Day 139.

The Reds, Pinks & Purples: two new songs by the ultra-prolific project of Glenn Donaldson. If you like your indiepop jangly you are going to like these! “Pictures of the World” and “Tell Me What’s Real” are up now on Bandcamp.

Vic Godard: the legend is back with a new album called “1978 NOW” on GNU Records. It looks as it is only available digitally and you can’t listen to all 14 songs on Bandcamp, but three of them, which is fine as a preview. My favourite out of the three? “Why Did You Shoot Me?”.

Happypills: the Fukuoka based Yuki Kondo has finally released a record! How cool! It is out now on Citrus City Records from Richmond, Virginia. It is a 10 song cassette album called “Milk Floe”. And it is really good!

Exploding Flowers: now let’s head to Los Angeles. Exploding Flowers just released an album on vinyl and CD called “Stumbling Blocks” and it does sound really good. 12 songs of pure jangle and classic melodies. I am going to play this album all summer long.

Milky Wimpshake: another classic band that makes a return. The Stoke-On-Trent band will be releasing the album “Confessions of an65 English Marxist” on October 16. The vinyl album seems to be limited to 200 copies. So run before it sells out!

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Definitely one of the hardest finds to find information about is Perfect. With that name in the world wide web you are lost really. And on top of that the one song I know by them is called “Desire”. Quite impossible. But hey, there might be some luck as this one song was included in “The Sound of Leamington Spa Volume 5”!

Being included in these legendary series of compilations that Firestation Records puts out helps. Why? Because there is a booklet and there is always some info there. Maybe that would end up helping finding out any other details about them.

So yeah, they appeared on the 2005 “The Sound of Leamington Spa Volume 5” (FST065) which at that time it was still a co-release by several labels. It was a Firestation release but also Bilberry Records (BILB 09) and Clarendon Records (W6 7CD) are listed. The song the band contributed as I mentioned was “Desire”. And this is what says on the booklet.

There weren’t many constants in Perfect — lead singer and main songwriter John Smith fronted a band that evolved with every gig — original guitarist Carl Hodgson left, so Duncan Lomax moved from bass to guitar, Andy Frizell swapped his flute and sax for bass, trombone player Dave Jamieson added a unique sound, and sax and flute players Phil and Simon stepped in to complete the brass section that made Perfect a breath of fresh air in early 80’s Liverpool. Only drummer Dave Francis seemed to stay in the same seat as the band grew.
The band gigged relentlessly and supported Microdisney and The Men They Couldn’t Hang, but apart from demo tapes (their first produced by The Pale Fountains’ Mike Head), they never actually released anything. So now, more than twenty years later, we present Perfect — enjoy…

Okay that’s some interesting details. Now we know they hailed from Liverpool, the early 80s and I have some names. The question for me is mostly about these demo tapes. How many did they record? How many more songs are there waiting to be discovered? I’d love to listen to them.

The only other hit I get on the web is from the website Link2Wales. Here it tells a few little interesting things like Duncan Lomax was also on Wake Up Africa, 35 Summers and Hal. Andy Frizell was also on Wake Up Afrika and Vernons Wizards of Twiddly. I had written about Wake Up Afrika in the past but had no luck getting answers to my questions. Maybe I should write about 35 Summers soon as they were another terrific band. This small blurb also mentions that the band played lots of gigs around Liverpool and Chester at venues like The Venue, Mardi Gras and Bierkeller.

And that’s all really. Any help to shed some light on Perfect would be appreciated!

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Listen
Perfect – Desire