WFMU: The Funhouse with Harry Parmenter: Playlist from October 8, 2023

The Funhouse with Harry Parmenter: Playlist from October 8, 2023

A weekly hour of unpredictable rockin' fun featuring unheard music with occasional history, commentary and anecdotes from host Harry Parmenter. THE FUNHOUSE offers the listener a brief respite from the onslaught of daily existence.

Sunday 9 - 10pm (EST) | On WFMU's Rock'N'Soul Radio
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October 8, 2023: A TRIBUTE TO THE JAZZ BUTCHER, MR. PAT FISH
"The Jazz Butcher, one of this threadbare island's greatest living songwriters..." -- Alan Moore, September 2012

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Artist	Track	Album	Label	Year	Format	Comments	Approx. start time
The Stranglers	The Waltzinblack (Intro)	The Gospel According To The Meninblack	EMI	1981	LP	The quotes below are culled from an interview late summer 2021 with Pat Fish, The Jazz Butcher, the man no less than Alan Moore called "One of this threadbare island's greatest living songwriters." As it turned out, sadly, I believe it was the last interview he ever did before his death 5 October 2021.	0:00:00 (Pop-up)

The Jazz Butcher Conspiracy	Partytime	Glorious Idiotic	ROIR	2000	CD	It’s a funny thing how people in different territories regard the name very differently. Among Americans, for example, the name seems well liked, but among Italians – even ones who like the band – it’s seen as irredeemably stupid. To be fair, it is. It arose from a conversation that I had with a friend about the stupid names that bands were adopting in the early eighties, At the time there were loads of trendy idiots naming their band the Jazz something-or-other. Either my pal or his girlfriend came up with “the Jazz Butcher”, which made us all laugh like drains. A while later, after recording a demo version of Zombie Love at home, I decided that I didn’t really fancy using my own name on a song about having sex with dead people, so I credited the tune to this imaginary Jazz Butcher character. Little did I know that the name would follow me around for the rest of my life!	0:03:20 (Pop-up)
The Jazz Butcher Conspiracy	A Great Visitation of Elephants	Illuminate	Creation Records	1995	CD	I grew up initially in south west London. As a very small boy I was insanely excited by the electric guitar sounds of the Ventures and the Shadows. My grandparents noticed this so they thought it might be amusing to buy me a toy guitar. Thus the first guitar in my life was a stupid little plastic thing about six inches long with plastic strings on it. I was about three years old but I can still recall my desperate, doomed attempts to tune the bloody thing. It properly convinced me that guitars were unfathomable things, only played by special people. It was never going to be the guitar for me. I only dared to start learning the guitar in my twenties. By then it had become a necessity. I taught myself on a nylon string guitar that I had liberated from a college acquaintance who had gone to join the Navy. I had made two albums and toured Europe before I finally owned my own electric guitar, a Fender El Rio electro-acoustic which I bought with my very first publishing cheque My guitar of choice these days is a Gretsch Electromatic.	0:06:43 (Pop-up)
The Jazz Butcher Conspiracy	Everybody's Talking	Waiting for the Love Bus	Creation Records	1993	CD	First and most important, much as Nilsson did a great job with it, the song belongs to Fred Neil, one of my favourite songwriters. Fred wrote loads of superb songs. I bet you’ve heard his song Dolphins. Everyone from Tim Buckley to Billy Bragg covers that one. Yes, I’ve done it myself, too, at gigs. Everybody in the world has covered this tune, so it felt fair enough to have a stab. I was inspired by John Cale’s re-working of Close Watch on Music for a New Society; wanted to strip it down to the bare essentials and let the winds of time blow through the empty spaces where the showbiz used to be. Couldn’t manage the bagpipes, but thanks to Nick Burson I got my ghost military tattoo drums at the end. It was recorded at the Love Bus sessions with Richard Formby in Leeds in January. The whole session was about bleaching out, disappearing into the void. We could be ghosts.	0:08:42 (Pop-up)
The Jazz Butcher	Grey Flannelette	Bath of Bacon	Fire Records	1983	CD	The first few Jazz Butcher gigs involved a floating line-up of pals including Max, Rolo and Alice of the Woodentops (at that stage they were a project in development rather than a working band) and an assortment of drummers. When we made the first LP I had no idea that we would ever perform as a live band, so it was all pretty casual and chaotic. Somewhere around the spring of 1984 we settled into a fairly solid little garage band formation with Max and me, Owen Jones on the drums and David J. on bass, the group that recorded A Scandal in Bohemia and Sex & Travel. We would play clubs and colleges around the UK on an irregular basis until, on the release of Scandal, we acquired a proper booking agent. I suppose out first actual “tour” would have been the week-long jaunt that we took into continental Europe in December ’84, which saw us play in Amsterdam, Hamburg and Frankfurt. We sat on the floor in the back of an old Ford Transit van with the gear piled up around us. It was cold. We had a blast.	0:11:13 (Pop-up)
The Jazz Butcher	Sea Madness "Sea Madness" by "The Jazz Butcher"	The Highest in the Land	Tapete Records	2022	CD	We’ve always received a very warm welcome and we soon learned to distinguish between the boorish wealthy American tourists that we encountered at home and the kind, friendly ordinary Americans that we met over there. We’ve made many true friends over the years. I cannot think of a single US trip that I didn’t enjoy. Some favourite venues: the Roxy and the Troubadour in LA, the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver B.C., First Avenue in Minneapolis, Tipitina’s in New Orleans, the Cotton Club in Atlanta and just about anywhere in Chicago, from the Metro right down to the sadly defunct Danny’s Bar. Sometimes great gigs can happen in the most unlikely/unpromising settings. One of my favourite nights was an impromptu show on a Sunday night in a little bar with no stage in Erie, Pa.	0:13:11 (Pop-up)
The Jazz Butcher	Shakey "Shakey" by "The Jazz Butcher"	Last Of The Gentlemen Adventurers	Pat Fish & Max Eider	2012	CD	What I love about that moment towards the end when Max kicks off is that it’s not introduced by any drum roll. No, it’s Richard Formby contriving the psychedelic alternative with three (count ‘em) Roland Space Echo units. Hardware, mind. By the same token, it was Richard who ran the outboard hardware that made Max’s guitar sound like that. None of us musicians can even remember the name of the effect. My love and admiration for Richard are eternal and immeasurable. Occasionally he still uses the word “wireless.” My lyrics are often strange mash-ups and hybrids. I begin here by quoting Neil Young, whose chords I have openly stolen for the main body of this tune but, yes, the shout out to Brian Wilson comes straight in after that. I think the theme here, really, is bad fathers. You know, Brian Wilson’s dad gave him hell. And yet, for all the damage, the guy is somewhere that poor, normal fuck-ups like you and I can never even go because, through it all, despite it all, he’s a flaming solid gold genius. I guess that’s the idea.	0:17:26 (Pop-up)

The Jazz Butcher	Tombe dans les pommes	Last Of The Gentlemen Adventurers	Pat Fish & Max Eider	2012	CD	The first concert I attended was King Crimson at Leicester Polytechnic in 1973 when I was 15. They were in their Larks Tongues in Aspic phase and were deemed by the press and suchlike to be a pretty hot ticket at the time. It largely went over my teenage head. Gigs that made me want to do music (though I had no idea how) included many insane, freewheeling performances by Daevid Allen’s Gong through 73 and 74, then Hawkwind (with Lemmy) and Doctor Feelgood (with Wilco) in 75. Then in 76 I saw the show from which there was no going back: Patti Smith and her band at the Roundhouse on a hot night. Insane. There was no coming back from there.	0:24:48 (Pop-up)
The Jazz Butcher	Melanie Hargreaves' Father's Jaguar	The Highest in the Land	Tapete Records	2022	CD	In the early days we would sometimes bill ourselves as the Jazz Butcher and his Big Soppy Pussycats. (We were still, clearly, not taking this thing very seriously.) By ’84 or ’85 we were simply the Jazz Butcher Group, but then we hit on “Conspiracy” in ’86. We liked the way that this could include everybody involved, the road crew and so forth, not just the people that appeared on stage. Since that time we have used the names Jazz Butcher and Jazz Butcher Conspiracy pretty much at random. There’s no particular significance to either title.	0:28:22 (Pop-up)
The Jazz Butcher	Time "Time" by "The Jazz Butcher"	The Highest in the Land	Tapete Records	2022	CD	As I write, I’m some two years cancer free. The crew at our local hospital were astonishingly good at their job, and cheerful with it. It sounds ridiculous, but we had some good fun during my treatment. Now, as a sixty three year old smoker who drinks fairly heavily (just beer, mind) I don’t think I could decently be described as “healthy” but I can still function well enough in my limited way. I tend to operate on a principle best summed up as: “Slow down; smoke more dope; stop and smell the fucking roses.” I do think about death, but I regard it more as an inevitable change rather than something to be feared. I’m not religious, but I do rather like the idea of becoming one with the Universe at some point. We’ll see, shan’t we?	0:32:08 (Pop-up)
The Jazz Butcher	The Devil is My Friend	Bloody Nonsense	Big Time Records	1986	LP	The title came from an interview that Roky Erikson gave to Nick Kent of the NME. It’s a direct quote, in fact. When I read it in the paper I laughed out loud on the train. This one properly span out like an expert. The song began as something that we would sing when we were drunk. While we were recording the Human Jungle single, we thought it would be a laugh to record it for an extra track on the b-side of the 12” version. When we played it to Dave Barker, the boss of Glass Records, he remarked “Well, that’s…stupid.” We were unable to dispute this. Then somebody at the American record company put it on that introductory Bloody Nonsense compilation. And all hell kicked off. People baying for the Devil is my Friend! We couldn’t believe it! At the very distinguished Barrymore’s Theatre in Ottawa in the summer of 1988, some eight hundred Canadians all started chanting “The Devil is my Friend!” at the top of their voices, stamping their feet and clapping their hands, while four pasty white boys from London stood helpless and aghast on the stage. The building was shaking. All I could think was: “Oh, my goodness, if only Tipper Gore could walk in here right now…”	0:37:30 (Pop-up)
The Jazz Butcher	She's a Yo Yo "She's a Yo Yo" by "The Jazz Butcher"	Condition Blue	Sky Records	1991	CD	The bones of it were all laid down live; drums, bass and two guitars, all in a room together, listening on headphones while amps were all in separate rooms around the spooky farmhouse that was Raven Studios. None of the musicians had met up for a few months, so it all went down raw, a lot of the tunes on the first take. It was insanely exciting. Lead guitarist Alex Lee (Blue Aeroplanes, Strangelove, Suede) later remarked: “It was four desperate men in a room; each one so desperate that he completely failed to notice how desperate the others were.” And there’s the vibe that drives this record: right there.	0:39:46 (Pop-up)

The Jazz Butcher Conspiracy	Water	Cake City	Vinyl Japan	2001	CD	I had some very basic studio experience with local bands as the seventies turned into the eighties, but my first serious engagement with recording came when we made Bath of Bacon in south London in the summer of 1982. The studio always interested me, so I tried to pick up as much as I could from the various engineers and producers who worked with us. It wasn’t until we made Condition Blue in 1991 that I really took full control of an entire production, albeit with an awful lot of invaluable help from the engineer on that session, Tim Burrell.	0:54:05 (Pop-up)
The Jazz Butcher	Do The Bubonic Plague	Big Planet Scarey Planet	Creation Records	1989	CD	In the early eighties my friend Barry Hale would collect recordings from radio and other media, which he would then cut up and arrange on cassettes, a couple of which he gave to me. I caught the bug straight away and would fill both audio and video tapes with random broadcasting stuff. The Bubonic Plague tune (our attempt at a “dance craze” record!) was built around a genuine radio broadcast from America. The idea that bubonic plague was still “a thing” in Texas in 1988 was just so bizarre that it just had to be made into a record. It was mildly popular in Spain, for reasons that I cannot claim to understand. I’ve always enjoyed using found sounds and snatches of dialogue on our records. Big influences on that were Steinski and Mass Media’s single “The Motorcade Sped On” and the Justified Ancients of Mumu’s album “1987 – What the Fuck is Going On?”, the dawn, of course, of the KLF.	0:55:45 (Pop-up)
The Jazz Butcher	Just Like Betty Page	A Scandal in Bohemia	Fire Records	1984	CD	I was nine when I bought a 7” copy of See Emily Play. First LP I ever bought was Abbey Road by them Beatles. I was but a little kid. Beautiful hippy chick on the counter hands me the record, takes my money and coos: “It’s a beautiful album.” I probably turned an interesting sequence of colours.	0:55:47 (Pop-up)

Listener comments!
	9:00pm Soulstealer007: Good evening!
	🥃 9:03pm Tom P: Hi Harry and everyone!
	🥃 9:03pm Harry Parmenter: hey. stream was off a long time and just went back up but The Whig Out got shortchanged bigtime. Damn.
	🥃 9:04pm Tom P: ↳ Harry Parmenter @9:03 Yes - enjoyed the last 7 minutes of it
	🥃 9:04pm medson: Hey Harry.
	🥃 9:04pm Harry Parmenter: ↳ Tom P @9:04 well welcome Tom.
	🥃 9:05pm Jessie: Good evening Harry and all!
	9:05pm Soulstealer007: Hi Jessie
	🥃 9:07pm Harry Parmenter: hey medson and jessie. medson: gotta catch your archive--my Friday was a mess.
	🥃 9:07pm Jessie: Hey Soustealer.
	🥃 9:08pm Will thee Sound Guy: Hi Harry and all!!!
	🥃 9:09pm Harry Parmenter: hey Will how ya doing
	🥃 9:14pm Will thee Sound Guy: I'm good, we just got home from a family thing... hope all is well with you!
	9:14pm Soulstealer007: Hmmmm....Warm Leatherette
	🥃 9:15pm Harry Parmenter: ↳ Soulstealer007 @9:14 parody
	9:17pm Soulstealer007: Copy
	9:30pm Soulstealer007: Harry, You should do that song next time you Karaoke
	9:31pm Zodiac: Hey Harry, Sorry I'm late but here as always!
	9:32pm Zodiac: I'm digging this!
	🥃 9:32pm Harry Parmenter: ↳ Zodiac @9:31 Zodiac! Welcome. I'm glad somebody is besides me!
	🥃 9:33pm medson: Sweet sounds Harry.
	🥃 9:33pm Harry Parmenter: ↳ Zodiac @9:32 watching SFvD?
	🥃 9:33pm Harry Parmenter: ↳ medson @9:33 love that skeleton!
	🥃 9:34pm medson: ↳ Harry Parmenter @9:33 Thanks. Hellraiser
	9:34pm Soulstealer007: Great song!
	9:34pm Zodiac: ↳ Harry Parmenter @9:33 Just turned it on. did enjoy Steelers -Ravens earlier
	🥃 9:34pm Harry Parmenter: ↳ medson @9:34 excellent.
	🥃 9:35pm Harry Parmenter: ↳ Zodiac @9:34 very good song. cat wrote this song knew he was dying soon.
	9:40pm Soulstealer007: Hilarious
	9:48pm Soulstealer007: Another great Butcher song
	🥃 9:50pm Harry Parmenter: ↳ Soulstealer007 @9:48 genius.
	🥃 9:52pm medson: Nice job honoring Mr. Fish Harry
	🥃 9:52pm Harry Parmenter: ↳ medson @9:52 thx medson. i think most people never even heard of him but i discovered years ago--via The Devil Is My Friend--wonderfl songwriter.
	🥃 9:56pm medson: Great show Harry
	9:58pm Soulstealer007: Thank you Harry. Very entertaining.
	🥃 9:58pm Harry Parmenter: ↳ medson @9:56 thx medson. STAY TUNED ALL FOR RAMA LAMA DING DONG. sweet sounds of doo-wop from the incredible mr. medson. cheers all.
	🥃 9:58pm Harry Parmenter: ↳ Soulstealer007 @9:58 thx man. thx everyone.
	🥃 9:59pm Will thee Sound Guy: Thank you Harry!!!

View Harry Parmenter's profile

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Artist	Track	Album	Label	Year	Format	Comments	Approx. start time
The Stranglers	The Waltzinblack (Intro)	The Gospel According To The Meninblack	EMI	1981	LP	The quotes below are culled from an interview late summer 2021 with Pat Fish, The Jazz Butcher, the man no less than Alan Moore called "One of this threadbare island's greatest living songwriters." As it turned out, sadly, I believe it was the last interview he ever did before his death 5 October 2021.	0:00:00 (Pop-up)

The Jazz Butcher Conspiracy	Partytime	Glorious Idiotic	ROIR	2000	CD	It’s a funny thing how people in different territories regard the name very differently. Among Americans, for example, the name seems well liked, but among Italians – even ones who like the band – it’s seen as irredeemably stupid. To be fair, it is. It arose from a conversation that I had with a friend about the stupid names that bands were adopting in the early eighties, At the time there were loads of trendy idiots naming their band the Jazz something-or-other. Either my pal or his girlfriend came up with “the Jazz Butcher”, which made us all laugh like drains. A while later, after recording a demo version of Zombie Love at home, I decided that I didn’t really fancy using my own name on a song about having sex with dead people, so I credited the tune to this imaginary Jazz Butcher character. Little did I know that the name would follow me around for the rest of my life!	0:03:20 (Pop-up)
The Jazz Butcher Conspiracy	A Great Visitation of Elephants	Illuminate	Creation Records	1995	CD	I grew up initially in south west London. As a very small boy I was insanely excited by the electric guitar sounds of the Ventures and the Shadows. My grandparents noticed this so they thought it might be amusing to buy me a toy guitar. Thus the first guitar in my life was a stupid little plastic thing about six inches long with plastic strings on it. I was about three years old but I can still recall my desperate, doomed attempts to tune the bloody thing. It properly convinced me that guitars were unfathomable things, only played by special people. It was never going to be the guitar for me. I only dared to start learning the guitar in my twenties. By then it had become a necessity. I taught myself on a nylon string guitar that I had liberated from a college acquaintance who had gone to join the Navy. I had made two albums and toured Europe before I finally owned my own electric guitar, a Fender El Rio electro-acoustic which I bought with my very first publishing cheque My guitar of choice these days is a Gretsch Electromatic.	0:06:43 (Pop-up)
The Jazz Butcher Conspiracy	Everybody's Talking	Waiting for the Love Bus	Creation Records	1993	CD	First and most important, much as Nilsson did a great job with it, the song belongs to Fred Neil, one of my favourite songwriters. Fred wrote loads of superb songs. I bet you’ve heard his song Dolphins. Everyone from Tim Buckley to Billy Bragg covers that one. Yes, I’ve done it myself, too, at gigs. Everybody in the world has covered this tune, so it felt fair enough to have a stab. I was inspired by John Cale’s re-working of Close Watch on Music for a New Society; wanted to strip it down to the bare essentials and let the winds of time blow through the empty spaces where the showbiz used to be. Couldn’t manage the bagpipes, but thanks to Nick Burson I got my ghost military tattoo drums at the end. It was recorded at the Love Bus sessions with Richard Formby in Leeds in January. The whole session was about bleaching out, disappearing into the void. We could be ghosts.	0:08:42 (Pop-up)
The Jazz Butcher	Grey Flannelette	Bath of Bacon	Fire Records	1983	CD	The first few Jazz Butcher gigs involved a floating line-up of pals including Max, Rolo and Alice of the Woodentops (at that stage they were a project in development rather than a working band) and an assortment of drummers. When we made the first LP I had no idea that we would ever perform as a live band, so it was all pretty casual and chaotic. Somewhere around the spring of 1984 we settled into a fairly solid little garage band formation with Max and me, Owen Jones on the drums and David J. on bass, the group that recorded A Scandal in Bohemia and Sex & Travel. We would play clubs and colleges around the UK on an irregular basis until, on the release of Scandal, we acquired a proper booking agent. I suppose out first actual “tour” would have been the week-long jaunt that we took into continental Europe in December ’84, which saw us play in Amsterdam, Hamburg and Frankfurt. We sat on the floor in the back of an old Ford Transit van with the gear piled up around us. It was cold. We had a blast.	0:11:13 (Pop-up)
The Jazz Butcher	Sea Madness "Sea Madness" by "The Jazz Butcher"	The Highest in the Land	Tapete Records	2022	CD	We’ve always received a very warm welcome and we soon learned to distinguish between the boorish wealthy American tourists that we encountered at home and the kind, friendly ordinary Americans that we met over there. We’ve made many true friends over the years. I cannot think of a single US trip that I didn’t enjoy. Some favourite venues: the Roxy and the Troubadour in LA, the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver B.C., First Avenue in Minneapolis, Tipitina’s in New Orleans, the Cotton Club in Atlanta and just about anywhere in Chicago, from the Metro right down to the sadly defunct Danny’s Bar. Sometimes great gigs can happen in the most unlikely/unpromising settings. One of my favourite nights was an impromptu show on a Sunday night in a little bar with no stage in Erie, Pa.	0:13:11 (Pop-up)
The Jazz Butcher	Shakey "Shakey" by "The Jazz Butcher"	Last Of The Gentlemen Adventurers	Pat Fish & Max Eider	2012	CD	What I love about that moment towards the end when Max kicks off is that it’s not introduced by any drum roll. No, it’s Richard Formby contriving the psychedelic alternative with three (count ‘em) Roland Space Echo units. Hardware, mind. By the same token, it was Richard who ran the outboard hardware that made Max’s guitar sound like that. None of us musicians can even remember the name of the effect. My love and admiration for Richard are eternal and immeasurable. Occasionally he still uses the word “wireless.” My lyrics are often strange mash-ups and hybrids. I begin here by quoting Neil Young, whose chords I have openly stolen for the main body of this tune but, yes, the shout out to Brian Wilson comes straight in after that. I think the theme here, really, is bad fathers. You know, Brian Wilson’s dad gave him hell. And yet, for all the damage, the guy is somewhere that poor, normal fuck-ups like you and I can never even go because, through it all, despite it all, he’s a flaming solid gold genius. I guess that’s the idea.	0:17:26 (Pop-up)

The Jazz Butcher	Tombe dans les pommes	Last Of The Gentlemen Adventurers	Pat Fish & Max Eider	2012	CD	The first concert I attended was King Crimson at Leicester Polytechnic in 1973 when I was 15. They were in their Larks Tongues in Aspic phase and were deemed by the press and suchlike to be a pretty hot ticket at the time. It largely went over my teenage head. Gigs that made me want to do music (though I had no idea how) included many insane, freewheeling performances by Daevid Allen’s Gong through 73 and 74, then Hawkwind (with Lemmy) and Doctor Feelgood (with Wilco) in 75. Then in 76 I saw the show from which there was no going back: Patti Smith and her band at the Roundhouse on a hot night. Insane. There was no coming back from there.	0:24:48 (Pop-up)
The Jazz Butcher	Melanie Hargreaves' Father's Jaguar	The Highest in the Land	Tapete Records	2022	CD	In the early days we would sometimes bill ourselves as the Jazz Butcher and his Big Soppy Pussycats. (We were still, clearly, not taking this thing very seriously.) By ’84 or ’85 we were simply the Jazz Butcher Group, but then we hit on “Conspiracy” in ’86. We liked the way that this could include everybody involved, the road crew and so forth, not just the people that appeared on stage. Since that time we have used the names Jazz Butcher and Jazz Butcher Conspiracy pretty much at random. There’s no particular significance to either title.	0:28:22 (Pop-up)
The Jazz Butcher	Time "Time" by "The Jazz Butcher"	The Highest in the Land	Tapete Records	2022	CD	As I write, I’m some two years cancer free. The crew at our local hospital were astonishingly good at their job, and cheerful with it. It sounds ridiculous, but we had some good fun during my treatment. Now, as a sixty three year old smoker who drinks fairly heavily (just beer, mind) I don’t think I could decently be described as “healthy” but I can still function well enough in my limited way. I tend to operate on a principle best summed up as: “Slow down; smoke more dope; stop and smell the fucking roses.” I do think about death, but I regard it more as an inevitable change rather than something to be feared. I’m not religious, but I do rather like the idea of becoming one with the Universe at some point. We’ll see, shan’t we?	0:32:08 (Pop-up)
The Jazz Butcher	The Devil is My Friend	Bloody Nonsense	Big Time Records	1986	LP	The title came from an interview that Roky Erikson gave to Nick Kent of the NME. It’s a direct quote, in fact. When I read it in the paper I laughed out loud on the train. This one properly span out like an expert. The song began as something that we would sing when we were drunk. While we were recording the Human Jungle single, we thought it would be a laugh to record it for an extra track on the b-side of the 12” version. When we played it to Dave Barker, the boss of Glass Records, he remarked “Well, that’s…stupid.” We were unable to dispute this. Then somebody at the American record company put it on that introductory Bloody Nonsense compilation. And all hell kicked off. People baying for the Devil is my Friend! We couldn’t believe it! At the very distinguished Barrymore’s Theatre in Ottawa in the summer of 1988, some eight hundred Canadians all started chanting “The Devil is my Friend!” at the top of their voices, stamping their feet and clapping their hands, while four pasty white boys from London stood helpless and aghast on the stage. The building was shaking. All I could think was: “Oh, my goodness, if only Tipper Gore could walk in here right now…”	0:37:30 (Pop-up)
The Jazz Butcher	She's a Yo Yo "She's a Yo Yo" by "The Jazz Butcher"	Condition Blue	Sky Records	1991	CD	The bones of it were all laid down live; drums, bass and two guitars, all in a room together, listening on headphones while amps were all in separate rooms around the spooky farmhouse that was Raven Studios. None of the musicians had met up for a few months, so it all went down raw, a lot of the tunes on the first take. It was insanely exciting. Lead guitarist Alex Lee (Blue Aeroplanes, Strangelove, Suede) later remarked: “It was four desperate men in a room; each one so desperate that he completely failed to notice how desperate the others were.” And there’s the vibe that drives this record: right there.	0:39:46 (Pop-up)

The Jazz Butcher Conspiracy	Water	Cake City	Vinyl Japan	2001	CD	I had some very basic studio experience with local bands as the seventies turned into the eighties, but my first serious engagement with recording came when we made Bath of Bacon in south London in the summer of 1982. The studio always interested me, so I tried to pick up as much as I could from the various engineers and producers who worked with us. It wasn’t until we made Condition Blue in 1991 that I really took full control of an entire production, albeit with an awful lot of invaluable help from the engineer on that session, Tim Burrell.	0:54:05 (Pop-up)
The Jazz Butcher	Do The Bubonic Plague	Big Planet Scarey Planet	Creation Records	1989	CD	In the early eighties my friend Barry Hale would collect recordings from radio and other media, which he would then cut up and arrange on cassettes, a couple of which he gave to me. I caught the bug straight away and would fill both audio and video tapes with random broadcasting stuff. The Bubonic Plague tune (our attempt at a “dance craze” record!) was built around a genuine radio broadcast from America. The idea that bubonic plague was still “a thing” in Texas in 1988 was just so bizarre that it just had to be made into a record. It was mildly popular in Spain, for reasons that I cannot claim to understand. I’ve always enjoyed using found sounds and snatches of dialogue on our records. Big influences on that were Steinski and Mass Media’s single “The Motorcade Sped On” and the Justified Ancients of Mumu’s album “1987 – What the Fuck is Going On?”, the dawn, of course, of the KLF.	0:55:45 (Pop-up)
The Jazz Butcher	Just Like Betty Page	A Scandal in Bohemia	Fire Records	1984	CD	I was nine when I bought a 7” copy of See Emily Play. First LP I ever bought was Abbey Road by them Beatles. I was but a little kid. Beautiful hippy chick on the counter hands me the record, takes my money and coos: “It’s a beautiful album.” I probably turned an interesting sequence of colours.	0:55:47 (Pop-up)

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Listener comments!
	9:00pm Soulstealer007: Good evening!
	🥃 9:03pm Tom P: Hi Harry and everyone!
	🥃 9:03pm Harry Parmenter: hey. stream was off a long time and just went back up but The Whig Out got shortchanged bigtime. Damn.
	🥃 9:04pm Tom P: ↳ Harry Parmenter @9:03 Yes - enjoyed the last 7 minutes of it
	🥃 9:04pm medson: Hey Harry.
	🥃 9:04pm Harry Parmenter: ↳ Tom P @9:04 well welcome Tom.
	🥃 9:05pm Jessie: Good evening Harry and all!
	9:05pm Soulstealer007: Hi Jessie
	🥃 9:07pm Harry Parmenter: hey medson and jessie. medson: gotta catch your archive--my Friday was a mess.
	🥃 9:07pm Jessie: Hey Soustealer.
	🥃 9:08pm Will thee Sound Guy: Hi Harry and all!!!
	🥃 9:09pm Harry Parmenter: hey Will how ya doing
	🥃 9:14pm Will thee Sound Guy: I'm good, we just got home from a family thing... hope all is well with you!
	9:14pm Soulstealer007: Hmmmm....Warm Leatherette
	🥃 9:15pm Harry Parmenter: ↳ Soulstealer007 @9:14 parody
	9:17pm Soulstealer007: Copy
	9:30pm Soulstealer007: Harry, You should do that song next time you Karaoke
	9:31pm Zodiac: Hey Harry, Sorry I'm late but here as always!
	9:32pm Zodiac: I'm digging this!
	🥃 9:32pm Harry Parmenter: ↳ Zodiac @9:31 Zodiac! Welcome. I'm glad somebody is besides me!
	🥃 9:33pm medson: Sweet sounds Harry.
	🥃 9:33pm Harry Parmenter: ↳ Zodiac @9:32 watching SFvD?
	🥃 9:33pm Harry Parmenter: ↳ medson @9:33 love that skeleton!
	🥃 9:34pm medson: ↳ Harry Parmenter @9:33 Thanks. Hellraiser
	9:34pm Soulstealer007: Great song!
	9:34pm Zodiac: ↳ Harry Parmenter @9:33 Just turned it on. did enjoy Steelers -Ravens earlier
	🥃 9:34pm Harry Parmenter: ↳ medson @9:34 excellent.
	🥃 9:35pm Harry Parmenter: ↳ Zodiac @9:34 very good song. cat wrote this song knew he was dying soon.
	9:40pm Soulstealer007: Hilarious
	9:48pm Soulstealer007: Another great Butcher song
	🥃 9:50pm Harry Parmenter: ↳ Soulstealer007 @9:48 genius.
	🥃 9:52pm medson: Nice job honoring Mr. Fish Harry
	🥃 9:52pm Harry Parmenter: ↳ medson @9:52 thx medson. i think most people never even heard of him but i discovered years ago--via The Devil Is My Friend--wonderfl songwriter.
	🥃 9:56pm medson: Great show Harry
	9:58pm Soulstealer007: Thank you Harry. Very entertaining.
	🥃 9:58pm Harry Parmenter: ↳ medson @9:56 thx medson. STAY TUNED ALL FOR RAMA LAMA DING DONG. sweet sounds of doo-wop from the incredible mr. medson. cheers all.
	🥃 9:58pm Harry Parmenter: ↳ Soulstealer007 @9:58 thx man. thx everyone.
	🥃 9:59pm Will thee Sound Guy: Thank you Harry!!!

The Funhouse with Harry Parmenter: Playlist from October 8, 2023

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