FELT (Go Kart Mozart, Denim)... Lawrence is amazing!

My only complaint with "Absolute Classic Masterpieces Vol. 2" is they left off "September Lady", "All The People I Like Are Those That Are Dead" and "I Can't Make Love To You Anymore". Granted, they weren't singles, but still. I added them to my digital version. ;-)

If I have Abso Classic Master 2 do I need Bubblegum Perfume?

I hope he did something nice: Bob, Pete and Sarah popped round with a bottle of Malibu and some antiseptic wipes or something ...

lol

they gave him a vacuum cleaner with ape hangers

If I have Abso Classic Master 2 do I need Bubblegum Perfume

I don't think so, the two ACM comps cover everything every other Felt comp has.

bubblegum perfume is a weird compilation. it hits all the b-sides to 12" material, which, granted is great! but it misses many of the "hits" from their albums, like september lady or castle or whatever

This is a really hard band to compile.

true

The original version of Bubblegum version contains the same non-album tracks as ACM2. However, the recently reissued version of BP replaces three of the album tracks with single tracks that haven't been on cd before.

xxp I think BP was intended as a "pop" album which is why there's no long tracks.

I'd suggest tracking down the following non-LP tracks, most of which are on the comps (some are not, i.e. "My Face Is On Fire", "Sunlight Strings")

"Ballad Of The Band"
"I Didn't Mean To Hurt You"
"Ferdinand Magellan"
"The Final Resting Of The Ark"
"There's No Such Thing As Victory"
"My Face Is On Fire"
"Penelope Tree"
"Something Sends Me To Sleep"
"Space Blues"
"Sunlight Strings"

And the LPs.

Essential:

"The Strange Idols Patter and other Short Stories"
"The Splendour Of Fear"
"Forever Breathes The Lonely Word"
"Poem Of The River"

Underrated:

"The Pictorial Jackson Review"

Good:

"Crumbling The Antiseptic Beauty"
"Ignite The Seven Cannons"

A few good tracks:

"Me and a Monkey on the Moon"

Non-essential organ-led instrumental albums:

"Let the Snakes Crinkle their Heads to Death"
"Train Above the City"

Felt - Pick Only 27

lol

i love pictorial to death. so perfect

he's alternately lou reed and dylan like coney island baby / just like tom's thumb's blues vibe. to me, anyway

@ scott "No (single)? Madness!" vs. "No (instrumental)? Madness!"

Pictorial Jackson is the worst for me ... the instrumentals are great but some of the the songs seem half-done. Production is dull too.

yeah, it may as well be a recording of demos or whatever, but i love it. the first few seconds of ivory past alone, wow

i love the way the lyrics are so defeatist and contrarian and bitter but then every fourth line or so a glimmer of genuine wisdom puts in an appearance even through the resignation and life-sickness

i mean in the album as a whole

i own 20+ felt releases on vinyl and i still feel like i won't be able to die happy until i own all the japanese pressings of the albums. cuz i'm sick like that.

i just thought of that looking at that page of releases.

plus the japanese releases have inserts that didn't come with u.k. pressings.

I posted this a month ago on another thread:

I remember walking down Parkway in Camden. I was walking on the street and he pulled me onto the curb and actually shouted at me. "A rock star can not be killed by a black cab or a mini cab." I was just drunk, but it stuck with me. Being killed by a cab would just not be good enough for me or for Lawrence… in his eyes of course.

i don't really care what that guys thinks about felt, but i read that anyway. when it was posted before.

the moptop guy. the oasis guy or whatever.

wow, what a great interview, thanks. agree with him that martin duffy is a genius.

also, lol at that quote. so fitting i guess

is weird and saddening that he wrote a song chastising a junkie and then became one. oh well. life

'New Day Dawning' could be their soul/Stax masterpiece, and 'Free' is pure gospel Aretha.

listening to live shows, there truly were a lot of moments where they sounded like booker t and the mg's!!

man i love forever breathes, the heavily reverbed guitars and the organ-driven renderings of his songs, but the background vox never worked for me.

i love the backing vocals on forever breathes the lonely word, and in fact pretty much all felt, esp. the re-recording of fortune on gold mine trash, lawrence can always use a vocal foil. fbtlw is flawless , it's so fussy though! i was listening to the andy kershaw radio session the other day, and it is to be honest a bit of a shocker, rain of crystal spires in particular is all over the shop, rhythm section way up the mix, guitar bits tripping over each other, vocals off key, it exudes a strong we're playing this for the first time vibe, but it all sound so effortless on the lp! that session has the only studio version of when the dawn comes creeping in too which you get the impression could have wound up pretty great had it been done justice.

Does anyone know the original proposed running order of the original poem of the river? thats always intrigued me, i know i can't make love to you any more was supposed to be on it, but the recording didn't work out, but i seem to recall some others were scrapped too, and silver plane was cooked up in a hurry to fill the gap.

poem of the river is the last perfect album for me, i get almost as annoyed by the underproduction of pictorial jackson review as the overproduction of ignite the seven canons these days. While the former is a great record, it's galling that mcgee wouldn't shell out for a proper production, i assumed that it was lawrence's decision to bash out something rough and ready, but it somehow makes all the difference that he though they were demos. it's kindof fun to hear felt being scrappy, but you get the feeling with a bit of gloss and depth it could have equalled forever breathes lonely word.

for all the oddity in his catalogue, the real anomaly for me is me and a monkey on the moon. it's like he's saying this is the band we could have been all along if we'd played it straight. it has grown on me in recent years, partly as he's great at writing really straight lyrics, as evidenced by denim, but some of those guitar solos do bother me....

hmm yeah

me and a monkey has never taken root with me as much as it could in theory

can't believe silver plane was a rushed-off filler track! so wonderful and dylanesque

not sure what the original running order was, just know that when the dawn... was supposed to appear on it

yeah, for being such fundamentally well-crafted songs, it is a little frustrating that the production on pictorial jackson review is not there...but i still love it to death. it's that and "poem" for me.

yeah silver plane is great. it makes sense that it came quickly though, it just glides along.

the monkeying about with bubblegum perfume bothers me a bit too, mostly because female star is manifestly not a great felt song and this is probably my single favourite felt artefact. i have three copies. maybe i need to make that four now. the sleeve proofs (very heavily) annotated by lawrence that were reprinted in the foxtrot fanzine are priceless though, yeah lawrence's design eye is dead on. mercilessly so.

It's funny how the instrumental records are generally dismissed as inessential, crinkle in particular is an amazing record. people seem more inclined to approve of these kind of ventures when they're interspersed with pop songs or on b sides. i suppose thats understandable.

yeah i've spent a lot of time with crinkle and train...

shit i need to check out that foxtrot thing.

even if one hates felt's actual music, can't imagine dismissing the artwork out of hand. i mean...

naw, it's lawrence's critique of the rework in progress of the bubblegum sleeve for the reissue, it's classic passive aggressive art direction, i mean it's great, everything he says is absolutely spot on. and theres some additional comments written on homeless shelter headed stationery.

that fanzine is worth checking out, the best bit is an previously unpublished interview from 1986, but there is a wealth of good stuff in there.

ha, oh loz...

I've a vague idea that I picked up a free Felt flexi in Our Price, Watford - I think around Me and a Monkey ...

yeah, get out of the mirror so i can see, i think that was their farewell gift to an indifferent world

this is a bit adrift, but i picked up heidi berry's firefly a little while ago, martin duffy is all over it, i think it's from '87 and it is pretty great, very reminiscent of poem of the river in a weird lady singer songwritery way.

What are the three unique-to-CD tracks on Bubblegum Perfume? Bcuz eMusic has it, so I can just cherry pick those tracks.

Did some checking about "Goldmine Trash":
"Dismantled King" and "Sunlight Bathed" are demos unique to "Goldmine Trash". Interesting but hardly critical.
"Fortune" is the re-recorded version which originally appeared on the "Sunlight Bathed" single.

luv Goldmine Trash, as a midwestern american that LP was the only "best of"

halfway through these new answers

This is a such a great thread, I never get tired of reading about this band.

I fell in love with Lawrence when I bought Denim On Ice when it came out and for a while it was my favourite album of all time. Over the last few years I've started to enjoy Back In Denim a bit more. It seems quite split to which people prefer of the two. I love Felt more as a whole but those two albums are really up there with his very best work.

As for Felt my two favourites have always been Strange Idol Patterns and Forever breathes The Lonely Word. They both represent what was great about both eras of the band. I can never really pick which era I like more, The Deebank years had Primitive Painters but the Duffy Years gave us Space Blues. Truly one of the greatest bands I can think of.

One of the things that fascinated - and fascinates me - about Felt was the discrepancy between the quality and the quantity of the love for them. Most people I meet know nothing about them; those who do love them. That was true at the time: when they did their final tour I got my ticket for the Leeds gig as soon as it went on sale, convinced it would be a rapid sellout. In fact, there were about 50 people there.

Maybe they're one of those groups that depended on a moment of conversion to make fans - was anyone ever aware of the group for ages ad gradually fell for them, or was it always a single lightbulb moment? Was definitely the latter for me, and it's still vivid in my mind - being really miserable one teenage Saturday afternoon, and browsing in Our Price looking for something to cheer me up: I found cassette with Seven Cannons on one side and Strange Idols on the other. And when I got it home I couldn't believe something like this existed: it was the only music I'd ever heard that merited the description "courtly" - as much for Deebank's guitar as for the titles. And I loved that Lawrence's voice sounded just like mine did to me when I heard tapes of myself - awkward and out of place.

My favourite Lawrence story (I may have posted this elsewhere; if so - sorry): At one of his 90s low points, Alan McGee took pity and gave him a job as a receptionist at Creation. Unfortunately Lawrence had no knowledge of switchboard systems, or interest in gaining it. So when a call came in, he would ask the caller to hold, walk through to find whoever it was for, then bring them back to reception to either take the call there or transfer it to their own phone themselves.

Jon Lewis:
Tuesday's Secret replaces A Wave Crashed on Rocks.
Female Star replaces Declaration.
Fire Circle replaces Gather Up Your Wings and Fly.

If anyone here wants the original Bubblegum Perfume cd I'll send it to them for nothing.

I had been aware of Felt for years, heard them but Lawrence's voice didn't work for me. Then a few years back I had the strongest urge to hear "Primitive Painters" and much to my surprise I didn't have it anywhere. So I picked up the Cherry Red "Ambition" compilation and borrowed the ACM compilations from a friend. Well! At that point it all changed for me, though I still find most of the albums inconsistent vs those singles comps. But, oh, the high points are VERY high.

I'd read about Felt around the time they broke up and was intrigued by their story though not enough to pick up the records. When ACM was released a couple of years later I got that and fell in love with it, subsequently getting all the Cherry Red albums. I didn't bother looking for the later records as I figured without Deebank something had to have been lost. A while later there was the article and interview with Lawrence in Record Collector which convinced me to get Bubblegum Perfume which I found to be every bit as good as ACM, inspiring me to hunt down everything else I could find by them.

Getting BP was my lightbulb moment.

yah, for me too

Gold Mine Trash was my introduction and the gateway drug for the rest. I read about it in a copy of Q magazine (!) that I purchased whilst in the airport heading for a school exchange visit to Nurnberg, and their 4-star review piqued my interest enough to make me seek it out on my return; I bought the cassette version with a side of extra instrumentals taken from their earlier releases. The 1985 release date ties in with this so I would have been approaching 14 by the time I got hold of it. I was still pretty wet behind the ears with regards to "indie" then and settling into a deep love for The Cure, but I remember being really blown away by GMT and in fact the demo versions on there as mentioned ("Sunlight Bathed..." etc) I still regard as the definitive takes. Per ithappens post, once I'd heard Felt I loved them immediately and started buying everything by them as it came out, along with the back catalogue.

I found the Crumbling the Antiseptic Beauty/The Splendour of Fear CD used at Amoeba when visiting SF, and I knew before I heard a note exactly what it would sound like, like I'd heard it in a dream. I was exactly right.

http://www.secondlanguagemusic.com/news.html

Second Language is proud to unveil two short films, recently shot by director Paul Kelly, in which Pete Astor, erstwhile Weather Prophet and Loft-leading luminary of Creation Records' initial onslaught, back in the mid-'80s, and the voice and songwriter behind the just-released Songbox (SL013), is grilled by Lawrence, of Felt, Denim and Go Kart Mozart fame.

http://www.bfi.org.uk/lff/films/new_british_cinema/1731

AWWWW SHIT

finally!