Newsletter July 2003

Every time we add something new, you'll see a linked guide to it here,
with our archive of past Newsletters.

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The Stereo Society is both polishing up the forthcoming CDs and enjoying the summer weather in New York (watching the rain come down, then cowering next to the air conditioner). This means there’s nothing heroic in the update this month, but quite a few small treats gained through trawling the archives.

Wire played the Bowery Ballroom in New York on Friday June 27. We have lots of memorabilia in the vaults. A bit of digging unearthed a poster from their 1979 concert at Notre Dame Hall in London – a Catholic church hall where occasional performers (who included the Sex Pistols) diverged a little from religious dogma. In the Words & Pictures section of our download zone, we post a high-resolution version for pinning to the late-seventies area of your wall.

Sarah Jane Morris played New York’s Knitting Factory Monday June 30 at 7pm to conclude a short North American tour. There’s nothing extra from her, since we really piled up the pictures a couple of months ago. But she’s playing out a lot this summer. Check it out.

Lots of earnest stuff has been written about the British punk era in the mid-seventies. But a lot of it was intentionally hilarious, having a good larf at the expense of the boring old farts. There was also some unintentional humor. We found a letter from a contemporary EMI artist, outraged when he learned that the company had signed the Sex Pistols. Here it is, with the signature and address blocked to protect the guilty. Perhaps we should run a competition to see who can guess its author. Again, in the Words & Pictures section of our download zone we offer a high-resolution version forfurther forensic study.

Thorne’s Sprawl CD from 1999 incorporates two Marianne Faithfull compositions sung by Sarah Jane Morris. These originated in an uncompleted project in 1985/6 which halted when Marianne hit bottom and went into rehab for some months (as she details extensively in her autobiography). Sexual Terrorist was co-written with Barry Reynolds, an associate artist of the Stereo Society. Marianne herself tackled these two compositions at the time, but never released a recording. It’s nice to see those old hand-written lyric sheets, once propped up on a music stand, complete with crossings-out and hamburger grease stain. Beats the modern typescript, even if they are harder to read.

Please take a creative ramble around the site. We’re past 650 pages now, and there is an awful lot of what they call ‘content’. It comes in often unexpected places, although as you have seen we have been implementing large panels of links as standard, together with the Links and Index pages. We continue to expand the streaming audio to illustrate the words. Listen as you read.