A Head Full of Wishes newsletter #50

2026-04-17
Categories: substack

Substack
A Head Full of Wishes newsletter #50

Listening party for Damon & Naomi’’s live album of Galaxie 500 covers

Damon will be hosting a Bandcamp listening party for What’s Past is Prologue, Damon & Naomi’s live album of Galaxie 500 covers. The party will be on Friday 17th (tomorrow) at 12:30pm Pacific, 3:30pm Eastern or 8:30pm BST.

The album was recorded over three wonderful nights at Cafe Oto in London and featured a number of guest appearances.

Here’s Damon’s invite:

I'm going to host a Listening Party of our Bandcamp-exclusive release What's Past is Prologue on Friday April 17 at 12:30pm Pacific / 3:30pm Eastern / 8:30pm UK time. Come listen to the album with me and chat about it - this is a live recording of Galaxie 500 songs Naomi and I played as encores during our recent residency at Café Oto in London, with friends Laetitia Sadier, Mark Webber, Richard Youngs, Jess Hickie-Kallenbach, Alabaster DePlume, Gina Birch, Marie Merlet and Stewart Lee. There's lots to discuss!

Damon Krukowski on Bandcamp

Head over to Bandcamp to RSVP.

I wrote about the shows back in January.

Fingers crossed that there’ll be a physical release at some point!

[343] Galaxie 500 - On Fire (orange vinyl LP)

Back in February 2019 Newbury Comics started releasing limited edition coloured variants of Galaxie 500’s LPs - the first of these was On Fire that was released on orange/gold vinyl.

Of course I already had many copies of On Fire but… I couldn’t help myself and bought a copy for $25 plus $15 postage (which is twice the postage I had been charged for an LP from the US just two years previously. They then released a maroon (with a black smudge) Today and a Blue (with a grey smudge) This Is Our Music… I bought both of them.

Later came a pink On Fire and a purple This Is Our Music but I had decided to draw the line!

Catalogue Number: AHFOW 12/042
Artist: Galaxie 500
Title: On Fire
Notes: Orange vinyl
Format: LP
Bought from Newbury Comics for $24.99 plus postage.
Buy ‘On Fire’ on Bandcamp

Previously in my record collection:

[344] Decomposing the songs of Galaxie 500 and Luna

Back in 2004 some discussion on the Galaxie 500 Mailing List turned to the idea of making a fan-tribute album and I volunteered to co-ordinate the efforts. It took a couple of years since the volunteer co-ordinator was a bit rubbish, but this finally saw the light of day some time in 2006!

The project started with grand ambitions but eventually ended up with me burning a bunch of CDRs and laser-printing sleeves and selling them to whoever wanted a copy for $5 including postage. It deserved better. There are a bunch of lovely contributions, some faithful, some interprative, but all made by people who loved what they were doing enough to give it a go.

One of the reasons for the delay was that I wanted to be a part of it and was hoping that some talent would be bestowed upon be by some higher being. Thankfully lost are my efforts at covers of Blue Thunder and I Want Everything!

The album is available to download here and is worth it - it’s lovely to have an album made by friends (even if the internet becoming less social means I’ve lost touch with most of them).

For the later AHFoW tribute albums I had invaluable help from Hannah and John and Miguel that meant they took only months instead of years to see the light of day. A couple of the tracks on Decomposing made it onto other releases:

Watoo Watoo’s lovely loungey Chinatown was released on their second (I think) album La fuite which can be bought on Bandcamp.
Ron Harrity’s cover of Cold Night was included as a bonus-track on a better organised tribute album On Fire | 30.

The Apollo Generation, whose cover of This Time Around was included on the release, put out an album a few years ago that I’ve only just come across and is being played right now and is sounding good!

I just noticed that the sleeve in my copy was on second-hand paper… that’s how cheap/rubbish I was!

This of course is another entry that doesn’t pass the criteria for inclusion but since it was a child of the Galaxie 500 Mailing List it seemed a shame not to include it. I wrote about the mailing list in a Substack post last year - you can read it for free (as all my Substack posts are).