Categories: uncategorized
Date: 19 July 2006 09:30:29
Today I have discovered The Unofficial Fat and Frantic Homepage which has a album disography for them, which enables me to reflect upon the music that was valuable to me which I have lost over the years (no idea what happened to my vinyl or tape collections). In fact sitting here thinking I realise I have gone from owning the following Fat and Frantic stuff :5 albums (3 on tape, 2 on CD), various 12" and 7" singles and a couple of videos to not being able to find anything relating to them :(
My spur for putting them into my search engine came from Onmebus who has been posting about them in recent times & has an exciting recent post which reveals that there is a major possibility of Fat and Frantic output becoming available on i-tunes. At this point I have to say I hope Live at the Wonky Donkey becomes available. This tape, which I picked up at Greenbelt when I was about 16 or 17, was the most overplayed during my later teenage years and in my mind their greatest release, particularly as it contained Billy and Jacky which is still one of my favourite ever songs although I haven't been able to actually hear it for years. It was a wonderful, yet terribly sad song relating to the miners strike and the effects of the dispute upon families and communities which was as good as any other urban folk of the time.
For those who don't know who they were Fat and Frantic were a sort of anarchic urban folk caberet band whose use of the washboard rendered them skiffle in places, use of harmonies rendered them gospel in places and general silliness rendered them punk in places, (although in my view alot of their later stuff didn't have the edge of the earlier stuff). They were sort of religious, sort of political and sort of crazy & totally amazing live, whether it was the local school hall (which was where I first saw them), a proper grown up venue like the London Astoria or the Junction in Cambridge or a festie like Greenbelt.