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    • April 26, 2011 11:10 AM CDT
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    • Hello everyone.  So the whole month of July, I will be in Europe.  Visiting London first, then I will go to San Sebastian, Pamplona, Rome, Berlin, Amsterdam, possibly Belgium, and/or possibly Scotland somewhere, then back to London to fly back home to San Diego.  Any festivals, shows, or anything going on?  Places I should stop (bars, record stores, etc.)?  Offers to hang out and/or show me around are also appreciated.

       

      Anyone interested, get in touch. 

       

      Thanks a bunch,

       

      -Jesus Tarazon

       

    • April 25, 2011 8:54 AM CDT
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    • The Thanes, fresh from their tour of Greece, are going to be playing in Glasgow on 6 May... here's the info - support is from Thee Phar'i-sees. http://garagepunk.ning.com/events/the-thanes-thee-pharisees They're also playing at the Bottom Rung Big Beat weekender at the Forest Cafe in Edinburgh on 29/30th April with Les Bof!, The Brutes, and lots of others.

    • April 21, 2011 5:08 PM CDT
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    • ourense!!!

      thanks!

    • April 21, 2011 5:05 PM CDT
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    • TOUR DATES:

      Thursday June 2 – Burgos – Estudio 27              

      Friday June 3 – Vitoria – Helldorado                                 

      Saturday June 4 – Madrid – El Sol                        

      Sunday June 5 – Valencia – Sala El Loco             

      Monday June 6 – Villareal – Japan Rock Club     

      Tuesday June 7 – Murcia – Sala Mariano             

      Thursday June 9 – Logroño – Biribay Rock Club           

      Friday June 10 – Bilbao – Kafe Antxokia              

      Saturday June 11 – Gijon – Teatro Albeniz                      

      Monday June 13 – Leon – El Gran Café                

      Tuesday June 14 – Ponferrada – El Cocodrilo Negro     

      Wednesday June 15 – Ourense – Rock Club       

      Thursday June 16 – El Ferrol – Centro Cultural Torrente Ballester     

      Saturday June 18 – Tomelloso – Sala Beat

    • April 18, 2011 12:39 PM CDT
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    • Man - Remember The Jackets for next year, ok? I even think you asked us to play last year or the year before and we couldn't. We also played in Portugal last year. Have a good one!

    • April 18, 2011 12:31 PM CDT
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    • DAMN!!!

      I WANT TO SEE THE FLESHTONES!!!

      DAMN!!!

    • April 18, 2011 12:15 PM CDT
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    • One more round of the great rock'n'roll festival in Quarteira [Algarve], Quarteira Rock Fest is back!

      The 3rd and 4th of June will be as hot as hell! Warmin-up will be electrified by the mighty Parkinsons [pt], who are reuniting for a series of gigs, and afterwards Maria P. and Victor Torpedo will hit the decks providing some rock'n'roll mayhem thru the nite, and takin' place in Bafo de Baco, Loulé.

      This year featuring The Fleshtones[usa], The Incredible Staggers [usa], Los Explosivos [mex] and Supraheat Surrenders [pt]!

       

       

      for more info: Quarteira Rock Fest

    • April 16, 2011 3:00 AM CDT
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    • OK !

    • April 15, 2011 4:12 PM CDT
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    • I'd appreciate it if you used the Videos section to post, ya know, VIDEOS. Can you do that for me?

    • April 12, 2011 6:57 AM CDT
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    •  
      INTERVIEWS - LENNY HELSING TALKS ABOUT THANES, WILDEBEESTS, POETS AND PUNK!
      (interwiev by Aldo Reali)

      DISTORSIONI: Your name will always be associated first and foremost with The Thanes that have been around for about 25 years now, what are your thoughts on that?

      LENNY HELSING: Well yeah I suppose I never really thought that The Thanes would still be around after so many years but it just kinda kept going on, and indeed still keeps going on…and even although I’m the only one who has been constant in all line-ups of the group, we have nonetheless been known for holding together quite a stable unit now and then.
      I remember how after “Hey Girl” and the debut album there was a time when people maybe thought the Thanes split up…or so it seemed living in Italy in those pre-internet days. Mainly due to the absence or the difficulty of getting records, I’m talking about around 1989 or so. 
      Yes I can understand that for a lot of people The Thanes had become very quiet for some years…but we were – as you well know – still around and continuing to hone our craft, playing all sorts of little gigs here and there, and always trying to come up with new songs and interesting cover versions to share with our audiences. But we didn’t always have any new records out and so I suppose the good folks in Italy or Spain, or Germany and USA didn’t know what was really happening with us? And sometimes when even when we did have a record out, it was maybe that whichever label it was on didn’t receive the kind of distribution needed to get our name across to the wider public.
        
      Then there was a period of about 10 years (1993-2004) when the band certainly settled with a steady line-up and indeed released a couple of albums. What do you think of that time and in particular of the recorded output?

      Yes I’m really quite proud of that period of The Thanes, although there were still a few personnel changes to thwart our progress now and again. Our bass player Denis Boyle left us, to be replaced by Mal Kergan, and then, significantly, co-founding Thanes member, organist and songwriter Bruce Lyall, who had also started The Green Telescope with me back in the dying days of 1980, left us not long after the release of our “Learning Greek Mythology” 12” EP that included Bruce’s “Gone Away Girl”. Bruce’s replacement, Nick Kennedy, had a relatively short tenure in the group, going to live and work in Berlin directly after our 1994 visit to Italy actually, which included an appearance at the second “Festival Beat” event in Piacenza with your old pals The Hairy Fairies, and Barcelona’s The Flashback V. In fact I’ve just completed a page about this very subject for a book that Luca Frazzi is doing in Italy. Nick’s last gig was our lowly appearance at the club Velvet in your home town Rimini! Ian Binns would also stop playing drums with us not long after this time due to work commitments, but I am more than happy to say that the man we got in to replace Ian, Mike Goodwin, is thankfully still playing in The Thanes to this day, and as they used to say back in the olden days before my time and yours, Mike is one of the best drummers in the business! Ditto Mal who played in The Thanes for well over a decade, contributing hugely to what is regarded as some of our strongest material. I’m thinking specifically the LP/CD “Downbeat & Folked Up” for the Screaming Apple label in Germany. As you know Mal now lives in Galicia in northern Spain these days and I’m glad he has continued playing, lending his excellent, distinctive bass style to those (relatively) young whippersnappers The Phantom Keys. And I think that some of the songs we came up with for both the LPs we made during that time, the afore-mentioned “Downbeat…” and the previous “Undignified Noblemen” set for Italy’s Misty Lane label were among our best. After Nick left us we got in new organist, guitarist Angus McPake, an old friend who founded The Rubber Dolfinarium in the early-mid 80s, a group I played drums in. We then became The Beeville Hive V, and the two groups played many great songs that Angus had written, so I knew that getting Angus into the group would mean we would also have another songwriter to bolster the group, as up to that point it had only been me, and occasionally Bruce who had been writing stuff and presenting it to the band. So things began to change a lot around then because Angus is quite prolific with songs and I was happy to have Angus present loads of songs for us to attempt. “It Can Never Be” on the “Downbeat…” LP is one of the best, and also on that LP there was “World Of Stone” and in recent times he has written some choice numbers that we have recorded, and will be recording soon, like “Dishin’ The Dirt” and “What You Can’t Mend” that go down well when we play. I’m still writing too of course but we’ve yet to properly record some of these. 
      You just got back from Greece, from the first ever gigs with the Thanes, how was it?

      Greece was a blast. We only played two gigs, one in Athens and one in Larisa but both nights were quite special in their own way. The Tiki Club in Athens is quite small but was totally mobbed-out and had a great atmosphere. There are already some clips up on You Tube you can check out. “No No No No” and “I’m A Fool” are pretty decent. The Stage club in Larisa was a bigger venue but less people watched us. But still we had a great gig and the crowds on both nights seemed to really enjoy The Thanes. Our visit was arranged by “The Coalminers Corp”, a promotion team of great guys set up by my old friend from Crete Costas, who calls himself Mr Optical Sound, plus there’s Takis and Johnny. All three are passionate 60s DJs too…and so I was also asked if I would bring along a box of 45s to DJ with both nights, which as you can well imagine Aldo, was a great little sound trip for me.
      Who’s in the Thanes right now; what are your current projects, what’s coming up?

      The Thanes are yours truly, still on lead vocals and guitar, Angus McPake plays organ, guitar, 12-string, Mike Goodwin is on the drums, and Mark Hunter takes care of bass guitar and backing vocals. Mark is the newest member of The Thanes, joining us in time for our support slot to The Sonics at New York’s “Cavestomp” event in 2007, which itself was quite an experience. Currently we are working on getting recordings of some of our newest songs together, with a view to getting a release for them sometime later in the year. We are doing these recordings in Angus’s “Ravencraig” home studio set up where Les Bof! – with Angus on guitar – have also recorded their brand new LP which out soon on Germany’s Copas Disques. Hopefully The Thanes will have a single out around summer on the State label here in the UK, headed up by our good friends The Higher State…but we also have some other surprises in store, but I better keep schtum about them at present in case nothing transpires. We also have another project on the go at the moment that involves The Poets, yes indeed the self same and truly superb and unique sounding beat group from Glasgow, Scotland originally in operation way back in the 1960s. Members of The Poets and The Thanes have been hard at work rehearsing, and honing many of their Decca and Immediate treasures which will soon be shared with a live audience or two. There is a taster of sorts taking place on Friday May 6 at the 13th Note in Glasgow’s King St, when The Thanes will be joined for one or two numbers by The Poets’ George Gallacher and Fraser Watson. A much fuller appreciation of this project will hopefully be realised in Edinburgh in late July when Angus and chums’ “The Big Stramash” will take place!!!
      When did you first play Italy and what are your memories of that or later gigs?

      We first played Italy in, I think, 1989, or maybe 1990, with a hastily arranged gig playing at an all-night “sit-in” at Milan’s State University, after the initial “squatter” venue in the city was called off as the place was falling apart. We also played in Pisa, Torino I think, and, if it was the same visit?, then we also played at the infamous Forte Prenistino, a social centre / squat type gig that was held in an old castle in Rome, which was run by punks and was quite an amazing affair altogether. Apparently we were pretty lucky to have played there as I’ve been told since that it was only genuine punk bands that were supposedly allowed to play there. But The Thanes played there for sure, on a really high-up stage and we had a pretty good reception. They had a superb vegetarian kitchen in the place and gave us tons of beer and some good money too.
      You have always been involved with several bands, but there’s one that certainly has been taking a lot of your time since 1995 or so: The Wildebeests, how did it all start?

      It all started really when I met bass player John Gibbs at a bus stop in Edinburgh’s Leith Walk a couple of days after he was kicked out of The Kaisers in October 1994. He said he wanted to start a new group, so I said I’d be interested in bashing the drums if it was a beat group. Liam Watson at Toerag studio in London also told John that former Milkshakes bass player Russ Wilkins was living in or around Edinburgh somewhere and would be a great choice as guitarist. So once contact was established, we agreed to meet up one Sunday afternoon at The Thanes’ practice basement in Great King St, and quickly found that we all had a great love for loads of amazing sounds; from the early blues and r’n’b to rock’n’roll thru beat, garage, psych into some prog and hard-rock, early glam and tons of great early punk sounds…we also seemed to be able to harness this raw energy and turn it into something of our own making. I mean that very afternoon we, albeit very roughly, recorded about an hour’s worth of our influences, which gave us a great starting block to base the next sixteen years around ha ha.
      What are some of your current favourite bands/records?

      Currently I love The Higher State’s “Darker By The Day” LP, “Red Dissolving Rays Of Light” LP by The Loons and Os Haxixins’ “Under The Stones” LP and the various attendant 45s from these records too. I’m also digging Paul Messis and his various 45s. On a very different path, I love Barton Carroll’s LP “Together You And I”. He opened for Mudhoney here in Aberdeen last October and was folkin’ great. Great live experiences of late have been Glasgow’s The Hidden Masters who as you know feature our very good friend Alpha Mitchell on bass. The gig they did with The Higher State was incredible. And a bit further back getting to sing with the OUTSIDERS at Rotterdam’s Primitive festival in 2008 was one of the highlights of my life!!!

      Perhaps not too many people know, at least in Italy, that you were in Punk bands.
      Tell us about that time, the bands you saw live and the whole atmosphere in Scotland over 30 years ago.

      Well I started off in pop groups of the Bay City Rollers era, but punk was just about to happen, and I just got totally immersed in it all. A friend’s cousin told me about a group in Edinburgh (I lived in a small village about 15 to 20 miles from town) who were just starting and needed a singer. So I agreed to meet the guitarist in town (he was Steve Fraser, who later also featured in The Thanes, playing on our recordings of Syd’s “Scream Thy Last Scream” and The Calico Wall’s “I’m A Living Sickness”) and take it from there. This was in 1978, so by this time a lot of punk action had already come to town, and while I didn’t catch some of the very earliest gigs, I did attend loads of gigs throughout ’77-‘79 including The Damned (with The Dead Boys), The Jam, The Clash (with Suicide), The Boomtown Rats, Dr Feelgood, The Radiators From Space (opening for Thin Lizzy), 999, The Buzzcocks (with The Slits), Siouxsie and the Banshees (one with Spizz Oil, and another with Simple Minds), Ultravox, Adam and the Ants (with The Monochrome Set), The Cure (with The Associates)…plus lots of local groups like Scars, The Ettes, Visitors, The Prats, Matt Vinyl and the Decorators, The Skids, The Valves, The Exploited (very early days), Another Pretty Face, TV Art (who then became Josef K), The Dirty Reds (who then became The Fire Engines)…it was a pretty incredible time really where lots of us young punks would meet up on a Saturday afternoon, mainly just walking about and having a laugh, and knowing that our appearance was being noticed around the streets, and checking out the various record shops and maybe going for one or two (still underage) drinks in one of the few bars that didn’t mind punks coming in. A few record shops like Hot Licks, Bruce’s and Virgin were the main ones where punks were allowed in, even if they didn’t buy anything (not much anyway especially if you are only 14-15 years old and don’t have much money) but just to kinda hang out awhile and hear a lot of what was going on record-wise, and news of gigs etc. Pheonix too was another sympathetic shop in town. A few older punk pals were studying at art college, so a favourite trick when you were with them was to find out where the “private view” functions were being held, and go there first and partake of the free wine and snacks that they had – sometimes the wine flowed very freely indeed ha ha! Also Ripping records shop used to run buses to some of the out of town gigs, that’s where I went to see the Banshees and Simple Minds in Glasgow, also The Clash in Glasgow with Mikey Dread, and The Clash in Dunfermline Kinema with Suicide. Some of the punks there that night hated Suicide and spent most of their time shouting abuse and spitting on them. We on the other hand thought they were great. 

       

      How did you first got interested in the music from the 60s?

      I think it was a mixture of things really. I was already heavily into rock music long before punk came on the scene, so I knew something about a lot of origins of bands anyway. I was reading NME and Sounds and Melody Maker all the time. A pal’s cousin sat us down in the summer of 1973 or 1974 and specifically played us The Pretty Things “SF Sorrow” the US copy with headstone cover, which made a big impression on me, so much so that every time I saw a picture of The Pretties or anything to do with them I cut it out and added it to my growing list of obsessive group-related ephemera I seemed to be building. Then a pal at school in 2nd year loaned me or my brother “Relics” and “Piper At The Gates Of Dawn”, and that got me hooked on Syd Barrett’s Floyd style much more than the then current “Dark Side Of The Moon”. Then I got into listening to John Peel and he’d be throwing in odd plays of “Oh Yeah” by The Shadows of Knight and “I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night)” by The Electric Prunes, and even weirder UK psych things, like “Wallpaper” by Pregnant Insomia. But then when punk exploded into the mainstream, Record Mirror had a “star chart” each week having a top ten playlist from a rock or punk star, and I remember seeing Gene October from Chelsea putting The Seeds “Pushin’ Too Hard” in there, Lemmy too…and also Radar records just issued “You’re Gonna Miss Me” and “Psychedelic Sounds Of The 13th Floor Elevators”, also the “Gloria” LP by Shadows of Knight etc… and of course quite a few of the punk bands were referencing 60s music, from Generation X and their mod-related fixations, The Damned and their love of The Stooges and MC5, Sex Pistols too. The prime 60s garage compilation LP “Nuggets” too had just been overhauled and given a new sleeve by Sire label, home of The Ramones, and Edinburgh’s The Rezillos even got given a deal with them. And there were other signposts too, like The Radiators From Space covering “Psychotic Reaction” on the flipside of their “Enemies” 45 in ’77, and The Undertones covering another Nuggetty classic The Chocolate Watch Band’s “Let’s Talk About Girls”.  Then we heard the TV Personalities on Peel and things got stranger and more primitive-like…and, well it was then just a short “Pebbles” throw to discover other harder, more primal, more screeching garage punk styled groups and records …

       

      Favourite bands: I know there are way too many bands to mention, but maybe you can give us some names of “lesser known” groups that you feel they deserve to be discovered.

      The Sound Magics from Holland, The Dovers from USA, The Boston Dexters from Edinburgh, String and the Beans from USA, Dean Ford and the Gaylords from Scotland, Our Patch Of Blue from Italy, Randy and the Rest from USA, The Talismen from England, Israel’s The Churchills, The 20th Century Sounds from Scotland, Vinidrios Quebrados from Chile :-))), Belgium’s The Paramounts, also Union Jack, and loads loads more …  cheers for now Aldo your pal Lenny

    • April 3, 2011 7:08 PM CDT
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    • Still looking for a drummer.

      Know anyone in Edinburgh who'd fit the bill?

    • March 31, 2011 7:23 PM CDT
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    • The wife and I are headed out on a 10 day tour of Italy in May. Just curious if their are any cool clubs/ bars in Rome, Florenece, or Venice that I can hit up for live music. Rome and Venice will be on the Weekend and Florence during the week. 

       

      Let me know

    • March 26, 2011 4:49 PM CDT
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    • Hi there,

       

      Here's a link to a brand new online fanzine called "Rocket Fanzine"

       

       

      http://red-rocket-zine.jimdo.com/

       

      It's all about Garage rock, & it's in french. You'll find news, reviews, a gig agenda and hopefully lots more things in the future...

       

      Hope you like it & don't hesitate to spread the word!

       

      Cheers,

       

      Tom.

    • March 22, 2011 5:15 PM CDT
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    • Thanks! Just in case you were wondering, the radio was offline for maintenance earlier today but is up and running again!

      Wayne Talbott said:

      nice one dude,spot on!

    • March 22, 2011 10:19 AM CDT
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    • nice one dude,spot on!

    • March 22, 2011 9:16 AM CDT
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    • sure, have a look at www.yeahright.eu

      some links to clubs on the left side and also don't forget to check out the calendar at the bottom of the page!

    • March 22, 2011 8:32 AM CDT
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    • Hey can any one help me. I going to berlin in may for the first time and wondered if there are any good garage/psych club nights/venues. thanks, WT

    • March 18, 2011 2:57 AM CDT
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    • Hey!! thanks..tous kaname add sto fb!  enoeite den xanoume tipota :D exoume kleisei idi 1 ke psaxnoume na vroume k alles meres! Cheers


      luscevious drummer said:

      www.facebook.com/faverave paidia nomizw pws aytoi einai bookers gia germania, opws kai na xei kai vlakeies na sas lew, den xanete kai tipota swsta?

    • March 14, 2011 2:22 PM CDT
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    • Damn! I'm just gonna miss you in Oslo!