Issue #1

Now available at Brunswick Bound, Missing Link Records, PolyEster Books, Greville Records and Sticky Institute.

I had to ask myself, why the cult following? Is it because there’s something in the way Spencer P. Jones plays his guitar, or maybe it’s something about the way he wears his cowboy hat, which makes you recognize that this man is from another time. A time when Australian rock n’ roll was dirty, when a pot of beer was sixty cents, when you could spend an afternoon at The Espy blowing your dole money on beer and pool. When a flat in St. Kilda was sixty dollars a month. A time when you’d cram your whole band into the back of a yellow Holden and hoon off to your next gig in some small town in the middle of nowhere. A simpler time. Maybe his songs resonate because he seems like someone who’s seen it all, done it all, and has a song to sing about it? A good guy turned bad or a bad guy turned good, and all the in-between...

Harry Howard and the NDE

Howard's lyrics (which seem kind of late 70's early 80's British post-punk-ish, spoken-poem inspired)  have a formalist structure to them; which has then been bulldozed down and built up again, all the while remaining emotionally cool . "I'm the song writer for this project [but] everyone contributes to the final product - of course". The songs off Pretty don't tell people what to think or how to feel, Harry is merely the narrator. "Words are slippery things" says Howard, "and they can mean as many different things to me as they can to anyone else". There is a nice measure, lyrically, between a song having some kind of 'other' meaning, a deeper meaning, an alternative meaning, along with the notion that it is what it is... There's no bullshit. "The songs do contain fact and fiction but it can be hard for me to know where one ends and the other begins". 

Jerry