A Head Full of Wishes is a site for Galaxie 500, Luna, Damon & Naomi, Dean & Britta and Dean Wareham. With news, articles and lists of releases and past and future shows.
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A Head Full of Wishes newsletter #60
This week was highlighted but two lovely, unexpected gifts that came in the post. First was a package from Angel Corpus Christi with a lovely promo copy of her White Courtesy Phone album and a single that filled a gap in my record collection that I’ll post about in a week or so.
The other gift was Danny Passerella’s gorgeous Spacemen 3 ‘Vinyl Archive: 1986 - 2024’ - it is an astounding collection, beautifully presented. Danny is now taking pre-orders for a Sonic Boom / Spectrum / E.A.R. edition which will inevitably have relevance to AHFoW.
This week’s finds
- Damon & Naomi are playing a show at the Carpenter Center in Cambridge, MA on the 13th August - described as an An Evening of Performances with Spencer Yeh and Damon & Naomi I’m not sure if this is a collaborative performance or two sets, the 90 minute total run-time suggests the former? Tickets are free.
- Dean contributed a short piece on The Cure’s Seventeen Seconds for UNCUT back in 2024 which has been shared on their website - “Where the debut was uptempo, funny and crisp, Seventeen Seconds is very different. […] It is really stripped down in terms of instrumentation, with minimal drum patterns, one guitar and maybe a keyboard playing a spooky melody.”
- It’s the last few days to get a pre-order in for a Dr Kiko Tours T-shirt
- Nathan Amundsun has just released a collection of early Rivulets demos from way back that includes a cover of Galaxie 500’s Tugboat - another one to add to the list.
https://aheadfullofwishes.substack.com/p/a-fleet-of-tugboats
I hastily threw together a post on Damon & Naomi’s A Sky Record - I hope to revisit this at some point and give it more deserving attention.
https://aheadfullofwishes.substack.com/p/damon-and-naomis-lockdown-album-a
I’m going to take a few weeks off from the Tuesday posts for a few reasons…
- I’ve been rather chasing my tail to keep up with them so I’m hoping to get some posts in the bank and allow them to be a bit more considered (no promises though)
- I’m expecting/hoping the next few months to be busier with non-AHFoW stuff
- It’s summer, I live at the seaside
I’ll pop out my usual call here for contributions. Please get in touch if you have any ideas you’d like to develop into a guest post.
My record collection [363] - Damon & Naomi - Shibuya O-Nest, Tokyo, Japan 2005 (DVD)
This was the first of two Japanese shows that Damon & Naomi released on limited run DVDs - this was filmed in June 2005 and released at the end of that year.
The video is very much of bootleg quality, one camera, show-lighting, no camera movement (just zooms and pans) but is a lovely record of Damon & Naomi’s live show with Masaki Batoh, Michio Kurihara, and Bhob Rainey and a guest appearance from Mikami Kan on one track.
What is it about last shows on a tour? The band is exhausted, but at its most together; the mood can be loose, but intense because it's the last night; the feelings are celebratory, but also melancholy.
The Galaxie 500 live CD, "Copenhagen," was the last show of a long European tour; the D&N with Kurihara "Live in San Sebastian" CD was likewise recorded at the end of an exhausting tour. And earlier this year, the last show in Japan of The Earth Is Blue tour turned out to be a similarly special night for us.
First of all, we had a dream band on stage with us: Kurihara, of course. But also Masaki Batoh from Ghost, fingerpicking an acoustic guitar. Bhob Rainey, on soprano sax. And we asked the legendary singer Mikami Kan - who had opened all our shows in Japan - if he might join us on stage for an encore this last evening. He honored us by saying yes . . .
We put together a set list that reflected the group we had assembled - the band's choice of our touring material, from the new album and otherwise; plus a song by Ghost ("Awake in a Muddle"); a song by Kurihara drawn from his remarkable solo album ("The Wind's Twelve Quarters"); and, for the encore with Mikami Kan, an improvised medley of our song that is dedicated to him ("Ueno Station") with a traditional Japanese "enka" tune that he recorded on one of our favorite albums of his ("Sendou Kouta"). At the end, because the crowd asked for a second encore, and because we always get a bit sentimental in Japan, we played the Galaxie 500 song "Blue Thunder."
And then we packed up and went home. There's always so much to attend to on coming home from a long tour, and somehow the last echoes of the trip fade first.
So some months later, we were surprised and delighted when a package arrived from our friend Hiroo Ishihara in Japan - Ishihara (who directed the great Ghost DVD released earlier this year) had filmed that night's show in Tokyo, and edited it for us as a souvenir on DVD.
We're pressing a limited run of these DVDs, to share the souvenir with anyone who might have come to one of our shows this year, or wanted to but couldn't. Thanks to Ishihara and all the friends we had on stage, it's a show we will always remember from our tour of the world.
Damon & Naomi release announcement (3rd November 2005)
It’s bootleggy origins make it something that doesn’t really reward repeated viewings, the image are very murky… sometimes you can barely make out the performers, particularly Kurihara who stands in the dark towards the back of the stage making his majestic sounds. The sound however is beautiful so it can reward repeated listenings!
It came in a beautiful sleeve designed by Naomi.
- Catalogue Number: AHFOW 13/001
- Artist: Damon & Naomi
- Title: Shibuya O-Nest Tokyo Japan June 24, 2005
- Format: DVD
- Bought direct from Damon & Naomi for $12 plus postage
Previously in my record collection:
My record collection [364] - Dean & Britta & Sonic Boom - A Peace of Us (LP)
So, despite my finest efforts to post all my Christmas releases around Christmas here we have a massive failure on that front getting posted as far from Christmas as it’s possible to be. But… a Dean & Britta album is for life, not just for Christmas.
The “Cherry Eco Mix vinyl” release of A Peace of Us was released for Christmas 2025, a year on from the album’s first release. I had no intention of buying another copy… sometimes even I know when I should draw the line at having multiple copies of the same album. But then in January the Rough Trade shop discounted it, and also had an additional 10% off deal and so it turns out that I don’t know when to draw that line after all.
I haven’t actually taken the record out of its shrinkwrap so as well as having no idea wtf “Cherry Eco Mix vinyl” is I also don’t know what it looks or sounds like.
A bit of (admittedly half-arsed) research revealed that Eco Mix vinyl was developed a couple of years ago by Canadian record pressing company PRP:
In early 2023 we began developing a solution for these problems and as a result, “Eco Mix” was born. Eco Mix is a new effect that uses 100% recycled vinyl, and is split into six distinctive color groups. This allows it to complement the color theme or artwork for your album, in ways not possible before. Additionally the new colors all feature varying levels of an effect we call “marbling”. This gives the mix a dynamic element, blending complementary colors to achieve a subtle, yet stunning look.
Precision Record Pressing continues its push for sustainability
While I’m not that big a fan of “marbling” I am a fan of recycling and it’s a healthy step away from the fad for “virgin vinyl” that there was a few years back.
Of course Eco Mix sounds as good to my ears as the previous release, which I guess wasn’t on Eco Mix.
I must admit that the plastic involved in the music business has been one of my most difficult things to resolve…
I like to own music - it’s not just something to play, it’s a declaration. But the plastic manufacturing industry is an awful polluter, producing pollutants and products that will last for years (or forever) and if that wasn’t enough its obviously heavily tied into the petroleum industry and all the awful things that that entails for our planet.
A few years ago I made the decision to stop buying records and CDs and move to entirely to buying downloads - while my record and CD buying tailed off it didn’t really ever stop completely (hence being on #364 of this series) - and of course with time came the realisation that the downloading and streaming had different but equally awful side effects powering massive data centres and tech made from rare-earth minerals and all the poisoning and polluting that extracting, manufacturing, and disposing of it involves.
I still get pangs of environmental guilt ever record or CD I buy, made all the worse by the utterly pointless shrinkwrap I have to remove before I can play them… but, I’m a hypocrite, because I love music and have no idea how to manage that without contributing to the destruction of the planet. I’m sorry.
- I still buy records and CDs new (although considerably fewer than in the past)
- I subscribe to a streaming platform
- I buy downloads from Bandcamp (and other platforms)
- I buy CDs and records from charity shops
- I have most of my CDs (and downloads) on a server… my own streaming platform - on a fairly low-power PC - but it’s on 24/7 (although it’s more than just a music server).
- I buy second-hand records from local shops (and online)
- I off-loaded hundreds of records to charity shops before we moved
Trying to be good is hard… and I guess all we can do is to be as good as we possibly can.
Anyway… I’ve been listening to A Peace of Us and right now Dean is singing that “Christmas can’t be far away” - what does he know… Christmas literally couldn’t be further away! Here are Dean & Britta performing it in December 2020 during their live stream… when it wasn’t far away.
- Catalogue Number: AHFOW 12/013
- Artist: Dean & Britta & Sonic Boom
- Title: A Peace of Us
- Notes: Cherry Eco Mix vinyl
- Format: LP
- Bought from Rough Trade for £16.20
- Buy ‘A Peace of Us’ on Bandcamp
Previously in my record collection:
OK, that’ll do for this week - Tuesday will the last extra post for a while but I will keep sending out these newsletters on a Friday.