Well, my Quit Dreaming box set is in the mail. Hoping tariff stupidity doesn’t inflate the price too much, or delay it unnecessarily. Usually Cherry Red stuff reaches me on the release date.

I was lucky enough to attend a conference in the US not long after I discovered Bill’s music in the late 80s, and basically bought every Enigma CD I could find in record stores while I was there. One of these was the rather nice compilation CD The Strangest Things - in retrospect I think Enigma was a great match for Bill, it’s a shame the label imploded so quickly (anyone else hoping that Signature Tunes turns up on Bandcamp someday? I’ve still got my CD, but the Enigma release left out the Yukihiro Takahashi track, presumably for US rights reasons). The “title track” of the compilation is “The Strangest Things, The Strangest Times”, which remained a real rarity until Transcorder came out. It’s got a little bit of found voice that says “He does the strangest things at the strangest times” which has nagged at me since 1989 - does anybody know where it’s from? My initial guess was that it was from a bizarre and rather surreal little animated series called “Murun Buchstansangur” that Channel 4 used as filler if there was a gap in programming in their early years. However, today I finally remembered the name of the series and found some episodes of it on YouTube, and I’m no longer as sure as I was. The voice might be the same as the narrator of said animation, but I’m far from certain. Anyone identified it? I’ve waited 35 years without knowing, so it’s not what I’d call urgent.

Not sure if it’s been mentioned before, but the most recent album by Port Sulphur, Meta Guru, includes a rather good track called “Bill Nelson” that is very much in the style of, well, you know. For those needing background, Port Sulphur is a Scottish audio collective based around Douglas MacIntyre and his Creeping Bent organization. There’s no fixed lineup, although Douglas himself is a common factor, but there’s a lot of overlap with the Hungry Beat Band, which is a similarly nebulous lineup focused around people from the Scottish post-punk scene as documented in the rather good book, “Hungry Beat”. So on any given track by the band you might find a couple of members of Orange Juice, or Josef K, or Fire Engines, or Vic Godard, or Gareth Sager. Not sure of the lineup on “Bill Nelson” (although the electric violin is, I think, Paul Research from Scars) but “Hungry Beat” does establish that there was some influence, with Davy Henderson mentioning that before the 1977 Clash show in Edinburgh that was Year Zero for Scottish post-punk, he’d been more of a musical omnivore, specifically mentioning that he’d seen Be-Bop Deluxe in Edinburgh. For those who want to check the track out, the album seems to be on all the usual streaming services. The A-side is mainly instrumental, the B-side has vocals, and it’s generally rather good. A lot of the material previously appeared on the Compendium compilation, but the versions here tend to be more polished - the only track where I prefer the original being “Fast Boys And Factory Girls”.