A two-in-one review of releases from The Residents that have made the journey from fan myth to bedraggled bootleg to majestic restoration. ‘A Nickle if Your Dick’s This Big’ – a coming together of the fabled ‘Warner Bros Album’ (or, as it’s still referred to on the sleeve, ‘The W***** B*** Album’) and ‘B.S.’ (‘Baby […]
If you only buy one seven-disc live dissection of 20th Century popular music by an avant-everything collective, make it this one. Already tremendously unwieldy and self-regarding in its original incarnation, the reissue of The Residents’ attempt to disseminate American popular music is now bigger in every way, an effort which only suits one possible person – […]
The Cryptic Corporation’s tireless piecing together of studio crumbs shows no sign of slacking. ‘God in Three Persons’ represents a milestone for The Residents, a period when they were forced to adapt to outside forces impacting both the way they worked and how they were experienced by their audiences. We’re in 1988 and the CD has […]
There are acts out there who do go that extra mile in delivering what their fanbase really wants. Frank Zappa’s ‘beat the boots’ initiative, whereby he commercially released better versions of his material already being bootlegged; Neil Young’s continuing trawl through his archive of live and unreleased tracks; Jimmy Page’s hands-on restoration of Led Zeppelin’s […]
One of the great mysteries of modern-day music for me is the inexplicable rise of the EP. I just don’t get it. Singles, yes – a bite-size nugget that leaves you wanting more, either a snapshot in time or a teaser of what’s to come. Albums, obviously, I understand those, a collection of tracks which […]
At six discs and over three hours of ‘new’ material, there is no doubting that The Residents’ reissue programme’s latest instalment is an abject lesson in how to both treat your audience and your catalogue with reverence. Now literally more than a trilogy and nearer a saga, the project was a result of both ambition […]
Music dullards will often, frothing at the mouth, offer well-meant but always hopeless tips as to how to tackle a band’s catalogue you are unfamiliar with. “DON’T listen to the one with all the hits, start with this bootleg of rare B-side performances first!” “It’s best you listen to them in this order – 3,1,4,2,8,7,5,6.. […]
1979 – the year of the eyeball. It was with the release of the album, ‘Eskimo’, that The Residents donned their tuxes and top hats and unveiled their ocular visages. From shadows and collages emerged an immediately recognisable band, though there was still no further clarity as to whom lurked beneath. It wasn’t the only […]
For the ITV network, situation comedy was always something of a challenge. While not the comedy wasteland that is has sometimes been made out to be (the network did, after all, have the likes of ‘Rising Damp’), the various regional broadcasters that made up the network would often struggle to come up with anything that […]
There was never truly a British equivalent to the US garage scene, the seemingly endless battleground of disparate bands with wildly inventive personae and often thrilling music, destined to achieve pretty much nothing. Merseybeat and Freakbeat are lightweight attempts to pitch for a Pebbles-esque posthumous footnote – they lack the excitement, the belligerence, the plain oddness. […]
