Hi all. It’s just occurred to me that even though I switched edwenn.com over to Tumblr a few months ago, I forgot to make an announcement to that effect on this site and that as a result anyone who has a feed reader set up to look for new posts here won’t realise that the site’s moved. Sorry!

When you get a sec please update your RSS reader to point to http://edwennmusic.tumblr.com/rss  and you’ll be back in the club You’ll still get to the site if you use a Web browser at http://edwenn.com because I’ve set up a redirect, but feeds got lost in the shuffle. Bah!

Cool icon courtesy of obamiconme.pastemagazine.com

In 1993 (?) Chocolate headed over to Europe to play some gigs with US band, The Dambuilders. We were friends with the same agent, Wieland Kramer from Powerline in Berlin and he set it up, but apart from that the only connection between the 2 bands was that in 1990 they had been touring at the same time as Sink and caught our gig at the AJZ in Bielefeld. We were introduced briefly by another mutual friend, the mighty Alfred Bradford (who I do so wish I was still in touch with). Anyway, suffice it to say that they’d never heard us and we’d not really heard them so we had no clue what to expect. As it so often turns out we had one of the best tours of our lives and the Dambuilders were all wonderful people. Joan’s now famous as a Police Woman, Kevin is a legend via his time with GBV (and the fact that he’s pretty much the best drummer in North America) and frontman Dave Derby is still a good friend and someone I keep very much in touch with to this day (he even sang on Mefloquine Dreams by Big Ray). Guitarist, Eric, I have totally lost sight of, but I’m sure he’s up to something interesting.

Anyway…..too many stories to tell, but the two bands got on like a house on fire and we were gutted to have to head home after a couple of weeks (despite the fact that John had knackered his wrist and wasn’t really able to carry on drumming anyway) while The Dambuilders carried on without us. Some brief memories: both bands playing Cheap Trick’s “Surrender” as an encore in Dresden, the pistol in Sascha’s briefcase at the same gig, joining forces with the Yanks for a game of ’soccer’ against the Germans, meeting Micha Meisterling, hearing too much Funky Metal, getting told off by the PA guy for showering the Dambuilders with beer one night during their set….the usual irrelevant tour stuff.

After going our separate ways, The Dambuilders got signed to some major and things were good for a few years. Their awesome song, “Shrine” did well for them on MTV - whatever that means - they recorded 2 or 3 more albums and eventually they split up. Completely by chance I saw them live in Vancouver a few years after our tour together and they were still great fun to watch. I don’t think any of their recordings more than hinted at how amazing they were live. Bumbling around on YouTube for videos to go on my new Musicsnob site I found this track from one of their later albums and thought I’d post it here in tribute of one of the finest and funnest bands I’ve ever had the pleasure to tour with.  

 

 The Dambuilders - Teenage Loser Anthem: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I’ve recently created a ‘drop’ for myself over at http://drop.io/edsdrop. It would be cool if you felt like using it as a way of passing on recommendations of anything cool that you think I should be made aware of: podcasts, books, songs (old and new - you can upload MP3s or whatever directly into drop.io), links to cool stuff online, exhibitions…all of it. By its nature drop.io is anonymous, so if possible leave a note of who you are when you make a recommendation so that I’ll know who to thanks later.

Side Note: First Stupids rehearsal for me tonight for the gig on Saturday. It’s going to be an interesting evening.

There was a fascinating piece on the situation in Pakistan and Afghanistan on last Tuesday’s episode of Democracy Now! Here’s the summary:

Veteran Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid explains how the US ally Pakistan has armed and financed the Taliban after the US invasion of Afghanistan; how the CIA pays Pakistan to arrest al-Qaeda operatives, but Pakistan uses the money to fund the Taliban resurgence in northwest Pakistan; and how the US and NATO’s failure to deal with Afghan civil society has led directly to the huge rise of the opium trade that funds the Taliban.

I urge you to go and watch/listen if you interested.