keep discovering bands all the time. Earth Earth latest is the song “Story is Wrong” which they have paired on their Bandcamp with an early demo version of the same track.

Death of Heather: continuing in Asia, here is a cool sounding Bangkok band who have released, just a week ago, their song “Mind”. The band is composed by Tay, Nine, Thong and Non and it seems they’ve been going since last year when they released their first demo. Dreamy sounds!

The Reds, Pinks & Purples: I don’t want to lose this tradition of me posting about every single new song of this San Francisco band on here. That’s because Glenn Donaldson’s project is great and jangly. Just how I like my songs. His latest tracks are two demos, “Unrequited” and “Lonely Blvd” which I suggest listening right now!

Blue Jeans: out on the Spanish label Bobo Integral is the second album by the Michigan band! This band boasts Tim Sendra who was in the classic 90s bands Veronica Lake and Madison Electric (I did try to interview him once! but with no luck). In any case this is a very lovely album which is available on vinyl LP at the moment. It is really lovely, I wonder why it hasn’t got much attention yet. Maybe that will change soon? I hope so.

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I guess it is a good question to ask how many BMX Bandits tribute bands have existed. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a few, I mean, the BMX Bandits is definitely one of the most important as well as beloved indiepop bands since the 80s. I’ve been very lucky to seen them more than a handful of times in both sides of the Atlantic.

The Duglasettes were fans of the BMX Bandits. They were a tribute band according to the Waaaaaah website too. They took their name from Duglas T. Steward, leader of the BMX Banditos. They released a split flexi which was shared with the BMX Bandits to boot. So they did what any tribute band would have loved to do, work closely with their heroes.

That happened in 1994, when they released the shared flexi with the BMX Bandits on Bring On Bull Records (BULL 21-0) that came for free with the 4th issue of the WAAAAAAAAAAH! fanzine. The BMX Bandits appeared on the flexi first with the track “Islands in the Stream” while The Duglasettes had “Love Machine”. This song is very different to the other one I know by the band. This one is garagey and punkie while the other one is as twee as it can gets. The lyrics for the song appear on the back of the sleeve.

Maybe they evolved into a punkier band. I say that because “Bellshill’s Son” the über-twee song I mentioned earlier was included in “The Waaaaaah! CD” (BULL 3-0), a compilation released in 1991 that included so many great bands, from The Bedflowers to Strawberry Story. This song is of course about Duglas from the BMX Bandits. He hailed from Bellshill in Scotland.

Bellshill (pronounced “Bells hill”) is a town in North Lanarkshire, Scotland, 16 km south east of Glasgow city centre and 60 km west of Edinburgh. Other nearby towns are Motherwell (3 km), Hamilton (5 km) and Coatbridge (5 km). Since 1996, it has been situated in the Greater Glasgow metropolitan area. The town has a population of about 20,650.

This song sounds familiar, right? I believe it is a reworking of the BMX Bandits’ song “Heaven’s Daughter”, just with different lyrics. I do find some interesting information on the Anorak Forum to my surprise. It seems the lead vocalist was called Chantelle Campling and she was then (2010) living in Sheffield. On “Belshill’s Son” she had the help of Tim Owen, who is an illustrator and brother of Jof from the Boy Least Likely To. Tim did the illustrations for his brother’s records. Then on the flexi song, “Love Machine”, she got the help from Will from the band Cee Bee Beaumont and his girlfriend Linda.

My friend dedicated a post to the flexi on his 7iete Pulgadas blog but he didn’t find any other important details about the Duglasettes. Sadly this is where I hit a wall. I don’t know if there are any other recordings by the band. Or why the change of styles. If they ever played a gig alongside the BMX Bandits. I think finding out more about them would be interesting. And if anyone knows of any other BMX Bandits tribute bands, well, I’d like to listen to that too!

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Listen
The Duglasettes – Belshill’s Son