Difficult Anecdote | The Crispin Mallweather Group

About this album

For the first time, the recently discovered masters for this long thought vanished 'music concrète classic' from 1968 are finally presented here to the general public. Many thanks to Sherwin Galper for his assistance and generous spirit in bringing this amazing artefact to light.

Some contextual information from ‘Places to See, People to Be: The Various Truths of Crispin Mallweather’ by Constance Harper:

"I came across this guy in the downtown chitlins bar performin' some real 'out there' stuff. He was throwin' raw shrimp at himself whilst recitin' some amazin' poetry about ritual sacrifice. He was callin' himself Papa Remus at the time. The crowd went crazy as batshit for it. I knew then that I had to sign him up."

In Derek Quix, Mallweather finally found a creative partner who was willing to put up with his unpredictable behaviour and numerous idiosyncrasies, but more importantly, genuinely believed in the projects Mallweather wanted to bring to life, and had the connections and know-how to make it happen.

"Yeah, sure, he was nuts," Quix confessed in an interview shortly before his death. "But by that point, so was I. We hit it off straight away an' spent a month or so just hangin' out on Bourbon Street, listenin', talkin', drinkin' I never got a sense of where he came from [originally] but at one point he told me his parents was immigrants too an' I called bullshit on that. I told him he didn't have to make shit up an' he just smiled an' laughed an' said somethin’ like ‘what else am I supposed to do?’, like it was in his blood. So I told him just to be himself an’ he laughed at that too, but I think he got the message 'cos that's when he told me his real name was Mallweather, an' if he got to make one record in his life, that was the name he wanted on it. He still preferred me introducin' him to people as Lord Remus' or 'John Jeremiah Joshua Johnson' or some such, though."

The album - provisionally titled Down On The Sky - was to be a mixture of spoken word, automatic poetry, improvised jazz and freeform electronics, a mélange that might also veer off into ethnic rhythms or tonal destruction at a moment's notice. "I didn't know what Crispin had or hadn't heard or was aware of, in terms of other music. There was a lot of weird stuff comin' outta San Francisco at the time, tonal stuff... it was a bit fuckin' highbrow for me sometimes, a bit theoretical. Crispin was never into that stuff as far as I knew but he was tuned into some weird frequencies, so who knows? Some of what he talked about made it sound like he knew what those people was up to, except when Crispin talked about it to me, it was things like alien birdsong an' rivers of light, but somehow it all made sense."

The album was to feature a host of musicians including Per Wainwright, Mitchell 'Stands' Wilson, Ernie Pelman, Carver Monroe and Milton Hague, with Quix as credited as executive producer and everyone else conducted by Mallweather. None of these musicians actually existed; they were all Mallweather, finally enacting his multi-persona performance piece, channelling a few of his inner demons by giving them a name and a purpose: He never pretended to be any of those people in the studio, but they was definitely a part of him. The use of an outwardly normal sounding band name - The Crispin Mallweather Group - would provide the final inside joke. On the one hand, perhaps to lure in the unwitting listener, it gave the impression of a jazz ensemble, while at the same time quietly acknowledging that this was a group of one man.

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