— Issue 98 —

First of all, apologies to all of you who have experienced delays getting the last two month’s boxes, and thank you all for your patience, support and kind words.

As you have probably seen from my emails, we have had an absolute nightmare with our warehouse shutting down and going out of business. What made things a lot worse is that it looked like everything was fine, and you were all getting sent stuff from April onwards. When we finally confronted the warehouse management and realised what was going on, we did move fast, and we now have a brand new (and hopefully improved!) warehouse and supplier for logistics.

I’ll be sending more emails as we progress to keep you up to date, but here’s the belated May issue for you. We hope it is worth the wait!

Your album this month is a somewhat obscure slice of ‘80s loveliness. The Jazz Butcher was the alias of British singer/songwriter Pat Fish (Patrick Huntrods), as well as the name of his band. Characterised by clever lyrics, and a sound very evocative of the early ‘80s, this band should have been bigger than it was. Pat Fish’s witty observational lyricism being complimented by Max Eider’s dazzling guitar playing with their joyous “sing around the campfire” melodies which could always leave a smile on one’s face. This, their first accomplished album, “A Scandal In Bohemia” will deliver that to you on a golden plate.

The 12”` for this month is the “Warm EP” by Speakman Sound. It contains a lovely soup of soothing psychedelic dance, made with help from singer Frankie Forman. Warm is the follow-up to the Glastonbury-based production duo’s debut single In Flight. This release saw some success when it was released in 2017, with some plays on 6music, and a slot on the BBC Introducing stage at Glastonbury (where the band are based), but we haven’t heard anything from them since. We’re hoping they see this and release something new soon!