***40-plus years since its original release, the pop-punk-new wave inventions of ANTHONY MOORE's Flying Doesn’t Help are freshly remastered, blasting the sparkling, angular sounds into today with perfect vitality. After spending the early years of the 70s making experimental music first as a solo artist, then with SLAPP HAPPY and HENRY COW, 1976’s OUT sessions had reinvigorated Anthony’s youthful love of the naive pop melodies of pop radio, the undeniable excitement of songs. While OUT ultimately went unreleased at the time, the iconoclasm clouding the late ’70s air was addictive and transformative for Anthony. England seemed to be roiled as violently as it had been in counter-cultural days a decade earlier; the UK pop charts breathlessly reflected the changing spectrum with equal parts aging hippie and prog delicacies alongside new ascendant sounds: rough-hewn pub and punk rock, plus dub reggae and disco and ska and Stiff and Krautrock... This proved to be an ideal environment for Anthony to make records by exploring, as he puts it, the “deep connection between minimalism, repetition, working with tape and celluloid and forming the modules of a three minute pop song.”
LP $21.95
06/10/2022
***“Rock and roll was a relief after the rigor of Henry Cow.” That was one of the thoughts in Anthony Moore’s brain in the late summer of 1975. Of course, leaving Henry Cow had meant the dissolution of the band he’d founded, Slapp Happy, as the two groups had essentially merged over the previous year. Still, there was plenty yet to do with music, and based on Anthony’s propensity for odd left turns, a solo career in the pop world seemed like a fine way to follow up his prior excursions in tape-based modern composition, writing soundtracks for experimental films, avant-pop and experimental rock. Managed and published by Blackhill Enterprises, Anthony signed a solo deal with Virgin—and while the music he recorded for OUT didn’t see release upon completion in 1976 (and wasn’t released at all until a CD issue of the late 1990s), we’re finally getting those historic recordings for OUT on vinyl after all these years, with the long-lost original artwork restored. It is worth the wait — an absolute lost chapter from mid-70s, proto-new wave Britain, bringing to mind the bright and subversive sounds of Eno, Wyatt, Ayers, Cale and so many other trail-blazers from that time. A fantastic joy to the ears!
LP $24.50
11/20/2020