This one time, we went to St. Louis and played a very short notice gig to 4 people while the world series played on a giant screen next to us because they couldn’t turn it off because St. Louis were in the world series. Sounds pretty bad – but then, while I was uploading videos for another band (The Thlyds, as it happens) this popped up in the related videos bit and you know what, it sounds really good and I think we did a good show for those four people and hey, we played a gig in St. Louis and we’d never done that before. I’m sort of proud of that.

We’re probably going to start asking you to pay us for things in the next few months – I hope the fact that we did a good show next to a sport-filled big screen to four nice people in St. Louis suggests that we’re the kind of band you’ll be willing to support when we do.

A whimsically insomniac Simon Indelicate
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In case you didn’t know, when we released Songs For Swinging Lovers, we built a whole pay-what-you-like record company to do so and made it so that anyone else could release on it too. We’re not the only company offering this kind of service (to be needlessly honest) but we are the only ones who are doing it cool as fuck – so there. We’re not just about the online and the digital- like the Poltergeist who locked Sarah Greene in a cupboard in Ghostwatch, we are looking to move more into the physical realm soon and we have various plastic discs and books and novelties in the process of being imagined. In the meantime, Corporate Records is already packed full of some really special music. Here is some of it that you should listen to:

First, The Dirty North released their debut EP ‘Know What I Think‘ on 12/07/2010. They are genuinely, truly and without a hint of music industry hyperbole among the best bands we’ve ever seen live in this or any other country and this release is special. You should go and download it AT ONCE and FOR MONEY, because they could do with it and because the record is good enough. Then you should see them live and then you should download it again FOR MORE MONEY, because you will want to.

Next, you might have suspected from my previous over-excitement about the guest vocalists on the upcoming Indelicates Record ‘David Koresh Superstar’ that I love the work of David Devant and His Spirit Wife‘s frontman under any and all of his various names. It is very pleasing therefore that he’s decided to put his ‘Demonstration Songs‘ on the Corporate Site. From what I can gather, these are all works in progress and he’s intending to upload newer versions of the tracks as he works on them, which you can then download and compare – hopefully choosing at some point to pay him for them. Like everything Mikey does, the songs are ace and I’m skipping for joy at the novel way he’s using the site to sell them to you:

Rock Stone‘s Aug Stone can be seen playing an ill-advised Geisha in our upcoming (and utterly revolting) video for Europe, but when he’s not doing that, he does this and it is dead cosmic as I used to say when I was in primary school in the distant distant past.:

If Aug rocks too hard for you, Bedroomsound by the 10p Mixes released recently will make you feel better. It is adorably pretty, folky and bittersweet and everyone I know who is cool and has heard it says it’s amazing and so do I:

There is plenty more, much of which I haven’t gotten round to listening to myself yet, and it’s an increasing delight to click around the Artist section of the corporate site and find wonderful things to listen to. I’m going to be posting more updates like this, and we are putting together a Corporate Records podcast to play some tracks from the site and TALK AT YOU which we’ll have ready to go in the next few units of recorded time. Please: if you are amazing and want us to know, upload some music/spoken word/ambient ‘found’ audio and tell us about it on twitter or in the comments or with a skywriter above Lewes, East Sussex where we live and often look up.

Current mood: Delighted

Music: Good

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Continuing our ludicrous quest to bolster our album release by ill-advisedly making videos for every track on Songs For Swinging Lovers, we are pleased to present ‘Flesh’ starring Julia as Travis, the excellently rebellious Lydia Snodin as Iris, Simon as a pimp and assorted others as lowlifes and scum (pause to consider – should the plural of lowlife be ‘lowlives’? it’s a tricky one) AND jerusalem starring Michael Daniel as Lil’ Simon and Simon’s brilliant cousin Hayley Fisher as Lil’ Julia…

enjoy!

also, honorable mention should go to Yunitsa who made this incredible unofficial Cameron/Boris/Jerusalem video and very neatly sums up what the song is actually about – give it love – and, if so inspired, do similar things with your time. Remember your Irish fopistry! The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless. THERE IS LITERALLY NOTHING BETTER YOU COULD BE DOING…