Jacko’s Birthday with Special Guests
Sunday 11th May 2025
The New Adelphi Club
Free Entry
Doors 8pm

I’m not known as the world’s greatest cover fan. For years I have said only do a cover if yours is better than the original or a complete reinterpretation. I found myself imagining fantasy gigs that could never happen. Think Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie & Hank Williams or Joan Baez, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, the Pet Shop Boys & Bronski Beat or Donna Summer, or the Sex Pistols, the Clash & the Dead Kennedys or Crass!

My own fantasy gigs were a little more modest but resonated clearly within the history of the Adelphi.
What fun we had. So my fantasy billing for my birthday goes like this……

THE NEUTRAL MILK HOTEL (Athens, GA)
performed by Ollie Smith & Guests.

KIMYA DAWSON (The Juno Soundtrack) (New York)
Matt Edible and Nick Broughton

BUCKFAST TRAMP (Hull)

What’s it all about?
In 2014 the great Andy Brown was able to get tickets for the Neutral Milk Hotel show at the Albert Hall in Manchester WOW! The UK shows had sold out instantly! So we went & were treated to what, in terms of performance & audience response, was one of the greatest 4 or 5 shows I have ever witnessed.

It seemed as though everyone knew every word of every song but none of that really matters!

The classic album “In The Aeroplane Over the Sea” was released in 1996 having been preceded by “On Avery Island” in 1994. Avery was a more than capable precursor to what was to come. The Aeroplane would become my favourite album for at least 10 years & is still very much up there. At the Albert Hall, as we got up to leave, there was a 16/18 Yr old couple looking shell-shocked. I asked the girl “was that OK?” and the floodgates opened big style. She had obviously listened to the album in the only correct ways which are alone or with an arm around somebody you love, but none of that really matters!

Athens, in the early 90’s was probably best known as the home of the mighty REM. By around 1994 REM were probably aware of the emerging Elephant 6 collective in the city. It took the form of a community of incredibly talented, mainly young musicians. I imagine a large house in which magic happened. There was a label, a brilliant website along with bands such as NMH, The Olivia Tremor Control & others. I imagine an interest in junk stores & flea markets where bizarre instruments would be picked up restored & learnt. I imagine a bunch of college dropouts with a few older people all devoted to their music. There would be girls and drugs & high jinx, but music ruled. The website was amazing & would play a critical role in the programming at the Adelphi in the years to come.

America at the time was at its year zero with nowhere to play for artists in music. To this day it is still common for DIY artists to play house parties in America but the fightback started with Elephant 6. It was there before all the blogs like KEXP, Tiny Office, Hey Ya etc. It was there before all the great labels like Sub Pop, JagJaguar etc made their adjustments. It was there before the Arts venues where you could never see a commodified band. The E6 website provided a portal through which you could access all the displaced musical artists/ bands across the whole of America. The bands & artists too good to be successful in an industry that rewards mediocrity. The artists that insisted on going their own way, rather than being told what to do by accountants & marketing idiots. This, in America, was the fightback of music itself as an art form. E6 was there at the beginning & that really mattered. The importance of E6 is amply illustrated today by the fact it is extremely difficult to research online. This represents the continuing investment by the industry in removing all reference to their enemies from public view. Any negative comments will naturally come to the top of any search.

So the Neutral Milk Hotel released an album that remains a beautiful aching classic. It features ambiguous lyrics that nevertheless resonated profoundly with audiences around the world. The instrumental sound is also unique with inevitable guitars jostling for attention  with musical saws & god knows what else.

NMH were also founding members of the Elephant 6 collective. As such they were very much at the vanguard of the American DIY fightback against commodification & the destruction of music as an art form. The fact that corporations still find a need to obliterate that proud legacy should be a lesson to us all. As the UK faces its own year zero are we really prepared?

It was through the E6 portal that I stumbled across the Olive Juice label in New York which was piloted by the mighty Major Matt Mason USA. This was to have a massive & beneficial effect on Adelphi programming which continues to this day & has also contributed 2 extremely articulate & incredibly talented patrons to the CIC.

Ollie Smith has been great in accepting this pretty demanding remit. He has the voice & a great instrument & perhaps some accompaniment. For his sins he was discovered performing the Aeroplane title track extremely well. On enquiring it transpired he knew & loved much of the NMH material so thanks for this Ollie!

So Olive Juice was a punchy, smaller (New York only) version of E6. Matt seemed to have a bit of a business head on him & had helped to advance the thriving New York underground to the wider world. Anti Folk revolved around the legendary open mic at the Sidewalk which was curated by the mighty Lach. In the UK Rough Trade were happy to release the 2 great ‘Antifolk’ compilations creating a substantial following over here & in Europe. By now every city across the USA was evolving its own fightback. From New Orleans to Chicago, from Austin to Seattle, from New York to Nevada City we got them all. Our first New York booking was of what turned out to be a 9 piece Dufus fronted by the charismatic Seth Faergolzia. Dufus were always a genuinely great live band. This band included Major Matt himself, 3 members of the Mouldy Peaches including the magnificent Kimya Dawson who performed a magical support set. In the following years she would return on 4 or 5 occasions to share her magic & words of humanity. Watching Kimya always gave you the feeling of being in the company of a beautiful,  good & kind spirit. The music soothed your soul. Nobody has defused more panic attacks than Kimya, who we still hear from on occasion. Kimya would of course go on to win a Grammy for her Juno Soundtrack which was picked up by Louis & Victoria years later. Kimya also has the distinction of having referenced the pleasures of taking a poo in the Adelphi loo in her ‘These Old Haunts.’ The Soundtrack itself is not all New York. It even (from memory) includes a Kinks song but is still very much antifolk in spirit. I find it great that Victoria & Louis discovered all of this years after all the Adelphi shenanigans!

On arrival in Hull Dufus got lost & were found wandering around near the BBC studios. Turning up for work Alan Raw found this bunch of freaks & (as you would) invited them in for a BBC session. Over the course of the 3 track recording, the 9 piece effortlessly recreated the sound of a party! How many bands would even think of that? The Adelphi show came later in the day & would be legendary!

On getting back to New York the Adelphi show seemed to have been a highlight & word got around. Kimya would be back in no time, as was Major Matt & Toby (MP) who had also performed with Dufus. Seth & his amazing band also came back on numerous occasions. Today he tours Europe regularly but can’t afford to come here aside from the occasional London show. DIY relies on word of mouth with no media coverage & is hard! Increasingly hard! In the wake of Dufus we were suddenly deluged with DIY artists from what is probably the world’s most creative & dynamic city. In the early days we had missed out on both the Moldy Peaches & the Dresden Dolls, both of whom went on to success & International distribution. I also regret missing out on the likes of Daniel Johnson & the magical Marissa Nadler who still does OK! (check out her session on Vincent Moon’s La Blogoteque recorded by the lake in Central Park. Magic!) Despite those regrets we did pretty well in nailing the rest.

So post Dufus the floodgates opened in no time.  Dufus, Kimya, Major Matt & Toby Goodshank were all back pretty quickly, each time bringing new blood from within the Sidewalk community as support or accompaniment. The magnificent Jeffrey Lewis was very quickly on the radar & playing regularly. Ed Hamell came through a different channel as I head hunted him with the intention of leaving the great mind intact. The avalanche continued with the likes of Diane Cluck, Curtis Eller, Thomas Truax, Adam Green, Peter Stampfel, Shilpa Ray, Ishi, the late, great Jack Terricloth & his World Inferno Friendship Society & many more. That’s the story of the Adelphi & New York for whom the Queen of Anti Folk, Kimya Dawson is ambassador for my birthday. I don’t think any of her contemporaries would have issues with that. Victoria & Louis are great & will do their damndest. They, like Ollie are representing a kind of DIY underground in Hull’s cover scene, keeping precious music alive.

And of course the Adelphi relationship with the USA went a long way beyond New York. Pretty early on we had seen genius from the Colourblind James Experience who played 3 times. A little later we had the late & great Vic Chestnut probably 3 times. At the time he was being championed by Michael Stipe which was another Athens connection, & whose final work was released by the awesome Constellation Records in Montreal, Canada ^ recorded at the Hotel 2 Tango studio, which is responsible for some of the great modern recordings alongside the likes of Kramer & the late great

Steve Albini. We did a few Constellation bands. We did outsider folk, we did punk. In folk Townes Van Zandt sold out the Adelphi in the same week Oasis played. He had been described by Bob Dylan as the greatest living songwriter & died on New Years eve 1999. 50 years after the death of his hero Hank Williams. We also did heavyweights such as the recently deceased Michael Hurley & Peter Rowan. In punk we did a few bands on Jello Biafra’s Alternative Tentacles label. We also did the Battalion Of Saints from California. Their history included the deaths of 5 band members due to heroin overdoses. They were not fun to work with. On a more positive note America gave us 2 of the most talented artists to have ever played the Adelphi. When asked that question people, with total justification, come up with names like Radiohead, Jarvis, Paul Heaton & Lee Mavers. America gave us Carla Bozulich & Joshua T Pearson of the Lift Too Experience who are right up there in my opinion.

For Carla try the 11 minute Voyager or some of her major label stuff with the Geraldine Fibbers (Dragon Lady) or perhaps her stunning pilfered interpretation of The Red Headed Stranger which impressed Willie Nelson so much he needed to be a part of it.

In the year 2000 Josh Pearson’s Lift Too Experience released the classic Texas Jerusalem Crossroads. The release was a couple of weeks before the twin towers came down. The album felt like a prophesy. The remastered version is better. When Josh first played the Adelphi he supported The Archie Bronson Outfit. The big bearded Texan performed for over an hour with tears streaming down his face. It was his first live performance in over 5 years. None of us will ever see anything like that again. Josh would return to the Adelphi around 5 times & we loved him very much. His debut solo album was unreleased other than its use as a tour CD. It was recorded at the Adelphi by Jim and was titled “To Hull and Back.” Much of the material is unfinished and comprises Josh chucking shapes & nuances around in the process of composition. Lyrically it is stunning & with his beautiful voice & magnificent (and influential ) guitar playing I love the album so much. It’s easy enough to find online though you may need to stream the individual tracks & tweak the eq.

So in the mid 90’s the doors of the Adelphi flew open to DIY (the real artists in music) acts, not just from New York, but increasingly from all the major cities of America & Canada and the whole world. For me, from a life of dealing with agents trying to trip you up, I was dealing with the artists direct which was by far preferable. It was a thing of building trust which we did.

The other thing that happened in the mid 90’s was the refurbishment of the club in 1994/5. This work was undertaken by the great award winning designer Chris Dimmack who put in a full year’s graft without asking for a penny in return though there were substantial expenses which we somehow managed. Chris, to this day, still does the equivalent of a full time job & when people say there would be no Adelphi without him they are correct. Same can be said of my wonderful family who over the years contributed over the years. For my part all I did was make the investment, take the risk, work 20hrs per day 7 days a week with no holidays while loving pretty much every minute, & create the template for something that has resonated so positively in the lives of so many people both on & off the stage.

The refurbishment was completed in 1995. Yosser the dog was gone & it had been hard work for everybody but the place was better. Higher standards in curation were accompanied by the arrival of great new club nights such as Payback & Easy Skankin. The front pool room had also been separated from the concert room to become the hub of the Adelphi community both inside & outside of licensing hours. I guess the out of hours stuff sounds a bit piss up but it was never really like that. To me it was my board meeting equivalent where I could bounce ideas off people to inform decisions. I always found discussions over a beer to be far more productive than those in unheated smoke filled rooms, but that’s me I guess.

So as we approached the millennium my vision of the Adelphi was feeling great & pretty much complete. This was the start of our heyday which has continued to this day. With Chris & other talented people aboard it felt like a well oiled machine, capable of reinventing itself almost on a daily basis which venues have to do. It was in the mid 90’s that Mr Sarel appeared on the scene. Always helpful, always fun.

At this point I would like to thank Victoria & Louis (The Juno Soundtrack) for agreeing to perform at my strange event. Having seen them they will represent the Queen of Antifolk: the black moral activist & hormonal freak Kimya to a high standard.

In 1999 the amazing band Fonda 500 appeared on the Hull scene…

The genuinely great Hull band Fonda 500 will make up the final part of my fantasy billing. I won’t be going on about them as I am well known for my views about the band. I genuinely believe them to have been one of the great acts of the past 25 years when at their best! (& that’s not just in Hull!) Just buy their stuff if you doubt that. Had a great time working with them too around the millennium. Not playing live tonight but Nick & Matt from Fonda will be playing their stuff in between live acts for my birthday. Expect everything from nursery rhymes to huge, chugging bastards & you might even fancy a shimmy as no band got more people dancing than Fonda. Thankyou Nick & Matt for joining the fun.

There will be a final live band with TPR house band Buckfast Tramp acting as gatecrashers. Every party needs a gatecrasher & these guys are everybody’s mates & fit the bill perfectly. I’ve been told to expect some New York stuff, some period protest & even the yodelly high pitched Focus song apparently. Seems Bob has had a nifty castratio in his locker which he has kept under wraps.

I think that’s a great billing & with free admission (donations to performers are welcome) I hope you can make it on Sunday May 11th.
There is nobody not invited & please share as you like.

Thanks PJX