Skip to main content

Neu! Reekie! Records – Jesus, Baby! What's Goin' On?

Over the last eighteen months, Neu! Reekie!'s monthly Friday nights of what used to be called alternative entertainment has captured Edinburgh's off-piste underground in a way not seen since Rebel Inc lit-zine first broke cover in the early 1990s. Neu! Reekie!'s speak-easy pot-pourri of spoken-word performances seen in-between screenings of avant-garde animations with a live music finale also recalls the ghosts of live-art cabaret night Silencio!, which lit up Edinburgh a few years back, while its spirit dates back to the 1980s post-punk happenings of Richard Strange's recently revived Cabaret Futura nights.

Now Neu! Reekie! Ringmasters Michael Pedersen and Rebel Inc founder Kevin Williamson bring us Neu! Reekie! Records, an aural experience that spreads the night's multi-media inclinations even further. Their first release is a double A-side 7” single, with Pedersen and Williamson overseeing a side apiece. While on one side, Williamson performs the title poem from his collection, In a Room Darkened, for his contribution, a lovely ditty called The Caterpillar Tango, Pedersen has conjured an avant-indie-pop super-group into being.

Jesus, Baby! Are some-time driving force behind Fire Engines, Win, The Nectarine No 9 and now The Sexual Objects Davy Henderson, former Futuristic Retro Champions keyboardist and current TeenCanteenist Carla J Easton, Belle & Sebastian associate Roy Moller and The Wellgreen/The Store Keys dynamo Marco Rea, who gift-wrap Henderson's lead drawl in some delicious harmonies on a lovely concoction mixed and mastered by former Coral guitarist Bill Ryder Jones..

“We didn't want to just put out a single,” explains Pedersen, who drafted in former Coral guitarist Bill Ryder Jones to mix and master a song penned with Henderson's voice in mind following an acoustic Sexual Objects set at Neu! Reekie! “We wanted it to be curated so it reproduced the back-catalogue of Neu! Reekie!”

The nearest comparison with Neu! Reekie! is with Giorno Poetry Systems, the label set up in 1972 by post-Beat poet/artist John Giorno, who released albums by the likes of novelist William Burroughs and chart-topping performance artist Laurie Anderson, as well as Giorno's own collaborations with No Wave composer Glenn Branca. In the UK, poet and publisher Michael Horovitz, whose Children of Albion compendium inspired Rebel Inc's own Children of Albion Rovers, took musical associates culled from the pages of his New Departures imprint on the road. These included jazz pianist Stan Tracey, saxophonist Lol Coxhill and People Show founder Jeff Nuttall, as well as Horovitz himself.

In keeping with Neu! Reekie!'s all-embracing eclecticism, the single's cover art will be provided by Jim Lambie, while the record's launch will be a three-pronged long weekend. This begins with a Friday night Edinburgh show featuring Jesus, Baby!'s debut alongside Williamson, and with appearances from novelist Alan Bissett and ex Arab Strap guitarist Malcolm Middleton. An afternoon in-store appearance at Avalanche the next day will see the record physically available for the first time, while a Saturday night Glasgow grand finale will feature a reading from Scotland's original polymath Alasdair Gray. Each Jesus, Baby! member will then show off their individual band's wares before regrouping in a glorious Jesus, Baby! Huddle.

“We've started a record company as a visceral representation of what we do in Neu! Reekie!,” Pedersen says, “and now we're turning that into a live event.”

Neu! Reekie! Records Unveiled, Scottish Book Trust, Edinburgh, July 27th, 7-10pm, with Jesus, Baby!, Kevin Williamson, Michael Pedersen, Alan Bissett and Malcolm Middleton: Avalanche Records, Edinburgh, July 28th, 2-3pm, with Jesus, Baby!, Kevin Williamson, Michael Pedersen; Mono, Glasgow, July 28th, 7.30-10.30pm, with Alasdair Gray, Jesus, Baby!, The Sexual Objects, TeenCanteen, The Store Keys, Kevin Williamson, Michael Pedersen

A shorter version of this article appeared in The List, July 2012

ends















Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Myra Mcfadyen - An Obituary

Myra McFadyen – Actress   Born January 12th 1956; died October 18th 2024   Myra McFadyen, who has died aged 68, was an actress who brought a mercurial mix of lightness and depth to her work on stage and screen. Playwright and artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, David Greig, called McFadyen “an utterly transformative, shamanic actor who could change a room and command an audience with a blink”. Citizens’ Theatre artistic director Dominic Hill described McFadyen’s portrayal of Puck in his 2019 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in London as “funny, mischievous and ultimately heartbreaking.”   For many, McFadyen will be most recognisable from Mamma Mia!, the smash hit musical based around ABBA songs. McFadyen spent two years on the West End in Phyllida Lloyd’s original 1999 stage production, and was in both film offshoots. Other big screen turns included Rob Roy (1995) and Our Ladies (2019), both directed by Mi...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Passage – Hip Rebel Degenerates: Black, White and Red All Over

Prelude – The Power of Three   Fear. Power. Love. This life-and-death (un)holy trinity was the driving force and raisons d’être of The Passage, the still largely unsung Manchester band sired in what we now call the post-punk era, and who between 1978 and 1983 released four albums and a handful of singles.    Led primarily by composer Dick Witts, The Passage bridged the divide between contemporary classical composition and electronic pop as much as between the personal and the political. In the oppositional hotbed of Margaret Thatcher’s first landslide, The Passage fused agit-prop and angst, and released a song called Troops Out as a single. The song offered unequivocal support for withdrawing British troops from Northern Ireland.    They wrote Anderton’s Hall, about Greater Manchester’s born again right wing police chief, James Anderton, and, on Dark Times, rubbed Brechtian polemic up against dancefloor hedonism. On XOYO, their most commercial and potentially mo...
Post a Comment
Read more