Many thanks to Rebecca Ramnauth for the cover artwork, Toby Borrow for the outboard mastering in Australia; and to all my awesome badass friends for their hard work on making these awesome, dark, and elaborate Fever Dreams come true.
Special thanks to Tyla-Joe for starting the ball rolling by asking to revisit his remix of Mother Lode on account of feeling like he didn’t do it justice the first time; back when we would connect through gigs between Hull and Goole and get our work played on BBC Radio Humberside.
Now he’s in Italy and I’m in Scotland, but it’s in the spirit of that shared scene of Nintendocore that I decided to bring my friends together to curate this album, and that faith was spawned by Tyla-Joe getting in touch and having that faith in my work and my faith in my friends to create something dank and true.
I’ve been wanting to share this track for ages but it only existed on CD that I’ve now finally gotten out of storage.
21 years ago, I started a band called Candungo Burro (Idiot Donkey) with Bo Weaver as the producer/synth/samples guy on stage and it was mostly industrial disco pop.
Through collaborating, we came up with some mad tracks that were just bonkers and so much hilarity to make. We had looked up to Fatboy Slim for quite a while but eventually realised his style was incredibly formulaic and easily repeated. So when we heard the track ‘Fatboy Slim is Fxxking in Heaven’, we knew what we had to do.
This track basically wrote itself, containing my vocal ‘Fatboy Slim is Fxxking a Sheep’ and we chose the ingenious title ‘Cook Norman’ for the track (Fatboy Slim’s real name is Norman Cook) We used to go clubbing at Room in Hull, often twice a week for the regular indie/rock/dance nights and got a friend who was a DJ to play the track one night.
Because Fatboy Slim was at the height of his popularity and the main vocal hook repeated his name, we could only surmise that people thought it was a new track of his and promptly filled the dancefloor. We were almost dying with laughter stood in the middle of the dancefloor surrounded by peeps joining us in dancing to our track. There’s a breakdown section that pans from left speaker to right and this was when we realised the club set up was split with right speaker by the DJ booth and left at the other side of the dancefloor across the room, so we really got the benefit of that panning sequence.
Later that year, we were at Glastonbury and Bo and my brother ended up in the artists’ camping area whilst I was off having a nap and they met Fat boy Slim with Zoe Ball at his backstage winnebago. When they told me this I was gushing, “what did he think about the track?”, I asked. Apparently they were too polite to tell him about it, because, and this thought had never occurred to me – with his wife Zoe Ball being there, in that context, they said: she was the sheep!
I miss those days making bonkers dance music, but the story of this track is probably the best.
Cook Norman was a b-side on our ‘Only Not’ ep, and the second b-side was a ridiculous yet bouncy remix of one of my old 4 track tunes called Licking Zed which Bo and I wrote in an afternoon, with friends filling in on vocals for a comedic choir section. This too has been dragged from the vaults:
Currently roping all my fave musician/artist friends from Hull, Aberdeen, and Iceland together with some awesome colleagues I’ve worked with in between to remix my 2013 debut album, Ditch House.
The album drops on Bandcamp this Halloween and I’m so excited to hear what my awesome friends come up with.
Here’s a remix by .CORPSE of a recent track I made in the Nintendo DS, .CORPSE will be contributing fresh work to the album – I forgot to share this one on the blog so here it is!
So nice for cafes to start reopening, even nicer to be able to leave the house and work out in the sun or sat in a bookshop!
Working on adding a wee card trick to the book, so had to buy some cards to play around with on the ferry over to Lerwick last week (pic outside Coffee Culture, Lerwick), and editing the 39,189 words of the current progress on the first volume of ‘The Eliza Daring Escapades’ in Books & Beans, Aberdeen (delightful pics taken by Louise Balaguer).
As much as I find working out of the house distracting, it certainly gives me more drive to get the work done and to make better work to be witnessed in progress!
Fun and games, how I have missed the distractions of the outdoors compared to sitting hunched over the keyboard in my living room!
And the coffee is great here too, not to mention being surrounded by lots of lovely books.
Annabel Strange 