What A F@&£Ing Beast: Mike “The Fox” Boorman’S Cunning Selection #1

Those of you that know about the inner-workings at R$N Towers will recognise the name Mike Boorman as being the man behind the infamous fox. In a brand new series, Mr Boorman uses his expert cunning skills to pluck an aural beauty out of the air and bring it into your ears. This month's beast comes courtesy of Greg Wilson and his Super Weird Substance project;

I absolutely love Super Weird Substance. I first came to hear about the concept last year when Greg Wilson put out the sublime DJ mix, ‘Blind Arcade Meets Super Weird Substance In The Morphogenetic Field’; a fusion of Balearic and baggy-Madchester Hip Hop, with the vocals/rap of former Black Grape front-man, Kermit Leveridge, stitching it all together.

That mix was a sneak preview of Greg Wilson’s new label, Super Weird Substance, now up and running in time for the summer months of 2015. The timing is no accident – there are summery vibes aplenty in their early releases – but what I’m probably most taken by is the third release; an absolute wildcard of a cover version of Iggy Pop – I Wanna Be Your Dog.

Where this idea came from, God only knows, but somehow or other it works. With Kermit teaming up with female vocal duo The Reynolds, the urgency of the original is retained but with a kind of disco sheen added to it. You could imagine someone like Craig Bratley or The Revenge boshing this one out at peak time. And for good measure, Greg’s own son Che is on lead guitar.

The rationale behind the wider Super Weird Project is what you would expect from Greg Wilson in the sense that it is about re-interpreting gems from the past and bringing them to a new audience, but what may surprise people is just how fresh it sounds: if you haven’t heard the originals before, you wouldn’t know that there was an original.

This is undoubtedly a step beyond Disco re-edits and shows what Greg Wilson is capable of when he has talented musicians at his disposal (lest we forget, he was a producer and artist manager for a good chunk of the 80s and 90s). It’s very well produced and engineered, but it still feels kinda ‘live’. If you were lucky enough to catch any of the Super Weird Happenings tour last year, you’d be familiar with the creative chaos that Greg is presiding over with this project, and it really shines through in the final cuts that make it onto the release schedule.

Fingers crossed there’ll be plenty more where this came from.