Wolfmen Update

The Wolfmen have been holed-up in Raezor Studios for the last three weeks. Here's the latest from their email news update:

First up, we've been collaborating with a Utrecht-based Tibetan opera singer called Namgyal Lhamo. A star performer from the Dalai Lama's Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts, she's toured the world with the likes of Bjork and the Beastie Boys. The first fruits of our collaboration - Chang Yare (Paradise Lost) - are available to watch and listen to on our YouTube channel. Namgyal has also just received a Best World Music Act nomination. More details here.

We've also been working on a brand new single, which will be out in February 2009, and our second album - Married To The Eiffel Tower - which will follow in May.

Also in plan for the first half of 2009 are a string of live dates, at least two further singles, localised releases of the Modernity Killed Every Night album (starting with South America on Universal Records in March), and the long-awaited Daler Mehndi collab album, Thieves & Liars.

P.S. For Wolfmen collectors and shoppers - by popular demand we've added a new Everything Pack(TM!) at to www.thewolfmen.net/shop - a bumper 4xCD, 2xDVD, 2-T-shirt, 3xVinyl, £25-saving package! We should also confirm that the limited edition free hidden download on www.thewolfmen.net has been removed now. But we'll be back with another one soon.

Excellent news that they're working on another album so soon after this one!

Young Parisians Page added

I will be doing one a month. Antmusic and Young Parisians are active right now, go here and click the Antmusic or Young Parisians cover to see the new pages!

An Ant at the Bloomsbury and Wolf-itunes

Adam Ant CD.

The triple-folded digipack cased Live at The Bloomsbury CD is set to be released on 12th December 2008. You can order it here.

The track listing for the Adam Ant Live at The Bloomsbury CD release has been confirmed, and it will include passages of Adam reading from his autobiography on the stage at the gig, complete with unscripted ad-libbing between he, Dave Pash on guitar and the audience.
There are also, of course, eight performances of songs from the night.
The tracks on the forthcoming release (which has a total running time of 65 minutes) are:

1 A Girl Named Bill (spoken word)
2 Young Parisians
3 Never Trust A Man (with egg on his face)
4 Cleopatra
5 Boxing Clever (spoken word)
6 Catch a Falling Star
7 Cartrouble
8 Stand and Deliver
9 Early Mornings Gene Vincent (spoken word)
10 Goody Two Shoes
11 Never Trust A
Man (with egg on his face) Encore

Adam co-produced the album with Boz Boorer at the House of Boz studios in late September.

Wolfmen.

This week sees the return of Modernity Killed Every Night to iTunes, with a new digital edition including three exclusive bonus tracks:

Kama Sutra Remix / Nothing To Say To You (Alan Moulder Mix) / Nothing To Say To You (Chris Hughes Mix)
Their early EPs are now also finally available on iTunes - and all other digital platforms - as of this week:

Kama Sutra / TV's On John Wayne's Just Been Shot Again
more >>

Needle In The Camels Eye (Alan Moulder Mix) / Zip Gun / Mother of Mystery
more >>

Jackie Says (Original Version) / Needle In The Camels Eye (Original Version) / If You Talk Like That (Original Version) / Up All Nighter (Original Version)
more >>

Cecilie / Do The Ostrich / Look Like Tarzan, Sing Like Jane
more >>

Don't forget the new one - Better Days - as spun in the last week but Gideon Coe on BBC 6 Music and Gary Crowley on BBC Radio London.

And in their online shop at www.thewolfmen.net/shop they have added some more limited edition promo goodies: Jackie Says DVDs, Kama Sutra T-shirts, and Cecilie DVDs. Get them while you can!

And don't forget you can download a free remix of Nothing To Say To You on the Wolfmen website for a limited time only!

Update

I got a new job recently which isn't a 'sit down all day able to use the internet when i feel like it' job, so I haven't had the energy or time to post much, plus i share a pc at home, so again, time is limited!

However I did just get hold of a bunch of my Ants stuff from home, plus the three Slapdash Edens by Andi Vaughan, and the interviews in those deserve to be reprinted, so I am going to (with Andi's permission) reprint those soon on the website, and try and get some of the Ant stuff scanned.

I will post an update on what the ex Ants are up to as soon as I can soon.
The Wolfmen are releasing the new single Better Days and doing more gigs. Adam is releasing The Bloomsbury CD finally on Ant.net next year, and also won a Q Icon Award last month.
As for the others, I will endeavor to find out!

I had a bit of a break, but will post some more Ant related stuff very soon!
I will also change the music on the ipod player........

One thing I will say is that I recently got hold of the Adam and the Ants Dandy Highwaymen Double CD, and I have to say it's one of the best compilation cds I have ever seen for the price, along with a great write up by Pat Gilbert who also compiled the tracks and writes for Mojo.

Lots of news and stuff to read on The Family Of Noise website and Message board, so please head over there for news of the latest Convention and first FON evening the night before it, and plans for the next one (Which I will bloody be at!)

AM4SP!

Better Days Single and Video

The latest news from the Wolfmen camp is that Better Days will be their new single. It's available from October 20 and has already been described by Uncut magazine as "an unholy mix of Slade's Gudbuy T'Jane and T.Rex's Telegram Sam..."

Mixed by Alan Moulder (The Killers, U2, Arctic Monkeys), it's a sumptuous blend of 00s psych/garage rock, complete with a technicolor video montaging classic 60s surf and way-out California living, and is the follow-up to May's MOJO Playlist #1 Needle In The Camel's Eye.

Better Days will be a download-only release and this time around you'll have a choice of B-side depending on where you like to shop for music:

Head to Napster where Better Days will be backed with Hippi Luv and a downloadable version of the Better Days video.

Or head to iTunes where Better Days will be backed with another non-album exclusive - Hymn to Beauty - as well as the Better Days video, too.

To help you make your choice they're now streaming all three tracks - and the video - on their MySpace. Head there now and leave them a comment about your favourite!

Both Hippi Luv and Hymn appeared on a demo's cd the band produced a couple of years ago to promote Jackie Says and film/ tv soundtrack music they had produced.
And both are great b sides, listen to them now on their myspace page!

Terry and Merrick on T4 Transmission

Antmusic, performed by The Dirty Pretty Things, Tim Burgess, and the 2 ex Ants drummers Terry Lee Miall and Chris Merrick Hughes.

New Wolfmen Better Days Video

New Single, out on October 20th, taken from Modernity Killed Every Night.

Wolfmen and Namgyal Lhamo: "Chang Yare"/"Paradise Lost"

With three tracks of music written, performed and produced by The Wolfmen, this is the first video from Namgyal Lhamo's forthcoming album "Highland Supernova".

Family Of Noise News Reporter/ Reviewer

I have joined the new Adam and the Ants website, the Family Of Noise, as a news reporter, and also contribute reviews.

Please join up if you haven't already, we have a myspace site and a facebook page to go along with the website and forum.
Contributions to the website are welcome, so if you have a review you want to write about any Adam and the Ants or related record, or a gig, or whatever, go for it!
Join the message board and meet like minded Ants fans.

I will still be updating this blog and my website, and contributing to FON as well.
See ya there, don't be square!

New Wolfmen Interview Music OMH

This is from Music OMH.

Slight error, she calls the Wolfmen/ Daler Mehndi single Wolf Eyes- it's Two Eyes.

The Wolfmen are Marco Pirroni and Chris Constantinou, formerly of Adam and the Ants, plus friends. Two years after getting back together, they've just released their debut album, Modernity Killed Every Night. Jenni Cole caught up with them at Raezor Studios in West London to ask how they go here, and what's next for a band who've done everything?

"I was in a band called Jackie Onassid", says Chris Constantinou, explaining how the two former Ants ended up back together. 'It was my first venture out at singing and doing the frontman thing [he also plays bass]. I was always looking for a guitarist who played like Marco - I kept telling people to try and play like Marco'. "People always call me up and say do you know anyone who plays like you?" adds Marco Pirroni. "They never call me up and ask me if I want to do something with them - they always say do you know anyone who plays like you?" Constantinou hadn't been in touch with Pirroni for around ten years when he called him, but says he thought, "oh go on, I'll just ask him anyway. So I did and he said yeah, go on then". He says it soon became obvious that they wanted to do something from scratch, together. "Marco had this idea for the concept of The Wolfmen - a band and a name - and that's how it started. We had this idea that we were going to do electro punk." "We started off with one thing and then we wanted to be something else and then it started to find its place. When we found other musicians and started playing live, that helped to form the later tracks on the album, songs like Better Days, Wak This Bass, Buzz Me Kate, If You Talk Like That, Je T'Aime Madame'." The Wolfmen's first project was a soundtrack for the Bravo series I Predict A Riot in January 2006, followed by scores for previously silent 1900s fetish films that were shown as part of the ICA's Fashion In Film festival later that year. Shortly after came their debut EP and a single, Karma Sutra, that garnered support from Radio 2 and 6music. This early success drew attention not only from the BBC but also from a rather unexpected source: Indian musical superstar Daler Mehndi, star of countless Bollywood musicals and a huge celebrity both in the subcontinent and with Asian communities across the globe. "Achille Forler, Daler's publisher, contacted BMG with the idea of finding a rock band to collaborate with him', says Chris, "and they thought of us". He admits that he wasn't familiar with Daler Mehndi's work before but the collaboration proved to be a fruitful one. The single they made together, Wolf Eyes, became a huge hit on the BBC's Asian Network radio channel, spending several weeks at number one. "Daler wrote the lyrics and the melody and we wrote the music around his vocal track, which was sent to us from India on a DVD. This is the way we work with all his songs [for the album Thieves And Liars, due out later this year]: we take the voice track and jam around it until we have a chord structure that we like. Then we arrange the song in a western rock style and lay on bass, drums and guitars, and finally the western percussion. "We spend a lot of time fine-tuning the balance of Indian percussion and Western percussion. Then producer/mixer Steve Musters works on editing the track up into a mix which we send to Daler and Achille'. Finally, he explains, Daler comes over to London, re-sings the vocal track and puts his ideas in before they do a final mix.

They didn't set out intending to work on two albums simultaneously, but doing this alongside their own debut album, Modernity Killed Every Night, doesn't seem to have been a problem for them. After all, even that doesn't account for everything they've been up to.

Since the success on the Asian Network, they've kept busy with a number of projects. Their cover of the Brian Eno song Needle In The Camel's Eye was released as a single in April and will appear in a new film out later this year called Digging - a love story made by Vertigo Films, who did The Football Factory and It's All Gone Pete Tong. The Wolfmen even have a cameo in one scene. They've collaborated with Primal Scream on music for an Alexander McQueen catwalk show, and with Lou Reed on a b-side for their third single Cecile, released in November 2007.

This might make it seem as if they're a band who take things in their stride, but it's not always as easy as it sounds. Before The Wolfmen's debut gig at Islington Academy, also in November 2007, Pirroni hadn't performed live in 15 years.

"I dragged him out of retirement", says Constantinou. "Marco hates playing live. We have our own views on that so we compromise". Pirroni disagrees with this, explaining that he sees playing live as not so much a necessarily evil, "but as something I have to do".

"I love it", says Constantinou, "but I wouldn't do it to the point where it's to the detriment of the band. You can get to the point where it's having a negative effect and you're just wearing yourself out. You've got to have a strategy and a reason for doing it; it's got to be constructive, apart from enjoyment. You can go and play live as much as you like but inside a professional set up, for anyone doing what we're doing, there has to be a strategy".

"I love touring, but wouldn't do it to the point where it's to the detriment of the band."
- Chris Constantinou.

They say they'd like to tour Canada and America, where their popularity is growing and they're getting a lot of radio play. Also, as a challenge, they'd like to tour India. When they went there to play with Daler, they were surprised by how old-fashioned much of the studio equipment was, and also how difficult logistically a tour would be.

"There are no proper roads," explains Pirroni. "They don't have power generators. Touring India would need to be a very organised process for it to work, and there's all the backhanders - you'd have to consider how that would work. You pay backhanders anywhere, in the UK, the US, anywhere, but not like in India". Despite this, they seem determined to give it a go.

"We're talking to Daler about it as an option", Constantinou says. "We were thinking of going in September and that's still being discussed but it would be such a difficult place to tour. It comes down to practicalities. It would have to be just him and The Wolfmen - a five piece band with a percussionist. It couldn't be a 13-piece band".

And, of course, they need to take time off too, to recharge their batteries and to write new material.

"That's what we're doing now", says Constantinou. "We're just assimilating. We're going through everything now that we've done in the last three or four years and there's so much stuff. We're going through it with a guy who works here, Matthew, and we're trying to section it out - how many songs are for us, how many songs are for other projects we're working on, for films, for adverts. There's a hell of a lot to go through."

"We have to write some new music as well. We can't wait - it's been a while since we've been writing just for us. We've been a bit sidetracked by the business side of it and the other projects we've been doing, including a project with Tibetan music".

They also hint at a project with "an Irish musician", about which they don't want to give any more information yet. But all of this is in the future, and as for plans for a second album, "We've barely released the first one yet!" Pirroni points out. With such a varied and exciting output behind them so far, though, is it any surprise that we can't wait to hear it?

- Jenni Cole, 8/2008

...Merrick, Terry Lee, Gary Tibbs........

Merrick, Terry and Gary all met up at Chris' garden in Bath last week, Merrick and Terry Lee are to feature in an upcoming episode of Transmission on Channel 4 in the Uk.

More details can be found here!

More pictures can be found here!

Wolfmen Modernity Killed Every Night Music For A Future Age Review

The Wolfmen - Modernity Killed Every Night (DAMGOOD 308) Released September 1st 2008.

Track listing:

CD Album

1. Needle In The Camels Eye
2. Jackie Says
3. Cecilie
4. While London Sleeps
5. Love Is A Dog
6. Up All Nighter
7. Better Days
8. Wak This Bass
9. Buzz Me Kate
10. If You Talk Like That
11. Je T'aime Madame
12. Karma Sutra (Remix) (Download only from itunes and Damaged Goods)

It's finally arrived! The album Wolfmen fans have been waiting for.
If you've been paying attention then you've already got the Jackie Says EP, the Kama Sutra Single, the Cecilie Single, the Needle In The Camels Eye single, and even the download of Two Eyes with Daler Mehndi.
Daler isn't featured on this CD, that will come later this year.
But what IS on this CD is all essential for Wolfmen/ Marco fans.

It's a delight to see Marco making music again after a long period of semi silence, and Chris is an excellent singer/ songwriter and perfect partner for Marco to work with.
He has a great ear for pop songs and for what will work, and he has one of the world's best guitarists/ songwriters to work with. Marco of course helped Adam Ant to reach pop stardom, and also helped Sinead O'Connor in her early career.
Not for nothing do stars look to Marco for guitar work on their songs!

The album opens with guitar feedback from Mr Pirroni, and what better a start?
Ants fans should also know that opener Needle and Up All Nighter feature ex Ant Chris Hughes on drums and in the producer's chair. Needles, the Eno cover, is a stormer of a track.
Next is the remixed version of Jackie Says, which has a classic melody and perfect chorus- if you aren't singing the chorus and wondering where this band have been for 20 years then you should unplug you're CD player/ Ipod and do us all a favour! Listen out for Chris' excellent Harmonica throughout the track.
Cecilie is one of the best songs I have ever heard, no lie. I heard this over a year ago when they visited the US for some promotion on the radio, and was blown away.
While London Sleeps is next, another slow one that is similar to Cecilie in tempo, another love song, "Sweet dreams of paradise with you". Ah, London!!
Love is a Dog from hell Chris tells us next, in another mid tempo rocker with more stunning guitar work from Mr Pirroni.
Up All Nighter picks up the tempo next, leading to the first new one (if you've been paying attention and bought the EPs and singles), Better Days. This is possibly going to be the next single, and a great choice it would be. This is another great pop song, surely the UK charts are there for the taking?!
"Don't need your pills doctor all I need are better days", never a truer word sang!
Wak This Bass is the fastest song on the album, "Hey boss get off of my case cos you're making me feel like dirt". Who hasn't felt like that?
Buzz Me kate, "I'm in love with a photograph of you, I'll deep sea dive you all night long, Buzz me Kate I'll be your back door man". Chris is big on love and the desire to be up all night with you!
But be warned, 'If you talk like that you better step up and fight". Last one from the Jackie Says EP, given a brighter sheen by Alan Moulder here.
Lastly we have Je T'aime Madame, we meet a french girl on a sunday in London by St Paul's and stroll through the moonlit city and go back to her flat. In love again!

The album features all 4 of the songs from the first EP, but in a remixed form, and they are better for it, though I have to be honest in 2 respects: I prefer the original mix of Needle, it's heavier, and I wasn't sure at first about them having all 4 of the EP's tracks on the album. I think it would have been better to have just had 2, making the Jackie Says EP even more of a must have. But that said, this is an excellent introduction to a band you MUST hear. If you're an Adam and the Ants fan, you have no excuse. You don't HAVE to like them, but you'd be deaf if you didn't!

The album is full of Love, London, and great pop songs with a killer guitar player- what more could you want?

The Wolfmen have been playing a few select gigs in London, keep a watch on their Myspace site and catch them live where they have also been performing another Daler Mehndi collaboration, Thieves and Liars.

Link to buy the album and other releases: Damaged Goods

Ants 25th May 1981 Bologna

This gig has been added to the ipod player, enjoy!!
This gig was bootlegged on the Antmusic Bootleg Lp.

Boz Boorer Interview

Monk has done a great new interview with Boz Boorer, the guitarist who co-wrote some of Wonderful with Adam and Marco, for Adam-Ant.net, the website and message board he now owns.
Read it here.

Update

There's not an awful lot going on lately.
The Wolfmen are playing live again tonight and promoting their latest single (a re-recorded version of Jackie Says b/w Nothing To Say To You, the album will follow later in August I believe.

I'm filling up the gaps in my Ants bootlegs collection thanks to a fan I finally managed to make contact with who has a bunch I don't.

'bout it for now.
I think enthusiasm for the Ant man is at a bit of a low lately, it is here too for now.

Keep watching this space though, if anything new happens, you'll read it here!

NEW CHRIS MERRICK HUGHES INTERVIEW!

Chris (On the right, above, next to Terry) kindly agreed to answer some questions for me, and the finished article is published here!

Barry Watts Interview part 1

Ant Fan Corky has done an excellent interview with Barry Watts, who drummed for Adam 1982-84. Part 1 is here on the Family Of Noise Website.

Carty New Video to Kings of Vienna Remix

That Welsh Maestro Carty has done another video to accompany a mix, this time it's Ultravox Versus AATA, Kings of Vienna. I like this a lot!



And here are Kings of the Wild Frontier, the ALTERNATIVE Kings of the Wild Frontier, and Ultravox's Vienna!

Plastic Surgery

This is an excellent video of Adam and the Ants doing Plastic Surgery, this is the version you see Adam watching on tv in Jubilee:


And this is the film version


Released in 1978, what an excellent Ant song! They used to open the gigs with this!

Youtube review of Dirk and Fan Stands and Delivers!

I found this on Youtube. Interesting!

Part 1


Part 2


Part 3


And this is kinda funny, though full marks for the effort!!
Stand and Deliver Fan Video......

Maw Maw Maw!!

The Family of Noise has posted an exclusive 2 part interview with James Maw, the writer of what has become known as the Ant Bible, the official Adam Ant Story.

The delightful Mariesha provided the questions, this is a great scoop and a great read!


Part 1
Part 2

Don't forget to browse the rest of the FON site, you might for instance stumble upon this review of the B Side Babies CD written by someone I know......... (*whistles*).....

Adam Ant in Tank Girl Comic

Adam Ant net has reported that Adam is in the latest Tank Boy Comic.
The scan above was sent to Ant.net by Rufus of Tank Girl.

Tank Girl Site

Wolfmen Live Review

Planet Mondo have reviewed the Wolfmen Live, here!

Watch this blog for a preview review of the album Modernity Killed Every Night, soon!

Monochrome Set Interview

Monochrome Set members Andy Warren, Bid and Lester Square were interviewed on London radio station Resonance FM in May.
That interview is now track 1 on the Music For A Future Age ipod player.

They talk about their time in the B Sides and with the Ants, as well as current band Scarlett's Well.










From the top left to right Bid, Lester, Andy, Morris.

YouTube Round Up!

There have been some cool new videos added to YouTube recently.

First off The Wolfmen have a couple:

Bobby Friction interviews the band in this one


Caroline Richards' Making of Cecilie video is in this 2 parter




And Marco plays guitar on this Primal Scream version of I Put A Spell On You


And finally Carty has put his recent new remix of Stand and Deliver to the video. This is the 3rd of Carty's Stand and Deliver mixes, and features on his 10th CD of Ant mixes.

Wolfmen Friday 30th May

Go see them!

Adam Ant Art book cancelled

Sadly there hasn't been enough interest in this so it has been cancelled.
Adam explains here.

Some say that it was marketed badly, and many fans are of course disappointed.
It's news to me that this was going to be personally financed and not by a publisher, this explains a lot.

New Website "The Family of Noise" Launches tomorrow!

Tomorrow, 17th May, at 1pm GMT, 3pm Central US time, The Family Of Noise, a brand new fan built website and forum will be opening.
It features a discography, a bibliography, a still in progress filmology, details on each of the Ants, a well as much more to come!
It's been built slowly over the last few months by a team of people, all long time Ant fans, and has some contributions from me too.

Amy Hankins' art work has been exclusively used for the site, as can be seen in the very cool looking banner above.
(Interview with Amy here)

An exclusive interview with a well known author of one of THE Ant books is also being put together as I write this. (No not Adam!)

So have a look and join the forum and get posting!!

Wolfmen Interview

This is a recent one, and a good read!

Here

Gordonfest!

Live near or in Reading? Want an Ant night out? For Free?
With Ant Disco and Terry Lee Miall and AntFlavour?

Go to the Thatchers Pub This Saturday!

Lamé

I asked Marco some questions about Lamé and the b side Inseminator.

Me: When did you and Adam write Lamé?
Marco: After "Wonderful", the same time we did Dandy in the Underworld.

How did the recording come about?
We had a few ideas and we decided to go into the studio with our
friend John Reynolds just to see what would happen.

It was used on a promo cassette for Drop Dead Rock along with the b
side Inseminator...
Was it? (Yes! See pic)

When was Inseminator recorded?
I did that in New york one night as a favour to the director of Drop
Dead Rock.

Who is on the recording?
I never knew the other guys on the session.

Why was it not released anywhere properly?
I don't know.

New Songs added to Ipod Player

I have added:

Wide Boy Awake 8 songs
Ants July 14th 1979 and Ants live May 14th 1978.
May 14th 78 was Mark Bivouac's final gig with the Ants, and Jordan's too.

Set lists:

May 14th 1978, London Roundhouse: (This is all one file again. Listen out for the guitar on Puerto Rican!)

Plastic Surgery
Puerto Rican
B -Side Baby
Deutscher Girls
Physical
It Doesn’t Matter
Hampstead
Lou
Bathroom Function
Dirk Wears White Sox
Fall In
Red Scab
Jaunito The Bandito

14th July 1979, Birmigham Digbeth Civic Hall:

Cartrouble (pt. 1 & 2)
Animals & Men
Nine Plan Failed
Day I Met God
Family of Noise (cuts in)
Cleopatra
Never Trust A Man
Kick!
Digital Tenderness
Tabletalk
Catholic Day (cuts in)
The Idea
Zerox
Lady
Hampstead
Fall In
Press Darlings (cuts)

Also, this just in: A new blogpost by the Systems of Romance blog on Rema Rema's Wheel in the Rose Ep, and files to download.

Send A Letter To Jordan....

Sex 430 Kings Road London

History

It first began when Malcolm McLaren opened at what was called Paradise Garage, which had a small shop behind it where Mclaren sold records and eventually Teddy Boy clothes: this evolved into his own store, which he ran with Vivienne Westwood, called Let it Rock, selling Teddy Boy clothes. They later moved further down the road to open a rubber and leather fetish wear store which they named SEX. Famously, the Sex Pistols auditioned Johnny Rotten in the shop.^[1]

SEX was by no means the only boutique of its kind on the King's Road and by the time British punk rock developed a larger following, there were competitors including; Boy, Granny Takes A Trip & Beaufort Market. SEX received many famous visitors, including Adam Ant, The Sex Pistols, Bromley Contingent; and had their own little following such as Helen Wellington Loyd, store workers like Chrissie Hynde, Jordan, Debbie Juvenile and others. This store became very famous in the punk rock scene and produced such famous clothes as the Cambridge Rapist T-shirts, the shirt featuring cowboys drawn by Tom of Finland, "Destroy" shirts, "venus" shirts, "tits" shirts, fetish wear and others.

From SEX the store then became Seditionaries which sold mainly the same clothes but with more of a music aspect and gradually drifted away from selling leather gear. Goods sold by the two stores are still on sale, many second-hand or reproductions.

"I wanted a major, major, major change. I thought we can't keep selling these old remnants and things, we've got to do something tougher and harder: it's all too sweet, and the store, for fuck's sake, is too goddamn popular. So it's got to close, no question about it. No more brothel creepers, no more drainpipes, no more of this rock 'n' roll clothing and get rid of that fucking jukebox (1)" ~Malcolm McLaren

External links

• Only anarchists are pretty Photos and information.
• Sex & Seditionaries Clothing designed by Vivienne Westwood & Malcolm McLaren circa 1975-1979.
• Punk Pistol Seditionaries tribute site to clothing designed by Westwood & McLaren.
• 
  
• 1 The sex behind the pistols . The Times (September 6, 2003). Retrieved on 2007-12-17. “‘The idea was we were the Pistols from the SEX shop,’ recalls Matlock. ‘In the Kings Road we were near to Granny Takes a Trip and Anthony Price’s shop. You would see the Faces and Bryan Ferry going there to get their clothes. Malcolm told us they were a bunch of w*****s and we agreed with him. Even though they were all loaded and we didn’t have a pot to p*** in it was a good attitude to have.’”
  

Located Here

it now looks like this

Ants Family Tree

Click the picture for larger version.

Opinions

I would really like to know what you're opinion of this blogsite is.
I have been thinking lately that I want to post and write about stuff other than The Ants, but at the same time stuff that is kind of related if not directly related.
Therefore I would post/ write about Punk 1977, pop in the 80's, and bands/ things that both Adam Marco and the other Punks were interested in and influenced by. Hence David Bowie, Roxy Music, Alice Cooper, all of that would be included..........

Please email me your thoughts, do you like what you've seen so far? Do you have any suggestions? Any complaints? Any ideas? Any requests?
It's hard to know when you get no feedback whether anyone is reading (I know that you ARE because i get statistics that tell me a lot of people have been reading!) but I only get a couple of people ever post any comments at me, so it's a little like talking to yourself!

Anyway, email me at stevehorwood@yahoo.co.uk OR leave a comment if you want to remain anonymous!

Thanks

Steve

"I was there really early on, I'm cool, You're not"

Marco is in the latest edition of The Word Magazine, and lucky you, thanks to AntRap Admin Monk, I have the scans for you to view here!

Post Punk blog Ant related posts

Here this cool blogsite has a list of "On this day in the 80's" posts on Adam and the Ants, Bow Wow Wow and Malcolm McClaren.

Included is this post on Dalek I Love You - Heartbeat:

On this date in 1981, Dalek I Love You released their fourth single, "Heartbeat". The B side was "Astronauts (Have Landed On The Moon)". Neither track appeared on an album. The band, at this time, was officially only Alan Gill (ex-The Teardrop Explodes) though he brought in musicians to help record this song. Merrick (future Adam and The Ants) played drums for these tracks. The Liverpool post punk/new wave band with a constantly changing lineup called it quits in 1990.

More on Dalek I Love You and music files here

1977 The Year Decency Died (PopMatters Article)

Two really good articles about Punk from the PopMatters Website. I'm widening the scope of what I post on here from now on, Adam and the Ants 1977-82 are related to a cultural change (Punk) and changes in pop music in Britain and the US, so I am going to post items about all of that too. After all, it's Music For A Future Age, and music from 1977-84 is precisely that, music that with hindsight was a lot more innovative than today's pop music, and post-punk music that was full of a whole lot more ideas and experiments in sound than much of today's music.
See Simon Reynold's book Rip It Up And Start Again to read more about this and visit his excellent website.




Channel Crossings: 1977: The Year Decency Died - Part I

[9 April 2008]

"I loathe and detest everything they stand for and look like. They are obnoxious, obscene and disgusting."

by Raphaël Costambeys-Kempczynski

Instead of identifying a contemporary sociological problem, the headline of a March 2008 issue of Time, “Unhappy, Unloved and Out of Control”, could well have been the definition of the punk-led youth of England just over 30 years ago. The year 1977 began with the International Monetary Fund lending Britain £2.3 billion in order to stay the decli

ning value of sterling. The Labour Party’s popularity was falling in the polls. A dynamic Conservative opposition leader was putting James Callaghan, the Labour Prime Minister, in difficulty; only a pact with the Liberal party would postpone the eventual demise of his minority government.

Although Labour was suffering in Parliament during those first few months of 1977, media interest was turning its attention to the nostalgia-fuelled Queen’s silver jubilee scheduled for the weekend of 4th June. But not everyone was caught up in the bunting and flag waving. A shadow was being cast. Writing in his essay ‘The English People’, George Orwell suggests that “England is the only European country where internal politics are conducted in a more or less humane and decent manner”, the English people he claims “are not good haters”.

Ten years after the Summer of Love, 1977 had it s Summer of Hate. This is how Jon Savage summarises the jubilee celebrations in his seminal punk history, England’s Dreaming (1991):

Out of the morass of mid-1970s pluralism emerged the old spectres thinly disguised with a fresh lick of paint. Here was the blind superiority that had characterised the English world-view after the Second World War; here was a concentrated dose of all the unappealing traits—snobbery, insularity, xenophobia—that rendered England’s continued claim to be a world power meaningless.

England's Dreaming

(St. Martin's (Revised);

US: Jan 2002)

Amazon

Savage’s insistence on England rather than Great Britain suggests that the Silver Jubilee was an English moment—the United Kingdom had no Empire, Scottish devolution was a burning question, Welsh nationalism was high, and the IRA campaign had spread to the mainland. As if the Establishment needed reminding of England’s social frailties, at 7.30pm on 7th June a boat called the Queen Elizabeth sailed down the Thames with the Sex Pistols onboard. The Sex Pistols were banned from playing on land and so a water-bound performance of the song “God Save the Queen” must have seemed like a good idea.

Except that the self-congratulatory act of performing to a captive audience put John Lydon a.k.a. Johnny Rotten, the vocalist and lyricist of the Sex Pistols, ill-at-ease. Neither was Lydon quite comfortable with sharing the stage with Richard Branson his hippiesque record label boss. Lydon’s performance was spiked with added resentment and when the boat docked there was a stand-off between the audience and the police. As night fell tensions increased and the police lost patience.

John Varnom, an associate of Richard Branson’s at Virgin, recalls:

We reached a high point, from which short steps descended to the pavement. It was at precisely this point that Malcolm [McLaren] raised his fist and, in full view of about five or six police, screamed: “You f**king fascist bastards!” It was a direct invitation, and it was not declined.

The release of the single was itself fraught with difficulties. The original release date had been decided as 27th May so that the single would reach the top ten by Jubilee week. But workers at the CBS pressing plant protested against the single’s content, downing their tools on various occasions. Once released, the promotion of the single was equally difficult—the Independent Broadcasting Authority deemed the single to be in direct contravention of Section 4 (10) (A) of the IBA Act, i.e., “against good taste or decency, likely to encourage or incite crime, or lead to disorder.” The commercial television stations and radios were instructed not to broadcast the single and the BBC banned the record altogether. Regardless of these efforts, or perhaps because of them, the single sold 150,000 copies within five days of its release sending it to number 11.

You would think that three decades on, the antics of the Sex Pistols would be viewed favourably; John Lydon bestowed the doubtful status of being an ‘institution’. And yet the Silver Jubilee seems to remain a touchy subject. After 30 years the secret government files of 1977 were taken to the National Archives in Kew and released to the public. Of the six files covering the Silver Jubilee, however, only two have been opened. The others have been held back under Section 40 ‘Personal Information’ and Section 40 ‘Information Provided in Confidence’. As Martha Kearney put it in her BBC Radio 4 documentary, UK Confidential, we may never know how the Queen felt about being “gobbed at by Johnny Rotten”.

In English popular musical terms, 1977 began at 6.15pm on 1st Decem

ber 1976. This was the day of the infamous interview of the Sex Pistols by

Bill Grundy on the Thames Television Today programme.

Goaded by a drunken Grundy, within two minutes punk, as a liberal socially complex phenomenon, was reduced to a flurry of four-letter words. So it was that 1977 was set up as the year decency died. Punk would still prove to be violent and political, but it had already been subsumed by the Establishment as bad boy rock. What had been an underground musical development was transformed into a media circus typified by the front page of the Daily Mirror published the next day.

Councils began cancelling tour dates, the record company EMI was urged to take action. Neither the group’s manager, McLaren, nor EMI had condoned the behaviour of the Sex Pistols on the Today show. This was the media condemning a scandal of their own making.

Was this a reflection of the age-old fear of a rebelling younger generation? or perhaps the indication of yet another moral panic sweeping the country? This then appears as an example of what Jurgen Habermas says about Late Capitalism and its propensity for crisis tendencies where policy becomes the management of these crises, a management which contains in itself the possibility of further crises, rather than the resolution of the fundamentals (see Habermas 1975). The fundamental issue in 1976 and 1977 was not punk but that great negator of common public decency: unemployment. As the Clash sang on their début album: “Career opportunities are the ones that never knock / Every job they offer you is to keep out the dock.”

As the closing comments of Steve Jones during the interview with Grundy suggest, it is the journalist, the broadcasting institution, and his proposition directed at Siouxsie Sioux that were seen as being indecent. Writing in the fanzine Bondage shortly after the interview, the singer of the punk band the Nipple Erectors and future member of the Pogues, Shane MacGowan, immediately identifies the vagueness of the notion of decency and projects it as a heuristic fiction:

Since when did EMI or any of those old c**ts put “public duty” before their precious money or the security it gives them. What it really is is they feel that security is threatened just by what the Pistols represent. And how could anything that appears on ITV offend public decency. There isn’t any public decency—people only know what’s decent by being told by ITV and the rest of the media and EMI too. (Shane McGowan in Bondage, N°1, December 1976)

Though placing the Queen at the head of a fascist regime in a song is defendable as the right to free speech in a democratic country (although there is no constitutional guarantee of this in the United Kingdom), this may not have been useful to the Sex Pistols and their anti-establishment stance. The message may have been one of decency, but the medium had to consistently be indecent to ensure the vibrancy of that message. Even this, however, would prove difficult to sustain as Lydon later admitted when talking about Public Image Limited, or PiL, the band he would form after the demise of the Sex pistols:

I formed PiL because I got bored with the extremist point of view that I’d had with the Sex Pistols… I attempted to move toward a liberal point of view and see if that could slowly but surely change society into something more decent… (Lydon 1993)

The Sex Pistols as “the poison in the human machine”, to quote from “God Save the Queen”, ensured that they would enflame the stereotypes of middle England they were reacting against, all those that the song “Liar” claimed to be in “suspension”. One such candidate was Bernard Brooke-Partridge, chairman of the Arts Council who had banned the Sex Pistols from performing in London. Writing in Rolling Stone Charles M. Young recounts his exchange with Brooke-Partridge:

“I will do everything within the law to stop them from appearing here ever again,” he says. “I loathe and detest everything they stand for and look like. They are obnoxious, obscene and disgusting.”

“Doesn’t the question of who should decide what’s disgusting in a free society enter in here?”

“I am the person who decides,” he says. “The electoral put me here. My power is not in question. If the Sex Pistols want to change the system, they are free to stand for election from my district.”

“In the United States, the First Amendment to the Constitution says the government is not allowed to make such decisions.”

“We have our own way of doing things here. The Sex Pistols are scum trying to make a fast buck, which they are entitled to do under the law. I am entitled to try and stop them. We’ll see who wins.” (Rock Is Sick and Living in London, 20 October 1977)

The Sex Pistols with Bill Grundy - Today show excerpt

Image (partial) from Blair Air Brushing.com

Channel Crossings: 1977: The Year Decency Died - Part II

[10 April 2008]

If punk’s message was ‘destroy’, then inevitably wrapped up in its own scream of existence was its dying breath. No sooner was 1977 declared the year of punk than the death of punk was in the cards.

by Raphaël Costambeys-Kempczynski

1977: The Year Decency Died - Part I “I loathe and detest everything they stand for and look like. They are obnoxious, obscene and disgusting.”

The year of the Sex Pistols was punctuated by the Grundy interview, the Queen’s Silver Jubilee and the troubled release of their album Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols. On 5th November 1977 WPC Julie Dawn Story informed the branch manager of Virgin Nottingham that the word ‘Bollocks’ on the record cover was in breach of the Indecent Advertising Act of 1899. Pivotal to the subsequent court case was the witness account of Reverend James Kingsley, professor of English at Nottingham University and former Anglican priest. In Kingsley’s account of the etymology of ‘bollock’ he argued:

The word has been used as a nickname for clergymen. Clergymen are known to talk a good deal of rubbish and so the word later developed the meaning of nonsense… They became known for talking a great deal of bollocks, just as old balls or baloney also come to mean testicles, so it has twin uses in the dictionary.

Calling upon a sense of pride in the English language’s Anglo-Saxon inheritance, this line of defence was enough for the magistrates to find in favour of the Sex Pistols although the senior magistrate stressed this was done “reluctantly”.

The battle ground between the Sex Pistol-led English punk movement and the Establishment was that of decency. The punk events of 1977 were driven by a need to re-appropriate decency as the domain of the subject, to inject responsibility back into a notion too long left in suspension. The claim of English punk music in 1977 was about empowering the social actor through responsibility with subjectivity.

There should be no mistake, however. Punk’s English dream of decency, to play on a line from the song “God Save the Queen”, was itself a construction. If the Sex Pistols were the unadulterated voice of the working class, or the unemployed class, this could only sit uncomfortably with their fame and money. The class issue would fuel the artist’s age-old struggle of how to remain authentic to the artistic endeavour and the message.

Margaret Thatcher Che Guevara Revolutionary T-Shirt© image (partial)
from Red Molotov.com - Revolutionary T-shirt Designs

The direct attack on the social realities of 1977 would lead to added attention, better record sales, increased wealth and greater distance from the class struggle within which the music knew its genesis. Critics have therefore argued that a popular musicians view of contemporary reality is fuzzy, distorted by the pull between the utopian message of production and the capital gain of consumption.

Ultimately what we need to bear in mind is that beyond the performance of punk bands of this period, whether on stage or in the media, many of the band members did not have working class backgrounds. Of the Clash, Joe Strummer’s father was a diplomat and Mick Jones went to art school. For the Sex Pistols with such figures as Situationist Malcolm McLaren and the fashion designer Vivienne Westwood pulling the strings from their Kings Road clothes shop, it is difficult not to peer at this working class subculture through the microscope of art school filtered postmodernism. Katrina Irving may argue that what differentiates US punk from English punk is that the Americans considered themselves artists, quoted Genet and played concerts in arts centres, but we must not forget that McLaren, if only briefly, had managed the New York Dolls.

Not only this, but, John Lydon, the mouthpiece of the dole queue, had never been unemployed for any particular length of time himself. Lydon had an ambivalent relationship towards class. He appears to have a nostalgic association to the English working-class community of his youth and yet his Sex Pistols persona, Johnny Rotten, an imagined alternative identity born out of his extensive cultural capital, a product of an intellectual construct, firmly rejects this wistful vision of the past.

To attack the generation of World War II, however, it would be necessary to demonstrate the suffering experienced at the hands of post-Empire inertia characterised by the Silver Jubilee. Perhaps the most violent aspect of “God Save the Queen” is not the attack on the “mad parade” itself (the song was written about a year before the jubilee celebrations) but the songs mantra that there is “no future / in England’s dreaming”.

With the seeming impossibility of prospect, all that was left was the immediacy of a present perceived as the apocalypse –- The Sex Pistols sang “I am an antichrist” in “Anarchy in the UK”, The Clash sang “London’s Burning”, X-Ray Specs sang “Oh! Bondage Up Yours”, The Stranglers sang “Something Better Change”.

Heavily defined by its class system, English society in 1977 had a voice for its alienated bored working class youth. With the Labour government hanging on to power by the skin of its teeth social order seemed in turmoil. The vicious sound of these English punk bands reflected the destruction around them: the dissonant snarling singing voice, the raw guitar wall of sound, every beat of every bar accented and the percussive high pitch of continuous crashing symbols makes listening uncomfortable.

Richard Middleton argues that teenage rebellion in the 1950s and 1960s, though set against the backdrop of growing liberal ideology, was articulated to safe musical patterns with little subversive content. Punk offered a more testing musical and message-driven assault at a time of more critical socio-economic unrest. One could argue, however, that the various moments of youth culture are self-regulating revolutions as the actors of one generation necessarily grow older and therefore normalise any sense of fracture. In the meantime the social realities of economic failure persist.

It would appear misleading then to suggest that punk helped shape the politics of the time, but these punk groups did project themselves as the voice of the English underclass, the Everyman voice of “Another Country / Another council tenancy” to quote from “Anarchy in the UK”. This is the little man against the big man mentality seen as a defining characteristic of Englishness -– as the sociologist Krishan Kumar puts it, the English have always “championed the good sense, resourcefulness and courage of the ordinary ‘little chap’”. Indeed, with such direct implications in movements like Rock against Racism, punk groups like the Clash, Buzzcocks, X-Ray Spex and Sham 69 did more than symbolic resistance.

Class differentiation was also identified along musical lines, notably in the polarisation of punk and progressive rock. Prog rock was the genre of popular music seen to be indulgently arty, intellectual, Romantic and middle class by punk. It lacked authenticity whereas punk was purer, had more street credibility.

Contrary to many of its predecessors, at the musical core of punk—from its conception to its performance—lies the action of protest. Instrumental solos, seen as superfluous to this and a sign of slickness, were to be condemned along with the banks of electronic keyboards so revelled in by the progressive rockers of the time. The lack of rhythmic variation made punk undanceable but added a sense of urgency. The simplicity of the riffs was the stance of individualism and allowed the anger of the voice to stand out.

Protest song in the form of folk or hippie music had been plaintive, punk, however, was declamatory. The Clash and the Sex Pistols confronted their audiences often provoking them into a violent reaction. The sense of confrontation is then worked on in the studio to reproduce this live feel. No sense of artificiality must come between the band and the audience, and though it may be difficult to make out the message because of the sneer, the snarl and the slur, the sincerity of that message must not be brought into question.

Often criticised for being out of tune one need only listen to a song “Pretty Vacant” to here how Rotten aggresses the listener with his political message sung out of key during the verse but then neatly falls into key for the rabble rousing chorus inviting us to sing along, to answer his call to arms. In this way punk positions itself against the music that had preceded itself—breaking away from rock ‘n ‘roll, from hippie music and prog rock, and expressing a real disdain for disco. And yet punk reworked rock ‘n’ roll in a pub rock guise, and inherited the rhythms of reggae. These articulations went some way to guarantee the bands’ commercial success, pointed at their mainstream bent.

Some writers, however, still see punk as fundamentally changing the nature of popular music. Ian Chambers for instance believed punk created a breach in the sequentiality of pop which would lead to “a proliferation of margins rather than a predictable return to a renewed ‘mainstream’ and subordinated ‘alternative’”. Today we can deplore the fact that sanitised Euro pop is still fed to us by such television programmes as the X-Factor where contestants churn out over-produced songs of the past, but television itself is becoming a marginal medium in the face of the Internet, which offers on demand access to an almost infinite possibility of marginal existences. Chambers is perhaps right, but is this down to punk or the digitalisation of the audio medium that would begin just five years later, in 1982?

Perhaps the public uproar over punk reflected a real threat to public order, but cultural theory teaches us well. Although much of the media attention focused on the public displays of violence that characterised punk—the imagery of bondage, the aggressive musical snarl, the lyrics of desolation and oppression, the public goading—there was also a commodification of this violence. After the Grundy incident, small retailers began to take notice of punk’s apparent individualist ethos and started setting up independent record labels. Added to this were the ‘one stops’—firms that bought bulk records from the major labels and then sold them on to independent record shops but without the small order surcharge imposed by the major record labels—in effect decentralising the chain of distribution.

This was the Do-It-Yourself drive of punk, though one should eschew all temptation to call this democratisation of the English record industry. If anything this was the transformation of the punk from consumer to producer, from the unengaged to the socially responsible subjective agent. Moreover, you no longer had to feel frustrated by lack of talent as this image from the fanzine Sniffin’ Glue demonstrates.

The Sex Pistols and the Clash had both originally signed to major record labels, increased exposure promising larger audiences and the wider communication of their message. But commercial pressures would call into question the authenticity of punk. Technical pressures of trying to reproduce the emotions of a live concert would also eat at the heart of the authentic punk experience.

And then there was the gimmick. Soon it was difficult to escape the coloured 12-inch or the limited edition. Post-punk would come to embrace the commodification of authenticity and leading the way would be John Lydon post-Sex Pistols with his new band, Public Image Limited, the name of which conjures up the notion of privately-owned limited liability companies.

As with many English bands since, the straw that finally broke the anarchist camel’s back was the Sex Pistols’ attempt to break America. The positivistic attitude of Americans did not appear to be a comfortable bedfellow for nihilistic apocalypse. And so often nihilistic apocalypse did not turn up, as Savage puts it “There was no murder, no vomiting, no mutilation: just four 20- to 21-year-olds”.

Reflecting the attitude of their manager back at the Queen’s Silver Jubilee when McLaren had aggravated the situation with the police, on 7th January 1978 John Lydon at a concert at Randy’s Rodeo in San Antonia decided that this was his moment of hubris and shouted: “You cowboys are all a bunch of f**king faggots”. Needless to say, the concert had to be interrupted for several minutes. Just ten days later the Sex Pistols were no more.

It would be all too easy to conclude with an image of the stereotypical Sex Pistols, leaving us with an ironic sense of the commodification of authenticity. But punk was the voice challenging the original generation of teenagers as they were turning into parents. The Sex Pistols were also the enemy within, willing to expose the record industry to show their authenticity as they sung on the track “E.M.I.”: “and you thought that we were faking / that we were all just money making / you do not believe we’re for real”.

If punk’s message was ‘destroy’, then inevitably wrapped up in its own scream of existence was its dying breath. No sooner was 1977 declared the year of punk than the death of punk was in the cards. The release of “God Save the Queen” and the publicity stunt on the Thames were accompanied by the Sex Pistols’ sighs of regret and the prerequisite boredom. Within the space of a year the proliferation of generic punk bands with the formulaic snarl had turned punk into a conservative mode of musical expression. Ironically one could see the symbolic death of punk as the election of Margaret Thatcher in May 1979.

The wave of post-punk bands would push the Clash to sing in June 1978 “(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais”: “The new groups are not concerned / With what there is to be learned / They got Burton suits, ha you think it’s funny / Turning rebellion into money.” Indeed, 1977 was the year decency died. Social decency suffered from the political upheaval of that year, public decency could no longer be stabilised by its hypocrisy, and musical decency in the form of punk was commodified by post-punk before even the first punk album had been released.

Perhaps the most indecent thing of 1977 was that an ex-Beatle, backed by the music of bagpipes, topped the charts singing “Mull of Kintyre”.

Paul McCartney - Mull of Kintyre

Wolfmen one-hour radio session coming soon...

Listen out for a Wolfmen special on Red Bull Music Academy Radio coming soon, featuring brand new songs, classic singles that have inspired the band, and a new interview with Chris Constantinou, who put together the tracklist:

Marc Bolan & T-Rex - Ride A White Swan 2:12
Jimmy Hendrix - Cross town traffic 2:14
The Wolfmen Jackie Says 5:00
The Wolfmen Cecilie 3:31
The Wolfmen Needle In A Camel's Eye 2:56
The Wolfmen Up All Nighter 3:08
Bob Dylan - Subterranean Homesick Blues 2:17
Velvet Underground - I'm Waiting for the Man 4:48
Johnny Cash - I've Been Everywhere 3:17
Warren Zevon- Werewolf In London 3:40
The Modern Lovers - Pablo Picasso 4:22
Dahler Mendhi featuring The Wolfmen 2 Eyes 3:38
Dahler Mendhi featuring The Wolfmen - Thieves and Liars (radio edit) 5:16
Leonard Cohen - Bird on the Wire 3:27
X-Ray Spex - Germfree Adolescents 3:11

Since the launch of Red Bull Music Academy Radio in Nov 2005, RBMA Radio has been streaming 24/7 – with over 120 new hours of music per month. Red Bull Music Academy Radio is now available on demand, offering daily updates and unlimited access to its holy archives. Along with hundreds of exclusive guest mixes and special shows it also boasts 20 regular shows, bringing you the latest tracks on CDR as well as those undiscovered vinyl treasures. Like all the people invited to take part in the Red Bull Music Academy, hosts like the Soul Jazz Soundsystem, Morgan Geist, Maurice Fulton, Marco Passarani, Wax Poetics founder Andrew Mason, Kirk Degiorgio or Bugz In The Attic's Daz-I-Kue believe in sharing their knowledge as well as sharing a serious passion for an eclectic range of music: all the while challenging people to look even deeper. Each host is given free creative reign: resulting in very unique monthly shows encapsulating the kind of vibes that our favourite radio shows were always about.

Ipod Player

Thanks to an anonymous commenter, the ipod player has now been fixed, the gigs will play again now, I have no idea what happened there.
I will add 2 gig2 from 1979 (Digbeth and Electric Ballroom New Years Eve) later!
And a few other songs.... watch this space!

Needles Video, Word Magazine and Chris Online Interview

First off Chris is interviewed here.

Marco is in the May issue of the Word Magazine, as previewed below


Don't forget that the Wolfmen are playing Live again on 17th April- details in the flyer below



And finally the video for Needle in the Camel's Eye is below!
Enjoy!