THE SCENE IS NOW

Dunno how, but this interview w/ one of my all-time fave bands, The Scene Is Now, appeared on the Perfect Sound Forever web site back in '01 and I missed it. I wrote about the band way back in the early days of this blog (actually, it was the second entry), so you can browse that for any details you may care to know. Their three albums from the 1980s - Burn All Your Records (1984), Total Jive (1986) and Tonight We Ride (1988) - rank high on my list as some of the best and most stupidly overlooked albums of that decade. Whilst their music slickened up considerably as they went along, by no means was it diminished in power (in fact, Tonight We Ride is my fave). I'll steal what others say about them and hail them as NYC's finest ever No Wave jug band, as, whilst their approach borrows heavily from that quick-as-a-flash movement which beheld hipsters by storm throughout the late '70s/early '80s, as well as strong elements of Eno, Beefheart, Minutemen, 'Ubu and The Feelies, there's a rootsy approach to their music, as well as a dash of Tin Pan Alley, which makes them utterly unique. Not often do you find a band which can bring to mind Dub Housing-era 'Ubu, Fugs, Bob Wills and Hoagy Carmichael in the space of a minute. The band has a Myspace site here and are still recording, releasing albums (which I must get my hands on) and playing around the traps on occasion, so if you happen to be in the NYC area...