Thursday, June 29, 2006

Extra Wonderful Review

Extra Wonderful review by Music For A Future Age

Ok, so first of all I've never been a big fan of Wonderful the album. I love the song Wonderful and Beautiful Dream, and like Gotta be A Sin, but overall the album I have played a couple of times and just never liked it much- I'm not sure if it's because it isn't like older Ant stuff, or what really. But I bought Wonderful cd singles 1 and 2 at the time and Gotta Be A Sin 1 and 2. So most of these tracks I already had, and had heard the others.


The first 6 are from Wonderful singles. Of them, Goes Around and Woman Love Run Through Me and Norman are the best of the bunch. There is the first of a "remix" of Wonderful- this being the Clearmountain Unedited mix. I get the impression through the few different mixes of Wonderful that they were striving to get the very best mix, though it is such a simple song and catches your ear so quickly that I think the many remixes are unnecessary. One listen and you already either love it or not.

Tracks 10- 15 are from the unreleased single Beautiful Dream, and these are the ones that Ant Fans will really want, because apart from some dodgy quality mp3s, these are impossible to get hold of unless you paid an enormous sum of money for the few CD singles that escaped the net and are sold now and then on eBay (the last one went for over £2000!, so both of them together would probably cost you at least £3000!) Well now at last you don't have to pay THAT much money to own these tracks, you can at least download them. And a note about downloading these tracks: there are a few different sites to get them off of, Carty has started doing a table here of the different sites. Some of them allow you to change the download bitrate of the mp3s, and me if I was going to pay for these, I would want the highest I could get, to make it worth my paying!

So, after Beautiful Dream the single mix, we have Let's have A Fight, Billy Boy, and Shake Your Hips. These are much better b sides than the Wonderful ones (except for Norman, which is written all by Adam, no Marco, and one of Adams's quirky little songs almost like his older Ant day b sides!). Let's have A Fight and Billy Boy are great little tracks, and Shake Your Hips is a cover of a Max (Kevin Mooney) song. Try and get hold of the Max version too, and see if you can hear the difference between the songs!

The remixes of Beautiful Dream are ok, Adam re-recorded the vocals for them. Again not songs I have played an awful lot.

Onto part 2, and these are the live recordings that were spread over the Gotta Be A Sin singles from Adam's run at Shepherds Bush in 1995. These are VERY worth getting hold of, they show Adam doing what he did a lot better than many of his contemporaries- putting on a great live show.

Dog Eat Dog in particular and Cartrouble caught my ear, with the 2 drummers really shining, and on Dog Eat Dog you can hear Dave Barbe playing like his Bow Wow Wow days, tympanis ahoy! It would have been great had Adam got him back to record an album again with another drummer, most of these songs just don't sound right with one drummer, they need two, and on these live rercordings, they got them!

So I would say for the hardcore- wants- everything fan, you'll want all of the tracks for completeness, but for the casual fan, perhaps just go for the live ones.

Wednesday, June 28, 2006

Chris Constantinou Exclusive Interview!

Thanks to Ian Peel for setting this up, here we have an exclusive interview with ex- Ant and current Wolfman, Chris Constantinou!
Me in bold, Chris in italics.

Chris Constantinou

The Wolfmen

Interview for Music For A Future Age




Describe Marco in
5 words.

King Guitarist!… Patron saint to fucked up women!…

What other plans do you have for the Wolfmen?

Single, new video, album, and to play live at some point, somewhere in the future!

You've been busy making a lot of music for various advertisements - do you prefer making music for a 2 minute advert or actual songs?

We wrote some music for the Fashion in Film Festival last month as you know, which was really interesting… Then there’s the soundtracks for I Predict A Riot (James Brown/Bravo TV)… We also wrote some music for Heineken Light in the USA and some stuff for Rimmel. Adverts are easy and fun- songs are a totally different matter – you can't compare them at all.

What kind of things do you write about in your lyrics? Where do you get your inspiration from?

Listening to conversations or what you think people are saying… books… films…the obvious - WOMEN!… anger… lust… love… LIFE… death… all of it.

How was it working with Chris Hughes?

Chris is an interesting character. I never worked with him in the Ants so it was funny to see Marco and him slip back into the old Ants humour and catch up on the stories from that period. We worked on Needle In The Camels Eye Up All Nighter which are on the EP and some more tracks which may be on the album or released at some point. We were going to do more tracks with Chris but he got busy with a few other projects so me and Marco steamed on by ourselves and got Steve Musters in to help us mix them.

I saw Jackie Onassid live a while ago, and saw you play flute (!). I didn't know you played flute- what else do you play?

Harmonica!

How successful were JOA and why did they end?

Some great songs, videos and gigs - so successful from that point of view, however I was always searching for someone who could play guitar like Marco an then I thought why
not call him up and ask him to play on some tracks. We started working together
and then Marco mentioned he wanted to get a band together and talked about the idea
and it was pretty obvious that the right thing to do was to pool resources and do it together and then came The Wolfmen…

Who was in JOA and what has happened to the other members of the band since
you started Wolfmen?

Russel Milton on bass is now playing with an American band and touring. Daniel Strittmatter is playing withKOALA. Phil Hardy has a Syd Barrett tribute band…

What did you do after Adam Ant in 1985?

Formed a band with Danny Kustowe and The Count, Bob Wiczling called SF-GO, signed to Miles Copeland, then Friends Of Jack, then formed band with Annabella Lwin, signed to Sony records, then sessioned with loads of bands, then Jackie Onassid, then loads of Jack Daniels and drugs, rehab, you know, the usual… And then teamed up with Marco for The Wolfmen.

Did you enjoy being an Ant?

I loved it!!

Do you have an anecdotes from your time with Adam?

Loads!!

You worked with Annabella Lwin in the 90s, I recently bought Car Sex and Do What You Do on cd and wondered to myself why on earth there wasn't an album.?
What happen
ed there?? How did you get involved with Annabella?

Think I got involved with Annabella through Bob (The Count)… It’s funny because I was taking to Marco today about the possibility of releasing the material we recorded prior to Do What You Do, which was so much better. Some of it was produced by Guy Chambers. Bob was in the original line up of course and then we had another 2 members, Chips and Jo Banham who were great but bad management and bad A&R made sure all the quality material was never released and the band they signed they fucked up… Yeah would be good to get that material out and about. A lot of good stuff.

What tracks will be on the EP?

Jackie Says, Up All Nighter, Needle In The Camels Eye, If You Talk Like That

Will there be an album?

Of course – many.

Has music made you wealthy wise and/or happy?

You can't beat the buzz you get after doing a great gig or writing and recording a great song. Wealthy? Ha ha!

What else have you been up to? Anything we should know about?

All I have been doing is working flat out on The Wolfmen.

Who are your favourite bands/ singers, and what have you been listening to
recently?

I like the singer from the Only Ones, Lou Reed, T-Rex, Velvet Underground, X Ray Spex, PiL, Captain Beefheart… I like watching PJ Harvey perform, she makes me laugh…

Do you like much new music or do you listen to older stuff?

I like some new music but it sounds like a re-hash of what we were doing - most of it worse, some of it interesting. I was at a party and listening to new music that was obviously recorded digitally and then Lou Reed/Bowie/Velvet Underground was played and the difference in sound quality was amazing. So so much better. So I was thinking that we have got used to listening to inferior quality stuff. I would like our second album to be recorded live on tape…

Thursday, June 22, 2006

Coming Very Soon!!

Extra Wonderful download tracks preview and details of where to download them from.
PLUS!

Wolfman Chris Constantinou Q&A!!
Marco Pirroni on Desperate but not Serious and Why do girls love Horses single!!

And live mp3s of Desperate but not Serious!!

Stay tuned!

steve

Thursday, June 15, 2006

Wolfmen Do the Ostrich

Before the Velvet Underground there was Lou Reed's The Primitives and a song: The Ostrich.


And at the very start of The Wolfmen, Marco and Chris remade, remodelled and bashed it into a brand new shape: Do The Ostrich, a Reed/Pirroni/Constantinou co-write, blessed by the New York legend himself, and produced and drummed by Chris Hughes.

Hear it today in the Downloads section at www.thewolfmen. net and at myspace.com /thewolfmen (Or download it and the original from my link above).

More news coming soon... including details of the new EP - out in August on Damaged Goods Records.

Sunday, June 04, 2006

"The Brass Section are just tuning up!"

Bumper mp3s for you today, thanks to Justin (Owner now of Adam Ant Net and Antrap, poor bloke!)

Friend or Foe:
arizona_4_12_82
chicago_17_3_84
milwaukee_29_4_83
pct_20_11_82

Friends:
friendz_rock_garden_10_4_1978

And Ligotage:
ligotage_live_78

Enjoy!