Some new sleeve notes for "Obscure Independent Classics Volume. 1" "Obscure Independent Classics Volume 1" was a vinyl L.P. that I compiled and released in 1986. I thought it would be a good idea to collect some fine recordings that I happened to know about, but most people hadn't heard of, and release them on a record so that more people would hear them and think "oh no, the music industry has been lying to me all this time and are engaged in a conspiracy to prevent all the best music from being widely heard so that we carry on buying all the terrible crap that they release instead". Making a record like this was relatively hard work in those days, you had to write to people on bits of paper and then wait to see if they replied and then if they liked the idea of their song being on your L.P. they had to make a production master, usually on quarter inch tape, and post it to me. Then I had to put all the tapes in the right order with splicing tape and a razor blade, and hope all the tapes went at the same speed. Some of the tracks turned up on cassettes and had to be transfered to quarter inch tape and Alvaro's "Drinking My Own Sperm" had to be transfered from a vinyl record. He told me that his wife had left the original master tape on a tube train and when they managed to retrieve it it had been exposed to a magnetic field. Famous mastering engineer George Peckham removed several vinyl clicks from the transfered tape by marking their position with a chinagraph pencil and cutting them out with scissors - everything was analogue as hell in those days - George was so good a this that the conventional splicing block would have just slowed him down. Of course, now I can do all of the processes described above without getting out of this chair. Which is obviously better. Isn't it? Discuss. There were other compilations of obscure music around at the time althought most of them tended to be on cassette. One that influenced the Obscure Independent Classics series in particular was an American "cassette magazine" called "The Other" of which two editions were compiled by some people called George Parsons and Mikhail Graham. This introduced me to such interesting musicians as Jandek, Game Theory, Einstein's Rice Boys, Rich La Bonte, John Trubee (it included his legendary "Blind Man's Penis" song) and Zoogz Rift. The latter two eventually released albums on the Cordelia label. I had a long correspondence with Zoogz Rift which eventually petered out after his wife took offence at my left wing politics. SOCIALISM JUST DOESN'T WORK ALAN she told me, and Zoogz sent me a copy of "The Virtue of Selfishness" by Ayn Rand which I read and told him was a contemptable sink hole of festering evil, or something like that. (Well it is). Some of the other tracks, such as those by The Sinatras and The Big Goats were by people I knew in Leicester, home of Cordelia Records. The Disco Zombies were one of the better know Leicester bands of the post punk era - their singer was Dave Henderson who later became the editor of Kerang magazine - Worldbackwards was another one of his bands. The Surgery was Neil Stout who ran a local recording studio and recorded my band The Deep Freeze Mice - also, by an amazing coincidence, included here. I'd heard the tracks by The Fire Hydrant Men and The Kamikaze Sex Pilots because they were recorded in the same studio in Norwich that The Deep Freeze Mice Recorded one of their albums. Passionhouse was a friend of Mick Bunnage (the Mice bass player). I think he was called Martin. The Rimarimba track was the work of Robert Cox who ran the UNlikely Records cassette label based in Flixstowe - he originated the "cassette sampler for two first class stamps" promotional method that Cordelia used in the mid '80s - we used to run a small add in the weekly music papers (NME, Sounds and maybe also Melody Maker) that said "Free sampler cassette, send two first class stamps to..." and you'd get a ten minute cassette in an envelope with a little piece of bubble-wrap round it. That was our main method of promotion in those days. Of course those cassettes are worth a fortune these days. No they're not. Marienbad was a girl called Marian Inge Teunissen who had some connection to the Legendary Pink Dots - their violinist is playing on this track - I suspect she ended up on here because I wrote to The Dots to see if they wanted to be on the album. According to Discogs this is the only track the Marienbad ever recorded. Anybody know what happened to Marian? The L.P. was relatively successful in that John Peel played several tracks and it sold out of it's pressing of 1,000 in the first couple of years. Cordelia released another three volumes after this one. Alan Jenkins 2016