A lifetime ago in 1980 I purchased the debut Cardiac Arrest 7″ single at the OurPrice record shop in Kingston after my curiosity got the better of me. A Bus for a Bus on the Bus really was unlike any other record. Before long got to see Cardiacs play live for the first time, meeting a family of firm friends and forever deviating my pathway, theirs was set!
During the rest of the 80’s, trajectory spiralled outward, slowly at first then with a momentum that thrilled and sometimes made us nauseous. We travelled the country performing all sorts of crazy, driving the unique tangle of musical ideas, inprinted with sonic heritage out there on the fringe, independant and striving for splendor. The Alphabet Business Concern we founded then, persists and thrives!
That bus dropped me off in time to pick up on a technology rocket that during the 90’s resulted in early networked database development with ESPY for BRAG agency, non-linear video editing as MIT with VideoVision Studio and by 1995, web design boutique Obsolete, media lab Backspace and community wireless primer Consume before the end of 1999.
Throughout, we have always kept closely in touch, supporting when possible, always in admiration. The later up’s and downs really seemed to have taken their toll and when Tim Smith finally succumbed after so many years of pain and suffering, that could well have ended it all…
Not so! In a life affirming effort by so many, over the intervening years, his expansive set of partially recorded songs has been fabulously elevatated and made ready for release this September.
LSD is a double dose of Cardiacs, 17 new songs that Tim had recorded at his home studio ‘Apollo’ but had barely sung on. All have now been completed with so much love and class, mastery and mahem abound !
A new single Woodeneye is already available and there are plenty of oportunities to see accounts of the band playing live, most recently a previously unreleased film from 1988 at Town & Country Club featuring YT and Miss Swift through the Whole World Window!
