HW: OFF: Tubilah Dog

[Keith Henderson]

Hi Folks...

Boy, it's quiet here.  Hope everyone is having a nice 2012 thus far.

I've been continually working on completing my digital music archive, now going on two years' plus work.  I'm on Tubilah Dog right now, and was wondering if anyone knew if there were any 'archival' recordings that were ever going to see the light of day in any semi-official way.  I thought I remembered hearing that Jerry and Alf had some mat'l to release one day.

I see now that Steve Mills, who apparently "owns" the name (hence Jerry and Alf once calling themselves Paradogs instead...now EarthLab I guess it is?) has been recording new mat'l under the Tubilah Dog name in recent years.  In fact, he did a complete album called Dark Erotika in 2006 with a female singer named Bel Adair, which I found over at SoundClick.com .  And then he's also got an album's worth of even newer mat'l (ca. 2009) that was to be an album release called "My Mum's Moroccan," bits and pieces of which are all over everywhere if you search long enough, SoundClick, SoundCloud, YouTube, MySpace.

I also snagged a bootleg tape of the Hop Pickers Ball show in 1987 at the MutantSounds website, which is dodgy audio (and has a very peculiar L/R imbalance which is difficult to deal with even given my no-longer-novice Audacity abilities).  Also, Track 10 (City Of Tiny Lights) is missing from the archived file there, which is a bummer 'cause this track is unknown to me (is it a Frank Zappa cover?  should be Lites then, right?).  That show has three Hawkwind covers on it, which should make it interesting to some folks here, natch.

Also in my possession is a CDR called "Rock In A Weird Place" which I gather dates from the late 1980s, but no idea whether it was official, semi-official or what.  Probably a 45-minute cassette release  at some point, traded/sold at Free Festies or something...I hear tape hiss on this digital transfer.  I've now cleaned it up and EQ'd some audio, repaired major dropouts and noises, and it sounds really nice.  Mixture of studio and live recordings from the Richards/Bannister twin gtr era, with I think Dave Brock and Harvey Bainbridge guesting on one live track, Step Down.  (A different audio mix/recording of the same performance exists also at SoundClick, I think it was.  The RIAWP audio/mix sounds better IMHO.)  Anyway, I can't remember where the hell I got this CDR from, and I have NO information of any kind about it.  Does anybody know more?  For the moment, I'm calling the tracks as follows (wild guesses really - Mills' vocals are hard to understand):

Tubilah Dog - Rock In A Weird Place (ca. 1987-88?)

1. Other Side Of The Sky (?)  (4:30) - original song, not a Gong cover!
2. Won't You Feel My Love? (?) (4:14)
3. Imhotep (7:35)
4. Timely News (?) (Live) (6:00)  or Tie Me Shoes (?)  :)
5. Why Keep On Searchin' (?) (5:39)
6. Step Down (Live) (9:46)
7. Damnation Alley (Live) (8:24)

The version of Damnation Alley here is really good, and I was going to throw is up on FileFactory for folks to download if they wanted, but that site is not allowing free uploads at the moment, so I will do it if there's interest and it becomes available again to me eventually.

Other than these releases, both official and not, all I know of TDog are the two T.A.T. tracks and the post-Jerry In Search of Plaice CD/LP, which was hit-and-miss.  Really, there should be more.  Voiceprint should be putting out archive stuff, or Rock in a Weird Place at least.

Steve Mills was also in a NWOBHM band called Trespass, which had a track on one of those Metal for Muthas compilations of bands on the NEAT label or whatever.  Not sure what else he's done over the years, but I have always liked his singing and I think Tubilah Dog has been an underrated band.

That's all for now.

Keith H.

ObDownloadTrack: Levitation - I Believe, from Meanwhile Gardens (Autumn),
never released officially as Terry Bickers left the band and Meanwhile Gardens was re-recorded with new vocalist.  Anyone know where the rest of the Meanwhile Gardens (Summer) & (Autumn) series of demos exist?  Some of them, including this track, are on MySpace, but not all of it.  Dark Star's Zurich material (the unreleased second album after 20 20 Sound) is also worth hearing....that whole thing is on SoundCloud.