Exposé Online

Guardians of the Ancient Wisdom Starts Crowd Funding Campaign

Ian Shirley of Record Collector magazine has a Kickstarter Campaign to reissue the lovingly restored music of his former band, The Guardians of the Ancient Wisdom. You can help Ian release this undiscovered music on vinyl!

by Henry Schneider, Published 2014-08-25

Here is what Ian has to say:

Back in 1979-80 along with my musical partner Paul Fielding (AKA Dark Zolan), I released 3 cassette-only albums under the names of Distinctive Drone, Clockwork Addiction and the Black Druids. These were listed in Sounds music magazine and we sold about 20-30 copies of each LP in the UK. These albums were recorded, mastered and dubbed on rudimentary tape recorders but as we grew more competent and musically serious we paid for one recording session - as the Black Druids - in 1981 at Ariwa Studios in South London, where we recorded one track called The Count. This was produced and mixed by Neil Fraser who is better known as the Mad Professor. Despite our track being very Goth sounding, Neil did two dub versions! At this point wanting to play live we changed our name to the Guardians Of The Ancient Wisdom and recruited two other musicians. The line-up was Dark Zolan (Vocals), Fred Previous (bass), Rob Clayton (guitar/casio keyboard/drum machine) and myself Ian Shirley (synth/backing vocal).

I have had various cassette tapes of the first gig, rehearsals and other recordings for years. I recently found, however, a late rehearsal tape with the full band including 'The Major' on drums. This really rocks. Through the good offices of Fred Previous (thank you Facebook) I also tracked down a holy grail cassette tape of the Windmill gig, recorded by Fred's mate Jon Attwood (later to be the Screaming Babies guitarist), where we were bottled off...

For the last four years I have had the fantastic task of running the Record Collector Vinyl series which has brought a number of rare and unheard gems to the ears of music fans worldwide. So, I know what it takes to clean up old tapes, remaster music and get vinyl albums pressed up. I also know that there is great interest in bands - like the Guardians - who never made it onto vinyl but who made some recordings before fading into obscurity. So, it seems a great idea to actually put this material by the Guardians onto vinyl some 32 years after it was recorded. Now, this music won't make Thom Yorke, Jack White or even Peter Murphy quake in their boots or bring Universal music, XL or iTunes to my door but this is music that needs to be made available to give people the opportunity to hear it! I have already started this project and paid to transfer the original cassettes of the live concerts and rehearsals into a digital format.

Filed under: Reissues

Related artist(s): The Guardians of the Ancient Wisdom

More info
http://kck.st/1l50ceW