Blair 1523

The music on Destination: Bomp! is amazingly good from end to end, but the next to last song really caught my attention:  “Fantasy of Folk” by BLAIR 1523.  I immediately caught the reference to “1523 Blair” by the Outcasts.  Sonic Boom, a member of the 1980’s British psychedelic rock band Spacemen 3, told Greg Shaw about this band:  “[They’d] sent him a tape from a place with the unlikely name of Praze-an-Beeble, somewhere in Cornwall.  By the time I got in touch to offer them a deal they’d already broken up, but I went ahead and compiled a CD from their various demos, and it became a favorite of mine and many others.  This [“Fantasy of Folk”] is one of their charming, poppier tunes; but the album also includes some stretched-out, deep space jams that are not to be missed.”  

Praze-an-Beeble – the name translates as “meadow on the River Beeble” – is large enough to have its own Wikipedia article, where it is identified as the largest village in Crowan parish; it is located in Cornwall near the very end of the southwestern tip of England.  

Blair 1523 was founded in 1989 and broke up in 1992.  They released an EP called On the Rise on a small English label, Wilde Club Records, so Blair 1523 might have dropped from sight altogether had they not caught the attention of Greg Shaw.  Their Voxx Records release Beautiful Debris came out on LP and CD  in 1993.  As shown on the CD, the bandmembers are Alan Duke (vocals/guitars/effects), Simon ‘Floyd’ Harris (guitars/noises), Andrew Jenkins (organ/vocals), Scott Moyle (bass/vocals), Tim Huxley (drums), and George Harris (tambourine/vocals/harmonica). 

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Allmusic has a glowing 4½-star review of Beautiful Debris, as written by Ned Raggett:  “It’s a fun and accurate album title, Beautiful Debris, collecting the quite wonderful and indeed more often than not sweetly beautiful output of Blair 1523. . . .  Compiling both the EP and unreleased tracks, it makes a solid case for Blair 1523 as underrated modern psych gods, mixing a fun kick-up-your-heels rave-up sense – ‘Swell’ is particularly great on this level – with some drone feedback zone-outs to good effect.” 

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I ran across Alan Duke on a blog sponsored by Julian Cope, a long-time alternative rock musician who started out in the excellent band The Teardrop Explodes.  (The site has security certificate problems, so I won’t identify it here, though those of you who want to could safely bring up the cached information; it is easy to locate).  Duke’s first post on the “Unsung Forum” was on June 18, 2013:  

“Hello to the initiated 

“My name is Alan Duke who many moons ago fronted and wrote songs in a band called Blair 1523 

“In my self indulgent net surfing way I often type our band’s name in and came across a thread of people talking about said band . . .  Just want to open up any correspondence with people who wanted to know more. .  I still think it was the biggest mistake and regret that we disbanded . . . . . .” 

In a later post in the same blog, Alan Duke writes:  “I’ve been doing some psych/noise/ambient/shoegaze stuff on the side myself in a project called Spaghettiman.  I’m mostly known for my ‘noise’ project Foot and Mouth Disease though . . .” 

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That is pretty much the extent of the information that I have been able to find out about Blair 1523, I’m afraid. 

There are actually a lot of websites out there that talk about Blair 1523:  It might be surprising to some that a search of the band name in quotes brings up 18,100 hits on Google.  The first page of Google hits has a YouTube video of “Fantasy of Folk”, the Bomp! Mailorder site where the “last copies” of the CD can still be purchased plus another listing on Amazon.com, the mention of the band in my Wikipedia article on the Outcasts, the Allmusic review and the Julian Cope blog mentioned above, a listing on last.fm that actually has some information and even a photo of Blair 1523, and more barren listings on mtv.com, Discogs, and Rate Your Music .  Further Google pages bring up other barebones listings – the one on Ticketmaster that offers concert tickets and tour schedules for a band that broke up 20 years ago is particularly hilarious – and other places to buy the CD and rate the music and see the lyrics and download “free” MP3’s (Napster lives!). 

So how can there be so many Google hits when, on one of these sites, Blair 1523 has a 94.0% rating on the “obscurometer”?  Simple:  The album exists, and it is easy for web pages to be generated for even unknown albums by websites that pride themselves on knowing about all of the music that is out there.  But trying to get a handle on actual information about the band is difficult indeed among all of that dross.  That is the reason that Wikipedia typically comes to the top of a Google search. 

(August 2013)

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Items:    Blair 1523 

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