Radio Gonzo

Date Published: 3rd June 2016 Strange Fruit is a unique two-hour radio show exploring the world of underground, strange and generally neglected music. All shows are themed and all shows set out to give the most hardened of sound-hounds some new delight to sample. The show is also unique in providing homework for undergraduate students on North West Kent College's Foundation Degree in Professional Writing (who dig up many of the odd facts featured in the links between tracks). The show is broadcast on Miskin Radio every Sunday from 10-00-midnight. Every other week the show is now presented by Jeremy Smith and as the two promotional pictures that he sent consisted as one of him covered in mud and the other of him covered in guinea pigs he is obviously mad as a bagful of cheese, which means he will fit in here just fine! He writes: I've been a huge music fan ever since my parents bought me a transistor radio and I would listen to the sixties pirate music stations at nights under the covers. This love of live mu

Wally is one of those bands that unaccountably just didn't quite make it on a commercial level. Why? Nobody really knows, because they were always (and occasionally still are, because they are all still good mates and reform once in a while) a bloody good prog band with a slight jazzy country tinge to them. In 1973, after playing the northern pub rock circuit that included venues in Manchester, Harrogate, Leeds and Bradford, they entered a New Act competition organised by the music paper Melody Maker making it to the finals at London's Roundhouse. They did not win - that honour went to a Prog Rock band named Druid - but they caught the eye of one of the judges, "Whispering" Bob Harris of The Old Grey Whistle Test fame. Their "runners-up" prize was the chance to record a session for Harris's BBC radio show, "The Monday Program". He took the band under his wing and set up a recording contract with Atlantic Records. Their debut album, Wally, released in 1974 was co-produced by Harris, along with Rick Wakeman wh

The Beatles are undoubtedly the most important rock and roll band of all time. In four years' time it will be half a century since they split up, and it seems that they still are of more importance – culturally and economically – than any band who came before or since. This is probably because they not only raised the bar for everyone who followed them, they were the bar. There is a veritable library of books on the band and associated subjects, and not only does this library grow apparently exponentially each year, but a goodly proportion of these books that are released contains new and hitherto uncollected material. And this – for a Beatlenerd like me – is bliss It is even cooler when the author of the latest tome is an old friend of mine, and it is published by….yup, US! As Neil Nixon, the author in question explains: “The Beatles remain the best-selling, most critically praised popular music act in history. Beyond that, the band and their works probably form the most inspirational force ever produce

The press release reads: MARTIN'S SUCCESSFUL MUSICAL EXPERIMENT For Immediate Release North Devon soundtrack musician and composer, Martin Eve, better known as 4th Eden, releases his new album, Atmospherik Mekanisms on 15th May via Bandcamp, and as a CD available from his website and via selected local outlets. The record, which is also his final year project for Falmouth University has been the capturing of found sounds around North Devon and Cornwall. All the sounds were then edited and constructed into an amazing collection of compositions recorded at his home stoudio in Woolsery. From old radios, garage sounds, steam engines, recycling objects, cathedral bells and the sounds of water and the sea he conjured up a gorgeously contemporary sounding album of electronica. It is a continuation of his work on last year's Organik Reflektion EP which was released to great critical acclaim. “4th Eden has produced a minor miracle, making a truly experimental, but eminently listenable and even danceable record” s

Date Published: 23rd April 2016Gregg Kofi-Brown is, of course best known for his work with seminal African funk rock pioneers Osibisa. They were one of the first, if not THE first African band to achieve popular success in the West. With conscience laden lyrics and funky afro-rhythms Gregg has a created a multi-national musical platform with his guest artists that speaks to many peoples across the world. Gregg Kofi Brown was executive producer of the 2003 Evening Standard cover-mount CD give away in memory of Damilola Taylor which featured the likes of Robbie Williams, Craig David, Gorillaz, Blue and Ms. Dynamite. In April 1997, Gregg was invited by David Sonenberg (producer of Academy award winner "When We Were Kings") to document & film Lauryn Hill's (the Fugees) fact-finding mission in East Africa. This documentary was made to highlight the problems of the refugees in Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania and sponsored by Lauryn's charity The Refugee Project. Gregg & Lauryn performed together several times d

Although I physically lived through them, having been born during the balmy summer of 1959, I missed out on the sixties. I spent the vast majority of the decade living in what was then the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong, which was quite a strange place, but almost entirely divorced from what was going on in Carnaby Street or Liverpool. I had heard of The Beatles, of course, but my only memories of the four lads who shook the world are fairly fragmented ones. I remember the furore in the news at the end of 1963 when a Church of England vicar asked the band to record “Oh Come all ye Faithfull, Yeah Yeah Yeah”. A couple of years later I remembered the storm in a teacup that happened when various old soldiers sent back their MBES in protest at The Beatles getting theirs, and I remember the rumours in 1969 that Paul McCartney had died. And that is about it. I returned to England to live just under a year after Paul had announced that the band had split up, and about three years later a schoolfriend lent me c

I think I have mentioned my friend Jane Bradley before in these pages. She was a gifted cartoonist, the mother of a young son, and a raving alcoholic who died stumbling - pissed as a rat - across the M5 one evening in early 1995. She inspired one of my better songs (The Day we Buried Jane on my most recent album which came out about two and a half years ago) and twenty one years after her death she turns up in my dreams on occasion, stinking of vodka and still refusing to sleep with me. And it was Jane who first told me about Viv Stanshall. Well, in fact that is a long way from being true. I knew intellectually who Viv Stanshall was. I had read enough rock music books to know all about the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, and to know that Stanshall was best friends with the equally insane Keith Moon, and that together they had carried out various performance art practical jokes across Olde London Towne. But, until Jane I never actually grokked him. Jane was an enormous fan of Stanshall's surreal worldview, particu

I am always particularly fond of obsessives and enthusiasts, and even fonder of enthusiastic obsessives; those who do things that nobody else would have dreamt of doing purely because they can. Years ago when I was on the phone to dear departed Mick Farren, he told me of one such obsessive—a man who made action figures of the Pink Fairies no less. Mick promised to hunt out this man's address, but then he died and all sorts of plans that we had disappeared into the aether. Then, three years later along comes famed Gonzo artist and graphic whatnot dude Martin Cook. Had I heard of the bloke who made action gigs of the PFs he asked me? Yes, but I have been wanting to get in touch with him for years, I replied, and in two shakes of a gnat's tail the deed was done, and I was in touch with a jolly nice fellow called Tony who sent me this: “My PF's themed model making really started back in '04 when Larry Wallis released his solo album 'Death in the Guitar Afternoon'. There was a PO box address printed on the fold

GONZO WEEKLY #176: Jon meets Joey Molland Date Published: 1st April 2016

You have met my mate Martin Eve before, when—about six months ago—I interviewed him for the pages of this magazine, about his Organik Reflektion project which boldly took a disparate collection of found sounds, and manipulated them into something that even I could once have danced to. The name '4th Eden' is just a re-work of Martin's name. Martin has been writing music since the early 1980's and has been compared to artists such as Mike Oldfield, Depeche Mode, Moby, Ulrich Schnauss and Ultravox. He only started re-recording compositions back in 2009. To date he has written in excess of 100 tracks (of which some are available to hear on his Soundcloud page) with many collaborations. In 2012, his first CD was released called 'Infinity' through Global Journey. Currently he is a full time 'immature' student at Falmouth University. He has just released an extraordinary new record on which he collaborates with two lovely ladies, one of whom is his lovely girlfriend Marianne who also doubles occasionally as my s

Date Published: 4th March 2016 I loved the Sex Pistols. They spoke to me in a way that was mine and mine alone. I was expelled from school a few days before the Silver Jubilee, and God Save the Queen summed up everything that I felt, and everything I wanted to say but was too much of a teenage boy to be able to. I was living in Bracknell, Berkshire at the beginning of 1978, and I was walking to work in the ice and snow of a Berkshire winter when I heard that the band had split. "That makes sense" I thought to myself. The career arc of the band had a glorious symmetry about it, and like thousands of others I waited to see what they were going to do next. What Johnny Rotten did next was to stop being Johnny Rotten, and do something completely different. The day that the first single by his new band Public Image Limited came out, I was there in Braddicks record shop (where the funeral parlour is now) at the end of Mill Street in Bideford. I took it home and put it on my little battery operated record player.

I have never been a fan of overly complicated lead guitar soloing, with the possible exception of Frank Zappa, and even then I have to be in the right mood to listen to things like Shut up and Play your Guitar. Even when I was a boy, and all my friends were idolising yer flashy guitar heroes, I much preferred the solider work of people like David Gilmour whose quiet professionalism perfectly fitted the songs his band were playing, and functioned truly as part of a vision of ensemble playing, even when he was playing something that no-one else in the known universe was able to do. A couple of years ago I was introduced to the music of Dave Bainbridge. Perhaps best known for his work with the pioneering UK based Celtic folk/rock/ambient band Iona, which he co-founded in 1989 with David Fitzgerald, Dave's multi-faceted career as a musician, composer, arranger, improviser, producer and engineer has led him into many musical genres and work with numerous artists including; Troy Donockley, Jack Bruce, Buddy Guy, G

Me and Wild Man Fischer go back a long way. When I was in my late teens I was living in Bracknell, Berkshire, for reasons that I will not go into here, not because they are anything about which I am particularly ashamed, but because they are convoluted and not very interesting. At the time my favourite reading was the first two volumes of a three part encyclopaedia of rock music, the third volume of which never actually came out. I was a lonely, introverted sort of bloke, and - although I didn't know it at the time - a manic depressive desperately in need of treatment that I wouldn't get for another twenty or so years. I disliked my job, and spent much of my time in a dream world where I wrote and sang songs in my head, because I had no real way to record them, and no prospect of getting one. For reasons that I don't altogether understand, I spent much of my free time sitting on Reading railway station, either daydreaming about becoming a singer in a world where the peculiar songs that populated my head wo

In the three years since I first started working with Gonzo Multimedia several of the artists associated with the company have become personal friends. People Like Judge Smith, Liz Lenten and Erik Norlander. For those of you not in the know Erik Norlander is a progressive rock keyboardist, composer and producer from California. He has written and produced over 30 albums since 1993 with his chanteuse spouse Lana Lane, his band Rocket Scientists, his own solo albums and numerous guest appearances. Erik's evocative keyboard technique is reminiscent of the legendary Keith Emerson, Rick Wakeman, Patrick Moraz and Jon Lord while still very unique and forward-moving in its own right. Erik takes many of the classic riffs and phrases of his heroes and reinvents them with highly emotional pitch bending, vibrato and authoritative phrasing. This technique combines brilliantly with Erik's mastery of sound and production. Erik has personally led sound design efforts on several major brand synthesizers, and his knowledge

Date Published: 23rd January 2016 Don Falcone is a remarkable man. I first interviewed him some years ago when he explained to me the concept behind his band Spirits Burning. "The original concept was to basically celebrate space rock and so what I did was, I put out a call – I guess it was in 1997 – to a number of musicians to say would you be interested in gathering and celebrating space rock? And what I think has developed over that time given some of my interests, and then also what I kind of perceive as the openness and possibilities of space rock, and that includes everything from synth and electronic music. There is a folk and a blues aspect in some space rock, prog rock and art rock and then if you take it a little further, what some might call experimental music. So at some point I think it has become a celebration of music possibilities and then the other side of it, I was real influenced and also a big fan of the Brian Eno albums, especially the early ones and things like Bob Calvert, places you

One of my favourite authors working within this field that they call rock and roll is Ian Abrahams who is not only an extraordinarily good writer and researcher, but a damned nice bloke as well. I first came across him by accident when I was laying out a new edition of his entertaining and informative book about The Waterboys, who are – by the way – a band of whose music I am rather fond. Working with him on this project was a great pleasure, and I remember telling him at the end of it that I hope we do something together in the future. Then, some months after, I was talking to the ever talented Don Falcone about his work with one-time Hawkwind chanteuse Bridget Wishart, and somehow Ian's name came up in the conversation. I then interviewed the lovely Bridget who – in passing – told me that she had been working on a book about the history of the British Free Festival movements alongside – you've guessed it – Ian Abrahams. Fast forward a few more months, past all the business deals and things that I neither

A couple of months ago I interviewed legendary bassman Percy Jones, late of Brand X about the latest slew of Brand X reissues via Gonzo. Brand X was another one of those bands who were beloved of other musicians and the more discerning of critics but which despite everything, never had the commercial success that it deserved. They were a jazz fusion band active 1975–1980. Brand X started in 1975 as a 'jam' band signed by Island Records' Richard Williams. Williams A&R man Danny Wilding wrote down the name 'Brand X' to keep track of their activity on the studio calendar and the name stuck. Noted members included Phil Collins (drums), Percy Jones (bass), John Goodsall (guitar) and Robin Lumley (keyboards). Not long after jazz/rock fusion greats Brand X put out their 1980 album, Do They Hurt?, the band members went their separate ways until their comeback in 1992. Goodsall and Jones formed a trio version of Brand X with drummer Frank Katz in 1992. To make up for the lack of a keyboard player, Goodsall used a Gib

Yes culture lovers, Jaki and Tim are back with another monumentally peculiar radio show. Apparently Tim has spent the last year in cryogenic suspension, and the submarine sank. Maisie the Cow is back from having been abducted by an un-named nobleman, and the two strange DJs are now in a spaceship made out of an enormous baked bean, along with a bunch of different poultry and other birds. Or something like that. This is my favourite radio show of all time, and I hope that it will be yours too. Chock full of radical music, even more radical politics and a load of surrealistic silliness, it presses all the right buttons for me. I hope that it does for you guys as well...

Date Published: 23rd December 2015 I think that Liz Lenten is an extraordinarily talented lady. I first heard her when the lovely Anne-Marie in the Gonzo offices sent me a copy of her first record for the label, 'Indian Summer'. There was (and is) something beguiling about her sensual voice, and the sinuous rhythms of her mostly acoustic band. With the album came this: Liz Lenten formed AUBURN in the summer of 1999. Their first gig was at the jam-packed launch party of Scarlet Records held at the salubrious and smoky Madame JoJo's in Soho to a completely packed and enthusiastic house. Their first EP Sweet Sebastian received extensive airplay and sold out of its limited pressing within 2 weeks. They then teamed up with producer Tim Pettit, (Travis, Sun House and Carlene Carter) and recorded For Life, which also got great radio support and the band toured UK and played many live radio sessions. The debut Album DREAMS was released in 2003 and AUBURN toured with SOPHIE ELLIS BEXTOR in UK and EUROPE, playing to 4

I remember exactly where I was when I first heard of Judge Smith. I was sitting in the car park behind what is now Chope's department store in Bideford High Street. I had just bought a copy of the Not the Nine O'Clock News album. Being somewhat inclined toward anal compulsiveness I was happily perusing the liner notes on the back, and I noted that my favourite song on the album had been written by a guy named Judge Smith. What a strange name, I thought. Over the years, I heard quite a lot about this guy. It turned out that he was a founder member of cerebral proggers Van der Graaf Generator, and had also composed a number of witty and erudite stage musicals. Roll on about 20 years. My first wife was working for a very dodgy concert promoter. Said concert promoter had a friend called Charlie Salt, and one day, after a meeting with this bloke, Alison came back and asked me if I'd heard of a composer called Judge Smith? I told her that I had, and recounted roughly what I have already told you SO FAR in this ar