Freur - Alabaster White Thing

[TheBang]

Posted by Yannick to rtsr-trade on Jan 21, 2003:

hey all.

i've sent a buch of old recording for all of you to checkout.
(uploaded to geoff ftp)


Freur Demo Tape - 1981? all kind of strange stuff
Freur Transmutation Soundtrack
Freur Unreleased Track
Underworld Mk1 Unreleased track + Demo
Mk1 Radio Session


so if you like to old stuff check it out.

Alabaster White Thing, and Freur demo tape is worth checking even if
you don't like the old stuff


happy good day

And on Jan. 24, 2003:

OK ... couple of different stories here

- Freur demo tape - believe it or not - turned up in a used record
store in the UK around 1989-90. Tape was in a box with a gold foil
hand written cover (and yes it is karls handwriting). A guy named
Trevor Andrews who was one of the guys on my Underworld mailing list
(pre-Internet) found it ... having recognised the name of some of
the tracks ... and paid about 3 quid for it if i remember correctly!

- All the other stuff came from Rick and/or Karl. They gave me a few
unreleased items on tape, probably to stop hearing me beg so much.
Apparantly Alabaster is just some experimental track they were
playing around with (!) and they supposedly recorded the phone bits
late at night / early morning where they phoned up one of their
management people and kept quiet ... just kept taping ... so if you
get a phone call in the middle of the night but its quiet on the
other end ... be polite!
* Transmutations stuff speaks for itself ... some songs from the
film soundtrack (called "Underworld" in the UK) that Freur composed
and recorded.
* Gypsy Hairdo was some track they did for a convention (something
to do with hair i think)
* Fever (dance mix) an unreleased mix for a song that never made it
to be released as a single from the CTW album
* Richard Skinner session the songs from the Radio One set
* Promised Land the unedited version of a song from the Wild Orchid
sountrack. Lyrics of this are on the CTW album inner sleeve.

[crank]

so THAT is the definitive word

[joethelion]

damn. I totally forgot about some of those other tracks...

[TheBang]

So, that second post came not from Yannick, but from some guy named Tony who went by the handle "freursoldhaircrimpers." I don't know who that is.

[34958hq439-qjw9v5jq298v5j]

Okay, that basically confirms it for me..thanks for digging that up. I wonder if they ever did any other experimental stuff like that. I remember the track Gypsy Hairdo. I had just assumed that it was mislabelled since it doesn't sound anything at all like UW at any point. It's not even in the same genre. Very strange.

Originally Posted by crank

Yeah, i saw that Russian listing too. Then i promptly googled Fleur. NO hits. who knows. Though I agree- it sounds a bit Rickish.

Actually there is a group called that from somewhere in Europe. You can download their music on the Russian mp3 sites and I saw one that listed Alabaster White Thing under "more songs by this artist". I wonder how they got their hands on it.

[Mike]

Originally Posted by TheBang

So, that second post came not from Yannick, but from some guy named Tony who went by the handle "freursoldhaircrimpers." I don't know who that is.

Tony is an old time rtsr-er, and all round nice guy, who lives in Toronto (but im pretty sure he is from the UK) - he injected the group with tonnes of Freur and Mk1 stuff...

Another old time fan gave me a snippet of a telephone conversation between him and Karl back in 1989/1990 ish - i will have to dig that out at some point.

[34958hq439-qjw9v5jq298v5j]

Ha, I just heard on the demo tape their old single "I Just Can't Stand Cars". It's such a stupid song and I'm really starting to love it.

[nelfun5]

Could someone please reupload the song somewhere (previous link is broken), I'm dying to hear it!

[dubman]

numberonesuperwhat

lol people doubting AWT, what next

[tonyb]

Originally Posted by Mike

Tony is an old time rtsr-er, and all round nice guy, who lives in Toronto (but im pretty sure he is from the UK) - he injected the group with tonnes of Freur and Mk1 stuff...

That would be me ) How are you all doing?

This thread SO caught my eye ...

Yes, much of the Freur and UW Mk1 stuff came from my collection. I was hunting high and low in the pre-Internet days for material. I ran wanted adds in Record Collector for months, and (briefly) had a small newsletter I put out for the band, based on info they would give me, including b+w photocopies of any printed material I was able to accumulate. Rick and Karl would pass my mailing address onto people who wanted to stay in touch. We are talking around 1989-1992 here. Along the way I made a few key contacts who were avid collectors and we'd trade cassette tapes ... think "stone age RTSR"! Sooo much easier in the digital age.I moved from the UK to Toronto in the early nineties - just after DubNo, and promptly lost touch with R+K before they went stratospheric (though I did catch up with them at a Torornto gig about 10 years later).

AWT was included on the same tape that included the Transmutations soundtrack stuff, which includes songs I had heard them play live as Freur (Theme From The Underworld for example, which is also a video clip sitting on VHS somewhere), so I am positive its them.

Regards to all
Tony