Rescued from the Archives of Oblivion: Anthony More "Judy Get Down"

I was writing a radio commercial to run on WRSI-The River for the Richard Thompson, Loudon Wainwright "Loud and Rich" concert at the Calvin on 10/6 and used "That's My Daughter" as one of the Loudon songs, which is actually a Peter Blegvad song and was also in the movie Knocked Up. Blegvad is a deft and literate lyricist whose lyrics frequently feature word games, literary references and complex and extended rhyme schemes. He was in The Golden Palominos on some of their best albums. The Palominos were a collaborative of sorts, congregated by drummer Anton Feir, and included Jack Bruce, Michael Stipe, Matthew Sweet, Syd Straw, John Lydon, and so many more. GREAT albums. Before that, Blegvad was also in the avant-pop bands Slapp Happy and Henry Cow and showed up in the Recommended Records stable frequently. His 80's solo albums were often collaborations with Andy Partridge of XTC and contain some great songs. I used to play "Lonely Too" on my radio show Terpsichorean Cacophony on WMUA at UMass in the mid-80s. Blegvad is also a cartoonist. From 1992 to 1999, The Independent ran Blegvad's strangely surreal, comic strip, Leviathan, which blended some of the most interesting elements of Krazy Kat with a coming-of-age-esque story akin to Calvin and Hobbes.

Now, to diverge (almost) entirely from Peter and get to the song that inspired this post, here's a YouTube post of Anthony More's "Judy Get Down." Anthony was in Slapp Happy with Peter. My old pal Jay McCoy (who ran Grape Street Records in the Stop & Shop plaza in Hadley) turned me onto this song when I was still in high school. It's a pip.


Oh why not. Here's Loudon doing "That's My Daughter." A classic already.


Finally, here's a link to a baffling website called Amateur that Peter Blegvad is somehow involved with. For a quarter of a century, the folks at Amateur have been quietly engaged in the exploration and mapping of a territory which can be described both by what it is not: ("not science, not philosophy, not art, not literature") - and by what it is: (here the word 'weird' comes to mind, and 'preposterous'). Take, for instance, Amateur's obsession with 'numinous objects.' These, the website helpfully explains, are objects 'charged' with sufficient 'immanence' to "rip a rent in the fabric of normal awareness." The Amateur website catalogues and grades the numinosity of hundreds of objects, ranging from "a yolk of leather in a tobacco egg" to, in fact, a common doorbell.