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.”
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!).
(September 2013)
