Bulletin Board of Bad Behavior

In the U.S. their name got changed to A Band of Bees. They are so amazing they are EVEN more fascinating than the new Beta Band, which is saying a lot. They are from the Isle of Wight, just below the southern coast of England.

Are they folk, jazz, reggae, peaceful hip hop grooves? All of the above and more!

This means of course, that NEW U.K. music is NOT DEAD NOT DEAD! The corpse raises it's head out of the coffin! The new Bees album comes out in June!!!

IF you put yourself in an egg shaped spaceship with the new Beta Band and The Bees "Sunshine Hit Me" you will definitely never long for Mork and Mindy. I promise.

i have been listening to >heroes to zeros< continuously, for over a week, so i am intruiged about the insect music you kindly recommend, marky. thanks!

am i the only guy around whom the beta band reminds of xtc? i was a pretty big fan in the early-to-mid 1980s but then they got acoustic, andy partridge got flautulent, and anyway: colin moulding was often annoyingly coy and fey. it's neat to hear a re-incarnation of one of the great bands of my youth - expecially when the re-incarnation is an improvement on the original.

well last night in my DJ set I played New Order's Love Vigilantes followed by XTC's Here Comes President Kill Again. And no one got off on the thread because I ruined the dance vibe even though it was early hours and I was having a mess about.

But all you downloaders and with good music collections, play those two songs in a row and tell me how fucking relevent it all is.

ps. it helps to listen to the lyrics.

pss. All of you wondering how I could work my way back into good graces I mixed in Royksopp's So Easy.

It ain't easy at all.

Actually I would not have thought of XTC and Beta Band together. XTC stick in my mind as a lot more Beatles-derivative than Beta Band. I dunno, it's just a different thing, and besides Betas are so new compared to XTC. I'm a big XTC fan, though, and I don't much like to see Colin Moulding dissed. I really like that guy and was disappointed when he decided to opt out of Andy Partridge's attempts to release XTC demos. That said, maybe Moulding is just doing some quality control that Andy was the fool for not doing. I haven't bothered to buy what Andy released, simply because I love Colin so much. If I were to list my favorite XTC songs, they were usually Colin's. If I die and go to heaven, there will be lots of Colin Moulding solo albums there and they will all be free of course.

Can't remember how Here Comes President Kill Again goes, but I know it's from their later stuff and around Oranges & Lemons I quit caring.

One more note about the Bees and I hate if this spoils it for some people because NONE of their other stuff sounds like The Pixies at all, but this one song they do is the most perfect Pixies imitation I've ever heard, like the only time I can ever imagine anyone imitating the Pixies and escaping my disgust: "A Minha Menina". I'm not even saying it's their best song, but really, how do they do it? So many bands want to copy the Pixies you know...and prior to this I would have said copying the Pixies was a crime. Maybe they just wanted to prove they could do it and do it right.