Blog: The Legend of Voon

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I went out for a BEER with my good friend and former partner in VOON, Mr Simon Wilkinson, on Monday night. I hadn't seen him for AGES, since well before my birthday in fact, and thus he presented me with a GIFT. It was a BOX SET of the COMPLETE Voon Recordings!

Simon being Simon this was LOVINGLY packaged - this is the same person who was FORBIDDEN from writing setlists, as he used to use a RULER to underline the date at the top of the page, and thus we would be sitting back at home having a cup of tea after the gig had finished by the time he'd managed to write out three setlists. Each tape (for lo! it was a really long time ago that we made these recordings) is beautifully reproduced as a CD, with original artwork REMASTERED and a picture of the original cassette tape itself behind the CD. It all came in a BOX, with a booklet reprinting The Curse Of Voon (the book I wrote about our EXPLOITS, available to read online at www.mjhibbett.net/voonc.html) and Simon's own discussion about the Voon Reunion gigs. It was BEAUTIFUL.

Best of all, he included a single CD containing MP3s of the WHOLE 4 HOURS of Sonic Noise Terror. THUS I have been able to sit at work listening to VOON. It's been BRILLIANT. I always go on and on about a tape that Dr Neil Brown and I recorded in around 1991-92 called "Modern and Vivid" as being the best thing we did, and listening to it again now I was most chuffed and SURPRISED to find that, yes, it actually is BLOODY GRATE. I mean, don't get me started on how ACE it is and Before It's Time, we'll be here all day, but it only INCREASED my intention to one day re-release this on an unsuspecting world. It was all done on an old four-track, and nowadays the mind BOGGLES trying to work out how we got SO MUCH recorded onto it. It's an hour long, has 23 songs, and it took us about a month to do. YOINKS!

The most HUMBLING thing about listening to it now is realising that, actually, Neil's songs were always the best. My ones are all right, but they do tend to try a bit too hard - it was only when we came back to do the Voon Reunion that i RELAXED and wrote my BEST Voon songs (like "Bands From London", for instance) whilst Neil's stuff was just BRILLIANT throughout.

It's a terrible shame he doesn't really make much music anymore, and when he does he rarely sits down and writes the kind of beautiful, moving, catchy, imaginative and just bloody FUNNY songs he wrote in Voon. That's the main reason I got him to play at the AAS 5th Birthday, just to show people what GRATE songs he writes - "Dog On The Horizon" may not be up there with the likes of "My Nan's Groin", "Never Fall In Love With Your Dentist", "Dexion Head", "I Like It Outdoors", "Surfing Monsters" or the immortal "Domestic Bliss", but it was a timely reminder that one man with a head BURSTING full of IDEAS can STRIKE DOWN any other musical form that stands against it.

I really am going to have to find the space to put some of these songs up, aren't i?

posted 21/8/2003 by MJ Hibbett

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