Wednesday, July 24, 2013

The Lost Jockey

Otaku alert! I have been re-visiting the music of a long-lost band.
Named after a Magritte painting, The Lost Jockey were a large, short-lived British ensemble of classically-trained musicians who played minimal music: both the compositions of (principally) Steve Reich & Philip Glass, but also their own - much of which really swung. They had three releases to their name: The Lost Jockey (LP, 1982), Professor Slack (10" EP, 1982) and The Lost Jockey (cassette, 1983), all of them difficult to get hold of even at the time, and amazingly none have been re-issued on CD. Or (legal) download.  
I never got to see them live and it's ages since I listened to them. In fact, until this week I only had the EP here with me, but managed to dig out the others (sadly, just cassette copies) from storage in London, as well as a dodgily recorded 'bootlegged' tape from June '83. Really great to hear all this stuff again, particularly the cassette (see pic). 
So what happened to them...? It's difficult to trace them all since there were so many of them, but Orlando Gough, John Lunn, Charlie Seaward and the unfeasibly tall Shaun Tozer (who was at Sussex Univ same time as me) went on to form Man Jumping, after which they each went on to have very interesting solo careers (just found out that John Lunn composed the music for Downton Abbey). Andrew Poppy - the only one I knew personally - did orchestrations for Psychik TV, Coil, The The etc, released a couple of albums on ZTT at the time of Franke Goes To Hollywood and has continued to compose for all sorts of media. John Barker played with Heaven 17, ABC and John Foxx...  There were others: Simon Limbrick, John Owen, Jeremy Birchall, Rory Allam... but not sure what became of them. 
But the question remains: why have there been no Lost Jockey reissues? 

2 comments:

  1. I love the cassette & the EP! And agree that it's time they were reissued.

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  2. Sadly Rory Allam (Clarinet & Bass Clarinet) passed away some time ago.

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