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Some memorable things have happened in and around FdM Towers over the last sixteen years - brilliant such as working with The Pretty Things and 'going live' with Crabstock/Dr. Sardonicus, disastrous such as the single released at the wrong speed and the one that looked like it came out of an Ann Summers catalogue...and if I ever remember enough of them to make a story, I'll post them here...
And we've rejected hundreds of them over the years, usually the ones I designed.
WOULD YOU BELIEVE...
(and this has nothing to do with Fruits de Mer, but it's a nice coincidence)
...I used to work with Brian Higgins, who co-wrote Cher's massive worldwide hit 'Believe' and went on to have countless hits with the likes of Girls Aloud, The Sugababes and Kylie.
But when I knew Brian, he was running a telephones sales operation for an industrial yellow pages operation in East Grinstead!
FAINT PRAISE
Possible the worst review we've had (so far) came from Norman Records, describing one of our releases as sounding like it was recorded by, "hippies wearing sandals"
GOING TO GREAT LENGTHS
The longest LP side of music we've cut so far was on 'Head Music', running to about 25 minutes.
WEDDED TO THE LABEL
Liz had Frobisher Neck's version of 'Isi' playing as her 'walk on' music at our wedding!
IGNORING THE OBVIOUS
I've never sold a Fruits de Mer record or CD on Discogs, eBay or Amazon (although one of my lads did sell one copy of Schizo Fun Addict's 'Theme One' on eBAy back in 2008, just to show me how straightforward it was!)
NEVER MIND THE QUALITY
2018 was probably our most prolific year, with approx:
- 8 hours of music that was new to vinyl
- a further 3 hours that was new to CD
- and 2 hours of exlusive DVD footage
DID YOU KNOW...?
There's never been a Fruits de Mer sleeve produced with a bar code on it - a policy I intend to maintain to the bitter end!
THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE
When we produced a run of 33 Cranium Pie double cassettes, I was a bit concerned people might not have anything to play them on - so I included a cheap Chinese player with every purchase- I've no idea where mine went (it probably self-destructed)
CHINESE TORTURE
...speaking of Chinese things, I produced about 50 USB cards of the downloadable compilation I put together for PROG magazine a few years ago and gave them away on the FdM stall at a Sardonicus festival.
However they came with a 'use at your own risk' warning as when I was loading up the music onto the USBs, a couple didn't work while one started to get red-hot in my PC's portal!
FILE UNDER...
The 16th Dream of Dr. Sardonicus festival featured the first appearance of Liz's 'vinyl widows' goodie-bags, which she gave away free to the less enthusiastic members of the audience (ie partners).
the first ones included a nail file (ideal for use during extended guitar solos) and noise-eliminating headphones (aka ear-muffs); in subsequent years, the bags contained crossword books, gloves, bubble bath, colouring books, sweets, umbrellas...
DID YOU KNOW...?
'Fruits de Mer' is spelled as 'Fruits de Mar' on one sleeve (can you imagine a decent label ever doing something as amateurish as that?)
CARDIGAN, WALES
A well-known and arguably 60s cult hero (although no longer so in my books) pulled out of a Sardonicus festival gig at the last moment because - he said - he hadn't relised where Cardigan was.
DID YOU KNOW?
10" test pressings are produced as 12" discs with either a chunk of blank vinyl on the outer edge OR with a random track filling up the outside 2 inches of the disc (at least this is true of the pressing plants I use!)
THE MOST COLLECTIBLE FdM RELEASES in FdM TOWERS?
I was so excited to be releasing singles by the mighty Pretty Things back in 2012 ('Honey, I Need' b/w 'I Can Never Say' + 'SF Sorrow Live In London'), I asked the new pressing plant I was using - Record Industry in the Netherlands - if I could have extras acetate of the 45s; they politely told me their plant no longer produced acetates(!), but they would cut ones for me on an old cutting machine as a special favour; which they did - and they have pride of place in my FdM archives.
My terrible photography just about shows up two things:
- the discs each have two holes in the centre - I've no idea why
- they are cut as 7"s on blank 12" discs
THE MOST COLLECTIBLE RECORD LABEL OF THE 21st CENTURY
I've lived off that quote - the headline in a feature by Dave Thompson in Goldmine magazine - for years.
To be honest, the headline ended in a question-mark, but I like to think it was a rhetorical question...
DID YOU KNOW...?
We persuaded Grobschnitt's drummer Eroc (now Germany's equivalent to Steve Wilson!) back into the recording studio after many years away to do a mad spoken intro to 'Head Music'.
AS SARDONICUS NEARS ITS END...
..I'm reminded that it nearly began life in a field, rather than Cardigan's Cellar - Pete Bingham was offered the chance to pull a summer festival together on some land near Cardigan, but when he floated the idea I had to tell him that camping out in a field in Wales might not go down too well with some of FdM's regulars (including me!) - so he approached Steve in the Cellar instead and eight years of beer, bands and more beer followed.
HAIR TODAY
Up there along with the best in the 'stupidest giveaway in Fruits de Mer's history' league table has to be the stick-on moustache that some early copies of the Sendelica/Superfjord 'Zappa' 7" included.
IF IT MOVES...
..stick a flexi on it.
When I worked in magazine promotions, I had a bit of a reputation for sticking flexi discs on magazines, whether they were appropriate or not...from Melody Maker to Tibits, 1-2-Testing to Puzzle Monthly, they all got the flexi treatment. So it was no great surprise to find Fruits de Mer getting its version - the 10 disc 'Postcards From The Deep' box-set; the sound quality hadn't improved over the years, but the cost of flexis certainly had - 'back in the day' they were a few pence each!
DID YOU KNOW...?
There's a copy of Dave Thompson's 'The Incomplete Angler - 10 Years Of Fruits de Mer Records' in the New York City Library.
OPTICAL ILLUSION
Andy Pernet has just reminded me of the long-running saga/near disaster that was the sleeve to Astralasia's 'Wind On Water'; at the time (pre-Brexit and all the European imort/export crap), FdM releases were being pressed by Record Industry in the Netherlands; the idea for the sleeve was an opticcal pattern printed on white card, with a similar pattern printed onto a clear outer sleeve - with all the fun of seeing one moving across the other as the two were separated.
Anyway, Record Industry had countless goes at marrying up the two images - god bless 'em; they were ready to give up, but were persuaded to have one final attempt, and they managed to make it work.
DID YOU KNOW...?
Maxine Peake is a fan of the label; we even managed to persuade her to contribute a few spoken words to Astralasia's epic 'The Darkest Voyage'.
TIPI, OR NOT TIPI?
One of the great disappointments of the Dr. Sardonicus festivals was not being able to use the Tipi outdoor pizza restaurant as a second stage; we had it all set up one year and then in the middle of a Sunday afternoon, residents living the other side of the Teifi river complained about the noise. It was an ideal venue - a short walk from the Cellar, decent beer, etc - but the owners/managers rather bottled it.
THE MOST IMPRACTICAL FdM 'EXTRA'?
I think it must be the custom Rubik's cubes that came with the special edition of Astralasia's 'A Different Kettle Of Fish' - bloody expensive and impossible to pack with an LP; even The Chemistry Set rack of test tubes were easier to send out.
A STICKY ENDING
Sendelica's first single for Fruits de Mer - a spellbinding version of 'Venus In Furs' - deserved a special cover; I had the bright idea of ripping off the Velvet Underground peelable banana cover, but with a pear and a Pink Floyd pun thrown in for good measure.
So far, so good but not when it came to unpeeling the pears - the sticky back pears were far too sticky and only came away from the sleeve after a lot of effort, and knackered the covers in the process.
So there are quite a few variants of the sleeve out there - most just have the pear, some just have the eaten pair, a few have the uneaten pear on top of the eaten pear and a few are probably just knackered.
Not the first, and certainly not the last, bright idea that turned out not to be...
ALL THE RIGHT NOTES, BUT NOT NECESSARILY AT THE RIGHT SPEED
Many years ago, I remember listening to a test pressing of a 7" single which will remain nameless, thinking, "this is great, mind you the singer sounds a bit frantic".
The single got pressed, only for the band to contact me on getting their supply to say it had been cut at the wrong speed - something like 49rpm instead of 45!
Through some quirk of incorrect bit-rates (or something) being supplied by me, the pressing plant - in converting the recording to the normal bit-rate - had sped up the track a little.
I got a fresh set of copies cut for the band, delivered with my well-rehearsed "I'm really sorry, I rarely get anything wrong" apology, but the speeded-up copies had already gone out, so there you have it - somewhere in your record collection, perhaps.
VERY OLD SONGS
The record for the oldest track to appear on a Fruits de Mer release goes to Leslie Philips, with 'The Disc', from 1959, which appeared on the 'Abolute Shower' lathe-cut.
Along with everything else on the EP, that song was pre-'63 and out of copyright so it didn't need artist approval; the oldest tracks that an artist has actually signed over to FdM came from a band called The Raiders, who included a certain Trevor 'Beau' Midgeley in their line-up; those tracks were recorded in 1964.
It's just possible that the 1959 record will be beaten by the end of 2025 - there are plans afoot...
THE GREAT Dr. SARDONICUS GIVEWAYS
FdM free goodie-bags somehow became part of the Sardonicus festivals and FdM-sponsored gigs in general; the bags are usually packed with around 10 CDs kindly provided by artists, by labels, or me; occasionally, they go a little further - free 7" singles, DVDs, posters, even a board game - one year we gave everyone a set of three 10" test pressings; I remember the gig in Wurzburg that we supported a few years back, held in a women's prison called Cairo...Liz and I desperately tried to persuade the locals to take free sampler CDs off us - I think they thought we were Jehovah's Witnesses selling copies of The Watchtower.
RACKING OUR BRAINS...
...for something 'special' for The Chemistry Set's 'Endless More And More' special edition, someone had the bright idea of a test tube rack filled with different chemicals - one for each track on the album; for chemicals, read 'sherbert' (or kali, as we called it in my day); for bright idea, read a right hassle filling the tubes and then posting them out without the almost inevitable shattering of glass.
I very recently discovered that all my copies of the special edition are missing the vital ingredient of a double LP - I've been reminded that there wasn't enough room in the boxes for the extras AND the LPs, so they had to be packed separately; I suspect I found my copies of the LPs at some point years later, assumed they were spares and sold them!
BALI (NON)SCENTS
Our efforts to bring the best to followers of FdM know few bounds - a good few years ago, in our more adventurous days, we went on holiday to Bali (nice if you like open sewers pouring onto the beach) and I found a cheap source of joss-sticks - I bought 150 packs and brought them back as giveaways in an FdM special edition (I can't remember which one!); I also bought 150 wooden paint-stirrers when we were over in the USA with Andy, with a bright idea in mind; a decade on and I still have the paint stirrers but no idea what the bright idea was.
KRIS GIETKOWSKI
Kris is a real one-off - I discovered his music by pure chance on youtube (well, sort of chance - I was looking for live recordings by the mighty Egg and found Kris; his recreations were a natural for FdM - I love that 'Canterbury' keyboard sound - and even more so when I asked Kris why he hadn't included two of the original tracks in his version - his answer being that he didn't like 'Boilk' and 'Fugue In D Minor' was too much grief to learn!
But I think my favourite memory was of one of my step-daughters playing a promo CD of the album in her car with the window down, a kid heard the opening bars of 'While Growing My Hair' as she drove by and shouted to his mum, "ice-cream van!"
Kris didn't restrict himself to Egg, I also released a 3CD set by him, which added to Egg with his instrumental takes on Atomic Rooster and The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown - wonderful stuff.
OUR FIRST CHEMISTRY SET AND OUR FIRST WINKLE
FdM set out to be a reissues label; that didn't work so we decided to be a covers label instead - and that worked just fine.
But then we discovered The Chemistry Set and they offered us the chance to release a single, but with an original song on one side and a Stones cover on the other; it was all just too good to turn down so we came up with a sublabel to protect our artistic intergrity (I'm joking, of course - we never had any - well, Andy did!) - and Regal Crabomophone (a mash-up of Regal Zonophone and Homer Simpson's reference to Lisa's saxomophone, if you didn't know already) was born - and Curvey 'enhanced' the FdM logo with a goatee, moustache and crown to complete the transformation.
FRANK SUCHOMEL
Surely the best run of record sleeves from Fruits de Mer were the responsibility of US artist Frank Suchomel; starting with 'Sorrow's Children' in 2012, Frank went on to design sleeves for our Hollies tribute album, a Soft Hearted Scientists compilation plus various singles and Dr. Sardonicus festival CDs.
Sadly Frank decided to focus on other projects but I still live in hope that he'll return to sleeve design one day.
DARKEST VOYAGE
A really strange one - a double LP and a six CD set - which started out with some basic tracks from Swordfish and then grew, changed, mutated, etc - quite amazing how the source material triggered so many wild flights - I'll let Marc explain...
A trip always turns into a journey but this has become a dark voyage of discovery, as solitary confinement was enforced around our world in March 2020.
It started as just a long drone with some sequencers, a guitar chord and snippet of a choir, plus some extra percussion, using a juno 60, kitten, doefper sequencers and a couple of om vcos, all done to a 120bpm clock in F; very real and very raw - no plug-ins, computers used as tape recorders only and a means to link things, to keep it organic and free for experimentation.
It was initially intended for the musicians in our bands, a kind of starting-block and a means of keeping in touch; it is very loosely based on what I did with a 'Voyage 34' remix for Porcupine Tree many years ago
...in the end, contributors included Pete Bingham, nick nicely, Use Of Ashes, Jeremy Morris, Jay Tausig, Maxine Peake, two of my grandkids and many more!
RONNIE SCOTT'S
The coolest 'launch gig' for a Fruits de Mer release must be for SEN3's album, when they played a set at Ronnie Scott's.
Admittedly the band were playing a support set, the display of vinyl in the club was a bit muted and I don't think we actually sold any copies on the night but even so - we were there!
OF ALL THE BARS...
I first met Fuchsia's Tony Durant by sheer coincidence when Liz and I were in Sydney - I picked up a local freesheet and happened to see an ad for Fuchsia, who wre playing in a club north of Sydney the following evening. We turned up and during a short break in their set I introduced myself as the bloke who'd issued his re-recording of 'The Band' with Sweden's Me And My Kites a year or two earlier.
Turned out Tony was (and still is) a great guy, and we've released a series of new Fuchsia recordings over the years.
The first Fuchsia LP is a true cult classic, of course, and is one of the few reissues put out by Fruits de Mer, even though we set out to be a reissue label.
ONE FOR COMPLETISTS
The 16th Dream Of Dr. Sardonicus special edition release included a 7" lathe-cut from Elfin Bow; there were two versions of the sleeve - this is the one that either didn't get used or was hidden behind the much better one designed by Elfin Bow herself - within the pvc sleeves they came in.
SUCK ON THAT
One of the sponsors of our 'Crabstock' festival back in 2013 was Fishermans Friend - thanks to Earthling Society's (now Taras Bulba's) Fred Laird, who lives in Fleetwood, which is where the Fisherman's Friend factory is to be found.
Everyone attending got a free packet!
CARRY ON MYSPACE...
Our first Vibravoid single was banned by Myspace for being too revealing, so we had to blur the image to satisfy the censors
THE GREAT FdM GIVEWAYS
Ok, maybe not great - but who can forget:
kites...DIY revolving temples...unicorn fart wax melts...balsa wood planes...Rubik's cubes...joss sticks...tattoos...hogweed seeds...t-shirts...fishnet stockings...tarot cards...receipts for vegetarian pies...miniature lobsters...music boxes...jigsaws...air fresheners...ray guns...3D spex...whelk soup recipes...crystal growing kits...test tube racks...8mm film...parking tickets...(fake)sheets of LSD tabs....pieces of Welsh bluestone
...and if you don't remember them, maybe you missed out on them - or did I make a couple of them up?*
(*spoiler alert : I didn't - they're all actual FdM giveaways)
NEVER MIND THE QUALITY...
In our early days, some of the 7" sleeves were photocopied by me. After a while, I started to get a bit too adventurous - I discovered a stapling facility on a copier and had the bright idea of producing a booklet-sleeve; I got cracking, printing up 300 8pp booklets, only to discover I'd printed the images too big, so our first 8" sleeve was created - unfortunately with a 7" record inside.
WHO?
Did you know the artist who produced the sleeve artwork for The Flaming Gnomes' single is Jeff Cummins, better known for his artwork for countless Dr. Who magazines and books, Radio Times covers and Kung-Fu Monthly? (I only mentioned the last one as it was an early magazine published by Felix Dennis of Oz fame, someone I had the odd encounter with in my magazine days)
SO WHO HASN'T RECORDED FOR FdM?
I was asked recently about artists I'd love to have on the label but haven't yet succumbed; it could be a very long and completely pointless list, of course, but three names that are on the borders of "you must be kidding yourself" but are - perhaps - not completely and utterly ridiculous to mention:
- Roy Wood
- Todd Rundgran
- Caravan
I did try contacting Caravan at one stage, but didn't get a reply, while the journalist Dave Thompson got as far as mentioning the 'Fruits de Mer' name to Todd in an interview - he was amused but sadly, I don't think I'll be releasing the follow-up to 'A Wizard...', and I've no idea how to get in touch with Roy
Next time you're down the pub with any, or all, of them, please mention my name.
A STRANGE BEGINNING
Strange Fish was a sub-label I set up in 2013 to release the more 'out there' side of FdM's output; the first release was a box-set of two double LPs, two single LPs and a CD - it wasn't planned that way, I tried to theme the individual releases so people could pick and choose between krautrock, motorik, prog rock, synth, acoustic and ambient music - but almost everyone wanted to order one of everything, so a hastily-constructed and rather flimsy outer slip-case was ordered to house the lot.
I didn't spot a corrupted WAV file had found its way onto one of the test pressings until a first batch of promo CDs had gone out; the result was that one of the tracks broke up part way through and let rip with a few bursts of corrosive static before recovering its composure; one early review singled out the track and praised this new, more experimental side of Fruits de Mer.
NEVER MIND THE WIDTH...
Fruits de Mer has always been a mix of new artists and established, cult, sometimes bloody legendary ones - but maybe the cult/legendary side reached its peak with two sprawling multi-CD releases:
1. 'A Band For All Seasons' - a 60s covers compilation which included tracks by The Electric Prunes, The Yardbirds, July, Fuchsia, Chad & Jeremy, The Purple Gang, Marc Brierley and, of course, The Pretty Things.
2. The Honey Pot 'Ascending Scales' - Icarus and Jacqui managed to rope in members of Fairport Convention, July, The Pretty Things, Fuchsia, The Electric Prunes, Tractor, Tir na nOg, The Bevis Frond, Astralasia and Buggles!
SHOW ME THE MONEY
I'm also reminded of the gig we supported at the Borderline, with the mighty Pretty Things headlining.
A great day's music, with Stay flying in from Spain and The Luck Of Eden Hall from the USA; I can't remember the name of the promoter but I do remember the end of the day, when Jordi from Stay ran up to me, shouting, "Mr Jones, Mr Jones...where's our money?" - I waived my hand in the general direction of where I thought the promoter was last seen and I quickly legged it down to a pub with a mate.
GOT LIVE IF YOU WANT IT
Our Sardonicus summer festivals have become a big part of Fruits de Mer Records but did you know our first gig was the Hertford Corn Exchange in October 2009; The Flaming Gnomes - who recorded our fifth 7" single - played live there and Liz and I had an FdM stall at the back (it was a very small stall and I think we sold one record!).
It was three years before we ventured out again, supporting a Lichfield Vinyl night, organised by Chris McGranaghan from Those Old Records, with Beau headlining; Brian Langan from The Sw!ms designed the poster and when I find a jpg of it I'll post it here.
