Merry Christmas and all that junk, everybody!

It’s been a rough-and-tumble couple of months, what with school starting up, followed by a computer crash that helped usher in a very lengthy bout of technophobia that hasn’t been completely kicked yet. We here at the Cozy Home feel as if we owe it to whoever might still be paying attention to get some more stuff up, cos it’s been bloody well long enough.

Coming up before the start of the new year is a release from Bad Cello, called “Naked on the Ground”. Keep yr eyes peeled for that one in a week or so…

Right now, though, is a release that has been needing to get done for about half a year now. The Wheelies are gone, officially. I know, we’ve all heard that one before, but this time feels… well, different. The Daydream Generation and Utica Flower Company have ceased their deafening roar and quieted down to a passive, but constant murmur. Smally has been the driving force for so many for so long, he was bound to burn out at some point, and many consider him superhuman to have lasted this long. In his own words about a month ago: “Think it finally reached breaking point last month. I’ve given this music trip a good shot for the last three years with varying degrees of success, but there comes a time when you turn around and feel like you’re throwing a load of energy at something and not really getting the satisfaction out of it. Things are predictable – the songs I write, the compilations – there just doesn’t seem to be the same spark anymore. So I figure dropping it at this point is the best thing I can do.”

So we arrive at this point, with the release of the Wheelies’ finally final album, a massive retrospective romp through a drug-addled age of relative innocence that has been dubbed “The Shite Album”. Rather than go on about it as if I was there (I wasn’t even old enough to get a passport at the time of the recording), I’ll let Smally do the rest of the talking.

“This is really it this time, no going back; my mind is well and truly made up. Finality is a funny thing. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve said that it was over, that I’d run out of songs, or the will to keep reaching for the record button. Here at the end, I got to thinking about how it all began some fifteen years ago when the world was there for the taking and absolutely anything was possible. And that in turn got me thinking about “The Shite Album”. Most of you unfortunate enough to download and listen to this record will only be aware of The Wheelies in its present form, mainly just me churning out the albums from 2006’s “Oh Happiness” onwards. Some of you have perhaps even seen the pictures that confirm that in actual fact The Wheelies were once upon a long time ago a band, dreaming the same daft daydream and foolishly recording it all as it fell apart. But very few of you will have actually heard what we sounded like.Once you hear “The Shite Album”, I guess you will see why.

This wasn’t a deliberate record in itself, but a posthumous celebration of “a unique collaboration” of songs recorded between 1994 and 1998, put together back in 2004 by Aliwheelie. Whereas the rest of us had long ago lost, destroyed or given away the reels of cassettes capturing numerous failed attempts to produce something of some musical value, he’d curiously managed to keep hold of almost all of them. With the technology at his fingertips to lift the recordings from cassette and burn them onto disc, he diligently set about torturing himself going through the entire back catalogue and compiled a 3-disc monster that was instantly recognized as “The Shite Album”. Four copies were made and given to each of the four founding members of the band. In fact it was one night in 2006 after digging my own copy out from the bottom of a beer-stained drawer that I listened back with horror and resolved to go out and buy a cheap guitar the very next day with the intention of somehow salvaging some semblance of pride. This is perhaps the only positive thing I have to say about this record – that if it wasn’t as bad as it is, then I wouldn’t be sitting here writing this today and you wouldn’t be reading it. So without further ado, allow me to take your hand and lead you through the twentyeight tracks I’ve chosen from the three discs as part of this digital download version of the record. I must warn you before we begin, it’s not going to be a pleasant journey. There are some terrible sounds, terribly played, and terribly recorded onto terrible equipment. To make matters worse, when the songs were lifted from cassette all of them had little unavoidable blips and jumps on the CD versions. To further compound the aural nightmare, the discs in my possession are so seriously scratched that many
of the songs skip and flicker. Several times I have sat down with the intention of remastering them all, but as you will hear, this wouldn’t just be a pointless exercise, it would also be completely impossible.”

Sook the bools.
Smally
3rd September 2009

Anyone interested in what Smally is up to right now can check out the Utica Flower Company blog at theuticaflowercompany.wordpress.com

Go to the artists section to download the Shite Album for free!!!

Once again, merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, and all the rest of the whatnot.

Don’t forget to smile at strangers.