Tapete England Screaming

"That album has always been a regret to me because I think these songs mark my coming of age as a songwriter, but not, alas, as a recording artist." In 1985 Eric Goulden released an album entitled A Roomful Of Monkeys on the Go! Discs label under the name Captains Of Industry. It was a disaster - most people didn't like it - where it wasn't roundly ignored it was critically slated. Forty years later he decided to use these songs, written in the Medway Towns between 1982 and 84, as the basis for a new album: England Screaming "I felt liberated: my songwriting took on an entirely different tone. There was no one telling me what I should be writing any more, so I wrote about what was around me, stuff I knew about - drugs, home-ownership, bankruptcy and bridal wear; being from somewhere, keeping up appearances, delusion, failure..." On the new recordings Eric played most of the instruments himself. Sam Shepherd played the drums, Amy Rigby and Marc Valentine sang backing vocals, and contributed piano along with Eric's art school friend, performance artist Graham (Graham) Beck. England Screaming is a sonically savage world apart from the insipid, half-arsed (Eric's words) original album. He has succeeded in marrying a young and unrealised vision to the wisdom and experience of his older years, incidentally posing the question: how far have we actually come as a society? As Wreckless Eric he needs little introduction - he wrote and recorded the classic Whole Wide World and had a hit with it back in 1977. Since then it's been a hit for countless other artists including The Monkees, Cage The Elephant and Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day. Eric's version featured in the 2022 Expedia / Superbowl / Ewan MacGregor travel ad, and the Cage The Elephant version is the new theme tune for the podcast Smartless. As Eric Goulden it's a little more complicated - a musician, artist, writer, recording engineer and producer, he didn't like either the music business, the mechanics of fame, or the name he'd been given to hide behind, so he crawled out of the spotlight and disappeared into the underground. He went on to release twenty something albums in forty something years under various names - The Len Bright Combo, Le Beat Group Electrique, The Donovan Of Trash, The Hitsville House Band, and with his wife as one half of Wreckless Eric & Amy Rigby, finally realising he was stuck with the name Wreckless Eric. Eric's most recent album - 2023's 'Leisureland' has all been widely praised as his best work. His albums encapsulate pop, bubblegum, garage trash and psychedelia - lyrical and sonic journeys, pop explosions, epic voyages, Polaroid snapshots... 'Goulden has enjoyed a genuinely extraordinary career. He is, one assumes, the only person in rock history to have written a Cliff Richard song, been part of the riotous 80s Medway garage rock scene that spawned Billy Childish, and enjoyed a doomed spell working as an artistic consultant to the French ministry of culture, He has also written a vast succession of wonderful songs...' (The Guardian) '...imbued with melancholy, interlaced with occasional interjections of hope, and soundtracked by Joe Meek-style synthesised backing tracks and instrumentals,' (Shindig) '... a psychedelic ambience that resurrects the spirit of Syd Barrett and Steve Marriott' (The Wire)