Day 211. Can I tell you that the Verandan 7″ is now at the pressing plant? 🙂 More info coming soon!
Flowerbed: there’s, on Bandcamp, a new song by this Denton dreampop project and sounds gorgeous. The song is called “Everything” and we can only hope that it gets released sometime! Good work by these Texans!
Firestations: “Automatic Tendencies” will be the band’s comeback since the 2018 album “The Year Dot”. This time around the band is going to be releasing a CDR for this 6 song EP on Lost Map Records on November 6th. Right now we can preview the 2nd track of the EP, “Small Island”, which is very nice!
The Telephone Numbers: some classic sounding indiepop here! Jangly and bathed in sunlight, that’s how we can describe “Leviathan” a superb track by the band led by Thomas Rubenstein from San Frnacisco! Looking forward to hearing more by this project!
Agent Blå: “Lay in My Arms” is the newest song by the Gothenburg combo and again it is great. I like this band a lot. I am waiting for a new record. When? Let me know when!
Neutrals: the new 7″ by the San Francisco Bay area band is going to be part of the Slumberland Singles Series and will contain two songs, “Personal Computing” and “In the Future”. As a designer I have trouble with the hierarchy of the sleeve, where it looks like the band is actually called “Personal Computing” but I will let that slip, the song sounds really really good, the melody and lyrics are really catchy! I have to get this one!
—————————————————————–
I have to return to the “Blabbermouth Volume One” compilation tape that the Medway Bands Co-op put together to promote themselves in 1986. Songs from these tape appeared on Youtube in 2016 but only now I am discovering them. This is the second I am posting after the great On Margate Sands’ “Charlie”. So yeah, quite exciting!
This band has even a more enigmatic name, Crystal Tips & Alistair. Wow. Really. Who were behind this Medway band? The song that is uploaded in Youtube is called “Lesley Cocaina” and it is a very fine slice of indiepop. You wonder how this song was not properly released. It is so so good!! Great guitars, great melodies. You start to wonder if the band recorded more tracks because I want to hear them!
What I did figure out was that the band named themselves after a British cartoon that the BBC produced in the 70s. Crystal Tipps and Alistair is a British cartoon produced for the BBC.The title characters are a girl and her dog who are joined by their friends Birdie and Butterfly. There are 50 five-minute episodes and a 20-minute Christmas special, all first shown between 1971 and 1974.[3] It was created by Hilary Hayton and Graham McCallum. Michael Grafton-Robinson, a BBC producer went independent setting up Q3 of London to produce the series.The animation was done by Richard Taylor Cartoons, who were also contracted to make the Charley Says and the Protect and Survive public information films for the Central Office of Information.
And again there is no more information anywhere. As much as I try different keywords in Google I can’t find anything about the band. So yeah, I need all the help I can get to try to track them and find out more about this band!
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
One Response to “:: Crystal Tips & Alistair”
Hi,
Crystal Tips & Alistair was my band! What a lovely write up of my song.
We were active on the Medway scene from 1984-1990 and were founding members of the Medway Bands Co-op, which produced the Blabbermouth Volume 1 and 2 tapes.
This Lesley Cocaina demo was our first ever studio session, in 1984 and we went on to do a few more sessions over the years. I have a couple of other tracks I could share, including the one from Blabbermouth 2.
Anyway, thanks for the kind words. A friend sent me the link to this blog yesterday and it really made my day, taking me right back to those 80s indie days.
Cheers
Damien