This one was pretty fun, as quite a few of you hadn’t even heard a bunch of these! Quite a few were hidden on obscure releases or on the umpteenth version of a 12″ single or whatever. There’s the whole session here, including the hour long music set beforehand that includes some of the originals we covered and of course the artists that inspired us. Scroll forward an hour or so to go straight to the chit-chat.
Manic Pop Thrill – (Very Hard to Listen to) Listening Party
So. Yeah. A few of you have reached out asking me to post some of the old listening parties that I hadn’t gotten around to posting, and this was one of them. My first excuse was that the server was full, and wouldn’t take anymore of the huge video files these things end up being. But I fixed that by upgrading the TPE infrastructure. Then I went back and found all the old files and… ugh. This one. This was the first time we did a listening party where the playback audio worked – or I thought it did. It turns out there’s a horrible echo on everyone else’s mic. We eventually solved this from the Millenium listening party onwards, but I hadn’t figured it out quite yet. So here it is, echo and all. Hope you can enjoy it.
Boxed Set Q&A with John Harris
Hey folks –
We did a Q&A session with John Harris from the Guardian to celebrate the release of our boxed set, “Every Beginning has a Future.” It was tons of fun, as usual. The full version is below, with the first hour being a pre-show during which folks chatted. Scroll ahead to an hour in to get to the actual Q&A.
Brooklyn Vegan Review of “Every Beginning Has a Future”
Check it out!
https://www.brooklynvegan.com/fievel-is-glauque-the-flaming-lips-that-petrol-emotion-les-big-byrd-2manydjs-halo-maude/
Fireproof Listening Party
Okay – this one was a little different, for me at least. It’s hard to believe how emotional listening back to this album made me. Thirty years later, and it still cuts deep that this was the album we thought was going to blow things wide open, when it turned out to be the album that folks just ignored.
Sigh.
Well – it’s still a great freakin’ record. Listen for yourself, and see for yourself how we reacted.
Chemicrazy Listening Party
Here it is!
Just like Millenium, I’ve put it up whole, warts and all. It takes a minute or so before I get the music started. Then, it takes awhile for me to realize that I’m sharing the wrong screen! So you get to see my email for a bit. Exciting, eh?
The first hour is just the pre-show DJ set. It’s a publicly available playlist on Qobuz, here: https://play.qobuz.com/playlist/6438395
If you can’t see the playlist or have any questions, go ahead and reach out here or on Facebook. Or skip ahead if you prefer – the party gets started roughly an hour in.
End of the Millennium Psychosis Blues Listening Party
I think we finally got this listening party thing down. We figured out how to a) make sure the audio was high quality, while b) not ruining the interview audio quality (turns out this was a Zoom thing), and c) even managed to share the video from the YouTube videos I was playing during the warm up.
I decided to leave the whole pre-show, with the videos. What the heck, why not? Next time I’ll try to share the zoom chat window as well, which doesn’t appear this time around, so that next time you can see the comments and chats that were going on during the pre-show.
Anyhow, enjoy. There’s an hour of pre-show, and two hours of discussion.
Steve’s Interview with Up to Your Ears
Hey folks – I recently got the chance to have a chat with the folks at Up to Your Ears. We chatted about TPE, my current band Stag, and my obsession with 70s polyester suits. It’s a good laugh.
Babble Listening Party
So we tried to do this thing, where we’d listen to Babble, and then talk about it. This was after we did the Manic Pop Thrill listening party. (Oh – that reminds me – I could post that as well… huh…)
Anyhow, it didn’t go so well… until it sorta did. The day before I tested everything and it was working great. We were going to use Zoom to get all the Petrols on video, and use the chat and Q&A, and then rebroadcast that to Mixcloud for folks who didn’t want to sign up for Zoom accounts or download software. Simple, right? I’m an expert, right?
On the morning of the party, not so much. Remember, 7PM UK time is 11AM my time, so… yeah. Anyhow, we decided to postpone the listening party, but we decided to have a chat nonetheless, and enough people hung around on Zoom that it turned out pretty well. Here it is, if you’d like to give it a listen.
The good news is that I’ve figured out a way to do this for next time, and next time we’ll do even more testing. We’ll announce the next one of these soon.
That Parental Emotion
Hey Folks –
It’s probably old news to most of you, but the reason we’re on hiatus is because I’m a new dad and consequently have my hands full. Thelonious James Mack was born 7/24, to the sounds of “Up For the Down Stroke” by Parliament. Yes, I was DJing.
Theo is a wonderful little guy. He’s got his first tooth, and he’s babbling (ahem) up a storm. I won’t bore you with the gushings of a new father – if you’re interested he has his own website where I do that.
So for the short term, there’s not going to be a lot of action in the TPE camp, at least not all together. I’ve been jumping around with some friends in Seattle (more about that in another post), and rumour has it that another Petrol might be playing out with some new songs – but I’ll let him announce when he’s ready.
Happy holidays, all, and we hope to see you all again sometime soon. I’ll leave you with my favorite photo of Theo, taken when he was about one month old. Swoon!
