Sing Me to Sleep

Dean & Britta have provided a remix of the track International Velvet Theme to The Right Track: Tunes to Target Cancer which is “a series of concerts, events, and music download[s ...] to help raise funds for rare and underfunded cancers”. The series also includes tracks by Ween, Linda Thompson, Buffalo Tom and The Cowbly Junkes (and more).

And while we’rementioning Dean & Britta’s sharity contributions a quick reminder that they have also have a track on the forthcoming Sing Me to Sleep compilation of “Indie Lullabies” for The Valerie Fund. You can hear and download Dean & Britta’s contribution, Making Me Smile, on Muruch.com and pre-order the album from American Laundromat.

In 1991 Galaxie 500 headed out on what was to be their last tour of the US supporting The Cocteau Twins. This recoding is from the second night at the Warfield Theatre in San Francisco and was probably a couple of nights after the accidental or pre-meditated use of a spotlight signalled the beginning of the end of Galaxie 500 (see BOTH Damon & Naomi’s Ptolemaic Terrascope interview and Dean’s Black Postcards for both sides of that story).

The recording is not too bad, and the seven song set is a gem. Within a couple of months it would all be over. I first read about the split in the Melody Maker at the beginning of May. I was sad.

Download Galaxie 500 at the Warfield Theatre – 21st March 1991 (via Mediafire 60MB zip)

The picture is (obviously) not from the show the recording is… I wonder if you still need to prop your amps on beer crates when you play in the big venues?

The two dates will feature Damon & Naomi playing with Kurihara and will also include screenings of Naomi’s films from the 1001 Nights DVD and a Q&A session moderated by Haden Guest, director of the Harvard Film Archive. Support for both shows will be from Sharon van Etten. The shows will be at 92Y Tribeca in NYC on January 30th and The Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, MA on January 31st.

The update on their website also includes a Christmas pressie from Damon & Naomi, an mp3 download of their cover of White Christmas that was released on a very limited CDR last year and was featured in the film Lovely, Still. Head on over to Damon & Naomi’s web page, read the full update and click on the Have a happy, everyone! link.

Dean & Britta are giving away a download of their lovely Christmas single from a couple of years ago. He’s Coming Home was originally released as a 7″ single on Chimney Rocks! Records but now is available in digital form from Dean & Britta in return for your email address. Head over to the He’s Coming Home promo website and enter your email and the code oldtoytrains.

If you’re looking for pressies for friends, family (or yourself) you can also grab the very lovely black Galaxie 500 T-shirt from Dean & Britta’s online store (as well as lots of other goodies).

Lost in Space (photo by Andrea)

Luna stopped off in Manchester for this session on Mark Radcliffe’s BBC Radio 1 show on the 13th December 1995. I remember staying up to record this. I went through my box of cassettes a while ago to try and find it but couldn’t track it down, which is a shame as I remember the interview being quite amusing… and at one point touched on the subject of, if memory serves, Angel Corpus Christi faxing intimate self-portraits to Dean.

Luckily the three tracks turned up on the Season of the Witch CD single put out by Beggars Banquet in 1996 (without the interviews but certainly better than my crappy FM recording).

Mp3s via box.net

• Indian Summer (6.3MB)
• Lost in Space (4.8MB)
• 23 Minutes in Brussels (7.7MB)

UPDATE: There were some digital blips in my rip so I’ve taken new rips from the CD – not sure they’re any better…

Photo originally uploaded by Guy Eppel

Guitrarrorists was a compilation of solo guitar pieces curated by Kramer and released on No.6 Records in 1991. Contributions came from such indie lumninaries as Thurston Moore, Steve Albini and J Mascis. I listened to the whole album a few weeks back and must admit I found it mostly heavy going.

Dean Wareham’s contribution is this nice little number entitled West Broadway. Enjoy.

Mp3: Dean Wareham – West Broadway (5.1MB via box.net)

I don’t have many recordings of Damon & Naomi – at most gigs since this one in 2001 my taping buddy hasn’t been able to tape for various reasons (and had one failure – and doesn’t come out so often these days). This was a great show, support had come from The Clientele (first or second time I’d seen them) and The Trembling Blue Stars (sadly neither of their sets were taped). Damon & Naomi were over with Michio Kurihara on the tour that would end with the “Live in San Sebasitan” deception (go read your Sub Pop Years liner notes).

I didn’t often bother making sleeves for the recordings I have, but I did for this one. The picture was not from London but from Holland (I think) on the same tour, and was from a set sent to me to put on the website by the photographer Stefan Claudius. I didn’t get permission to bung it on my CD sleeve but then it was never meant for sharing. Stefan’s photos also turned up in the “Song to the Siren” CD booklet.

Anyway… great show – you can see my original review here.

Download Attention Shoppers from Mediafire (93MB) (booklet / insert)

Back in the early 90s I used to record shows until I realised that often I was worrying more about the recording and not enjoying the show as much as I should. I recorded two Luna shows, their first one in London in 1992 (my first recording with my new Walkman Pro and I had it set up all wrong so sounds pretty poor) and this one from 1993.

Firstly here’s how I described it when I shared it on easytree a few years back…

I just listened to this for the first time for ages and I hadn’t realised just how good a recording it was (despite the standard issue SONY tie-clip stereo mic I used).

Luna were in town supporting The Velvet Underground on their reunion tour and threw in this headline show at The Borderline. The band seemed in good humour and put on a damn fine show. I remember the “I Want Everything” girl pissing me off at the time but I now find it quite funny and it led to some nice banter from the band “Can we get some Valium down here please”.

And a couple of Galaxie 500 tracks just to make a great show complete.

And for a bit more on the “I Want Everything” girl here’s a story I posted to The Galaxie 500 Mailing List shortly after Luna’s last show in London in 2005…

At the ULU gig there was some heckling going on and Dean said “are you from Colchester?” – which struck me as being an odd thing to say – but hey – who knows what goes on in Dean’s head.

While listening to a London gig [from 1993] the band were being constantly screamed at by a girl – the “I Want Everything girl” (IWEG) as she is now officially known (in my head) – and at one point she screams (and this is just a rough guestimate rather than an accurate transcription as I don’t have a copy with me at work today)…

IWEG: “We’re from Colchester”
DEAN: “Colchester? Where the hell is that?”

So it seems that Dean either…
still remembers the endless ear-bashing the IWEG gave him back in ‘93 (possibly waking up in cold-sweats in the middle of the night)
    or
has been constantly plagued by hecklers from Colchester for the last 12 years

if IWEG is on the list I’d like to say that while I was pissed off with you back in 93 – listening again to that show made me appreciate your contribution to a very good night – Thank you!

Having subsequently read Black Postcards its clear there are other reasons that girls at gigs might be memorable.

Download Luna @ The Borderline, London 1993 (94.3MB via Mediafire)

We played the same stage as Melissa Etheridge, but missed her show. We also missed Lenny Kravitz and Midnight Oil and all kinds of other stupid shit. Rock festivals are celebrations of rock music, and everyone is happy and nice to one another, but the truth is that you hate most of the bands. Well, you hate their music, and isn’t that the same thing?

Galaxie 500 *

So just to prove how pointless and hateful festivals are here’s an excellent recording of Galaxie 500’s performance at the 1990 Roskilde Festival. Bah! Glad I wasn’t there.

Download Galaxie 500 at The Roskilde Festival – 1990 (68MB via Mediafire)

* OK – the picture was taken at The Bizarre Festival in Lorelei, Germany the week before Roskilde, but it’s the closest I can manage. Dean mentions this festival in the book as well and how despite the beautiful setting The Ramones chose to stay in their trailer and eat pizza rather than be outside enjoying “the mountain, the cliff, the sunshine, the barbecue [... because] punk is a celebration of ugly, how can punk rockers enjoy the beautiful Rhine Valley?”

If you haven’t already you really ought to buy a copy of Black Postcards – no self respecting Galaxie 500 (or Luna) fan should be without it – even if it will make you sad.

Dear Paulina

OK – a ridiculously long post so skip to the end if you’re just here to leech a couple of Luna rarities!

In Summer 1997 I had this half-baked idea to release a kind of Beatles Fan Club single only with Galaxie 500 rather than The Beatles. I had no idea, when I kicked off, just what I thought it might be like. So… I wrote (on paper with stamps and things) to Damon & Naomi just to test the ground. I got a lovely letter back from Naomi saying that they’d rather not get involved as Damon & Naomi, and that apart from The Peel Sessions they didn’t have any Galaxie 500 unreleased material that they wanted to release “we were never that prolific” so, with that knockback I forgot about it.

In October 1997 I spoke to Dean Wareham after Luna’s show at the LA2 in London, it was little more than a “hi you were great… would you sign my ticket” but it was the ice-breaker. Later that week he called and left a phone message for me (see Dean Wareham moment #2) and that lit the fire under my plans again… after all… we were mates now!

The idea cooked away for a year (nothing moves particularly fast in my world) and in the spring of 1999 I emailed Dean and asked if I could put out a Luna single. He emailed back saying yes and suggested that he’ll talk with the band and pull out a demo I could release (I, sadly, have long since lost the email so I can’t remember the details).

A couple of months later a package arrived at the door with a DAT and details of the tracks that I should put on the single. No demos or live tracks for me… these were genuine… unreleased… luna rarities. The a-side track Dear Paulina was taken from the (cult but actually pretty unpleasant) film Thursday and featured during a scene in which Dallas (played by Paulina Porizkova) rapes Casey (you can see the scene on YouTube but it’s obviously NSFW). The b-side, Seven-Eleven, was some near-instrumental music also from the film.

So I had some music but absolutely no idea at all what I was supposed to do now… so I got in touch out of the blue with Dom from the London indie Earworm records who had been putting out lots of lovely singles… he in turn pointed me towards a company that would arrange the cut and press the single, Key Production, and another that would print the artwork.

On the 9th of August Hazel and I went to Abbey Road Studios (yes that Abbey Road) to oversee the cutting of the masters – of course we knew nothing and just went along for the ride with little more than Dom’s advice which was something along the lines of “don’t let them mess with it.”

I knew nothing about the film and had no idea who Paulina might be so for the sleeve art I threw together with my very limited Photoshop skills a picture of Hazel overlayed with a what was supposed to be the reflection of a computer monitor showing an email being written. A reference to the Galaxie 500 Mailing List… and you know… “Dear Paulina” sounded like a greeting at the beginning of an email. I’m no designer or artist so I didn’t expect great things and all I really intended was that it would be better than a cat nailed to a board. I had help from my designer friend Julian preparing it for print and sent it off.

Over the next few weeks everything but the singles turned up at my house. It was odd having 500 sleeves, 500 plastic covers, 500 mailing envelopes and a strange nagging doubt that the record was a bizarre dream. In mid September I finally received a batch of test pressings. While they were good to hear they were also worryingly not perfect. Key reassured me that the production run would be just fine… and not having anyone else to trust I chose to trust them.

On the 27th September I took delivery of 546 seven inch singles – I’m still not entirely sure why 546, 46 more than I had printed sleeves for. Over the next few weeks I mailed out 250 or so of these. In the days before Paypal, taking orders over the Internet was a headache and the singles were sold for a “carefully concealed 5 dollar bill.” I eventually sold quite a lot of them but nowhere near enough to cover the costs.

The single got the Tower Records Single of the Week in Irish paper Hot Press, which led to Tower Records desperately getting in touch with me to get some copies into their shops (which the bastards NEVER paid me for). I paid Luna in singles which they sold at their shows or put into shops in NYC. In February 2000 Hazel and I went to New York City to see Luna and gave them most of the copies that I had left – they had more chance of selling them than I did.

Looking back it all seems like a dream and only looking at Hazel’s face on the sleeve and our address on the label reassures me that it all really did happen. I lost a stack of money but then it wasn’t about making money and I didn’t really expect to make any. It was all an absolute blast.

Trivia:

• The run out groove on the a-side has the old URL of A Head Full of Wishes – it doesn’t work any more
• I gave away some of the test pressings to people who helped out with the single – I still have a few and periodically wonder if test pressings have any value. Don’t think I’ll sell though
• Just before the single was released I saw Luna in London and asked Dean if he wanted to approve the sleeve art before I released the single – he said “don’t worry… as long as it’s not a cat nailed to a board” (or something along those lines)

Downloads (via Box.net)

• A-side: Luna – Dear Paulina
• B-side: Luna – Seven-Eleven