DNRC099 | 7″ | 2025 Read more
Author: Les Tombeaux (page 3 of 5)
Les Tombeaux is an editor and music writer based in Majorca. His journalism has appeared in Drug Media, Beat Off, Fabulous Tasmanians and Vogel. He is currently working on the authorised biography of Davey Dreamnation.
This Tribesco-only import (whose brief half-life might be summed up by the word ‘whatevs’) sounds a little bit like Davey Dreamnation’s Live At Budokan, only worse.
While words alone cannot convey the Clint Bo Dean Experience, a brief history is necessary. Born on the back of a postage stamp somewhere south of vaudeville, Bo Dean was an enigmatic noodle who rose steadily through the Glad Rap and Hand Core scenes, building a reputation as an eccentric and wayward xylophonist.
Two summers spent entertaining guests on P&O cruise ships in the early 1980s had no discernible effect on Bo Dean’s playing abilities, and it was at this time that he began to move away from his xylophone roots, experimenting with (and soon mastering) both the bush bass and the lagaphone.
His subsequent dismissal from his cruise ship contract left Bo Dean a ruined man, both creatively and spiritually. He began to experiment with cough mixture and developed an all-too-familiar fondness for nenish tarts.
None of this goes any way towards explaining the genesis of Bo Dean’s first breakthrough single, the unspeakably bad Private Poet, which was apparently penned during this creative nadir on the back of a clinker, and which will go down in history as ‘deleted’.
Clint Bo Dean’s debut album, Never Go Ashtray, suffered a similar fate, only in reverse. It was deleted and then released in 2010 before being deleted a second time, just to be sure.
That album’s track listing alone broke several Tribesco council ordnances, including an obscure 1823 zoning by-law banning the recording of chipmunk, cricket and grasshopper noises in situ. After being hauled before a magistrate on trumped up charges of lese majeste, Bo Dean was sentenced to a period in which he must remain incognito, ergo sum and obiter dicta notwithstanding (Cf.).
Clint Bo Dean spent the next fifteen years in cotton wool, shielding himself (and his two fans) from the humiliating spectacle of public irrelevancy. That Bo Dean maintained his silence in private speaks volumes about the truth of rumours that he had a straightforward case of Laryngitis. Which brings us to 2025.
Live in the Bahamas is a strange kind of ‘live’ album, resembling more closely the soundtrack to a live instrumental album composed not so much of songs but rather chipmunk squeaks and pule-laden sound effect collages, separated by bizarre soundless interludes and random mobile phone keypad noises.
Actually, there’s no way of knowing whether Bo Dean even appears on this album at all, or whether he has instead ‘phoned in’ his contribution from Uranus. The truth does not really matter in this case, however, as Live in the Bahamas did not even reach the pre-release stage.
It was in fact pre-deleted the moment Bo Dean (or whoevs) pressed ‘play’, on that otherwise ordinary day in 2025. Thankfully, we won’t have to wince at the memory of hearing it ever again.
DNRC096 | 3xLP | 2024 | DELETED
Electrical pulse sensation Stung learnt a lot in his days touring the German and Austrian satellite circuits supporting luminaries like Mead and Kentucky Barbie. Those days had been a kind of ‘apprenticeship’ for him, be it one which only confirmed his rising status in troubadour circles. But he never knew what hit him the day he got hit in the face with a copy of his second album, the essentially timeless masterpiece Desert Boot Nose.
The Kiwi Sting impersonator known to the world as Stung had released what was supposed to be his masterpiece album—I speak naturally of his debut, the recklessly hideous Dream of the Blue Pipe Cleaners—in 2003, back in the very early days of DNRC Records, when an ‘anything goes’ spirit prevailed.
The fallout from that album’s release, and DNRC Records’ subsequent deletion of it, was an emotional and creative nadir for the troubled pop antecedent from Dunedin. Rumours inevitably began flying around about the validity of rumours that he was not actually a Sting impersonator – that he was, in fact, a freelance composer who had written some of the world’s most intriguing and complex car commercial theme songs.
The fact that Stung had attempted to fake his own death on a commercial airliner in protest at this slur on his name, employing an elaborate hoax involving his seeing eye llama and a Vicks inhaler, did not really help matters. That he then entered a period of self-imposed exile, re-learning the arts of various woodwind instruments, only made things even worse. Hideously worse.
It wasn’t until more than twenty years later, in 2024, that Stung finally overcame his creastive differences and returned to Tribesco Studios to record his second DNRC Records LP. A year later he would reprise his on-again, off-again affair with Davey Dreamnation, acting as vocal coach and second flautist on the faux-valedictory E.P., The Sounds of Silence. Though no DNRC Records release of this EP yet exists, we can easily guess at its contents from the evidence offered on the ridiculously grandiose and totally unnecessarily long Desert Boot Nose.
The news, though there is lots of it, is not good. Desert Boot Nose is, essentially, a fitness workout concept album. As unfortunate as it is to relate, opening track ‘Chucky’ begins with the sound of boiling water, and hissing steam. After about two minutes of this toejam Stung’s melodious voice comes over the PA, with some kind of announcement.
Perhaps it’s just as well that you will never get to hear the announcement itself, for when the synthesized saxophone (played, it is alleged, by Eyna, who had opened for him on tour in Bavaria) kicks in, and the beats start up like Robots On Chipmunk, you will be beyond language.
You will also find yourself inside a car commercial dressed up as a fitness workout concept album, as title track and lead single ‘Desert Boot Nose’ coaxes you out of your cynical reverie and convinces you, instead, to purchase the latest model Daviumobile. It’s marvellously effective but from here on in, the ride is all downhill.
The addition of snippets from ‘Walk Like An Egyptian’ on the otherwise radio-friendly ‘C3PO Dance’, though seemingly a good idea at the time, should have stayed just that. Apart from the obligatory but kind of cute exercise instructions and eighteen compulsory advertorial interludes that allow the listener to be carried away on bed of flautist wonder, it’s all desert boot, but no nose.
In fact, by the time your turgid listening ordeal is over, you’ll be wishing you’d never heard of Stung, or his desert boots, let alone the absent nose. It’s a gut-wrenching experience to fall, finally, into a small coma of relief at the conclusion of the final ‘routine’, a rhyme jam filled with so many IT in-jokes it makes R2D2 look like a sock-puppet.
And there, one would think, the story should end. Alas, this is not quite true; for there is a happy ending to come, and it comes in a shape familiar to us all. According to several sources, late one Friday night, after an emotional and intense eight day recording session in the Camp Davey studios, Stung’s triple album was finally ‘in the can’, as studio technicians used to say in the music industry.
A riotous party ensued. Assembled at this party were no less than thirty DNRC Records artists, including Mead, Eyna, Davey Dreamnation and Scaramouche the Llama, Stung himself of course, along with some of the older, lesser luminaries of the Tribesco scene, including assorted members of Cried, The Sea Pigeons, Footpath, Cliches, Hoodie Over Heels, Captain Sans Tenielle and (unbelievably) the Guide Ponies.
When Stung and his band of assorted hangers-on finally left the studio at around 2am on Sunday morning, they left Dreamnation and Scaramouche there, and retired to the Camp Davey Compound, where celebrations continued for several more days. It wasn’t until the following Sunday that anybody realised someone had simply deleted any record of Desert Boot Nose from DNRC Records.
And though this very thing had happened so many times before, not one person has yet said a word about how or why anyone let Dreamnation and that stupid llama anywhere near the mixing desk unsupervised, let alone at night, and just before the ‘release’ of another DNRC album, too. The rest of us are left to ponder what might have been, and whether it’s just as well that it didn’t. Happen, that is.
Wikipedia meme band Chloro-5-substituted adamantyl-1,2-dioxetane phosphate’s debut disc, the understated My Mother Cleans Them, hit the charts just weeks after the release of DNRC Records’ all-time greatest-selling album. I speak, naturally, of the magnificently barmy Watercress, by Irish-Dutch folk songstress and chanteuse, Eyna.
Chloro-5-substituted adamantyl-1,2-dioxetane phosphate thus rode a small but significant wave of popularity for DNRC Records which, given its long history of deleting each of its releases, sometimes before the were even recorded, was a major step forward, both for the label and its hopelessly-dreamlike founder.
And so, we come to Chloro-5-substituted adamantyl-1,2-dioxetane phosphate’s ‘difficult’ first LP, and its barmy title. While the latter may have been generated as part of the original meme crawl, there is nothing at all random about this stunning album, set in a moonscape once used by Howard Hughes for the filming of an atomic-themed Western musical.
What else can possibly be said about this collection of twenty six pop-by-instruction post-perfect lessons in the chemical arts, except that like all cocktail albums it is filled with a staggeringly diverse range of lo-fi sounds and influences, a fusion of elements expressed perfectly on opening track and album stand-out ‘Straight To Wallpaper’.
What else can possibly be said about this ten minute Powerpoint presentation of a song—with its towering chord arrangements between slides and an intricate light-show of sonic wonderment throughout the breathtaking final six minutes, where the robotic chisel of Johnny ‘Mango’ Mars’ guitar work is let loose in a field of syncopated drum fills (Gin Desole) and bass drills (The Exit) that drifts towards its unexpected conclusion, a chipmunk whale chant coda to waken the dead—except what I just said?
Fans of the education through music genre will warm to the presence on this disc of several medleys, which in a ‘cute’ way summarise the backgrounds of the three band members, and their individual contributions to the emerging foodcore scene in Melbourne’s inner suburbs, especially the newly-electrified Fitzroy Underground precinct.
This former no-go zone with its ‘Spiders From Mars’ feel sheltered the only remaining live music venues in the Zone: Totalled on Wellington Street and the cavernous Bullring, right above the Underground station itself, at the old intersection of Brunswick and Johnston Streets.
While Mango Mars served his musical apprenticeship alongside inner-city jam musicians and students from MUT, Desole and The Exit (whose in hindsight ridiculous stage name was an apparent protest at the sacking of The Edge from U2) both came from strict foodcore backgrounds.
Their subsequent culinary requirements forced the band to record this album in a way that not only had no negative effect upon the environment, but also somehow actually turned the music into food.
The LP was to be officially launched in private, at an exclusive after-dinner performance by the band, their first in eight years, supported by an apparently large rider request, which was, also apparently, later refused.
In any case, we shall never need to wonder what went wrong, or why, or how the public would have reacted to the album if it had been released, for it was of course deleted the instant it hit those imaginary shelves in Old Fitzroy, and sadly no trace of it remains, save this barely readable review. We shall never see the the likes of Chloro-5-substituted adamantyl-1,2-dioxetane phosphate again. CSADP.
Scientists from the future will stumble upon this album and think: so that’s what all the fuss was about.
Watercress, the breakthrough album for Dutch-Celtic songstress Eyna, signalled a shift in fortunes for DNRC Records and its enigmatic founder, despite the fact that said ‘fortunes’ failed, as ever, to materialise.
In short, Watercress is a classic. Here’s why.
Possessing a voice as fearless as a rabid chipmunk on helium, Eyna also found herself in a fortunate situation whereby her bi-lingual ‘moon’ ballads were quickly ‘covered’, first by the Dutch superstar Jan Smit just hours after the album’s release in the Netherlands; and then later that day by a re-animated version of the Fureys in a small establishment in Temple Bar, Dublin.
Eyna’s success in both of these little countries propelled her instantly towards the larger German satellite circuit, where she ground her way through the summer of 2023 as a support act, opening first for Christy Burr and then Stung.
Her appearances later that year in a stage musical version of her life as an airline stewardess were all the more haunting for her audiences’ knowledge that none of it was true.
In fact, the closest Eyna got to any kind of aeroplane was through her song licencisng arrangements, whereby melodious synthesiser versions of her most well-known tracks (I speak naturally of ‘Watercress’, ‘Pinocchio Flow’ and ‘Miss Bo Dean Remembers …’) were ‘piped’ through the speaker systems of international jumbo liners before, during and after both takeoffs and landings.
While an aggressive campaign to ban this practice ultimately failed at the last step before the ICC in The Hague, the ensuing unrest and sporadic duels that occurred throughout smaller airports and terminals led in the end to the preserving of Watercress in amber until a settlement could be reached as to its perpetual distribution.
There the album may well have rested, had it not been for the efforts of a dedicated band of musicologists and expert whale-song recorders, who patched together an unauthorised version and propagated it via the usual underground and electronic channels.
What we hear, then, is an entire mono-culture’s take on Eyna’s unique and soaring voice—a voice which Stung later described as being even more suited to the singing of uplifting car commercial theme songs than his own. Unforgettably, a voice which was deleted, sadly, by a now-extinct species of song-cop, in that fateful summer of 2024.
We will never hear her melodious and guttural moon songs again.