Foruli's Twitter feed
17 Jan 2012
In which Mr Bruford states that one of the postive aspects of being a member of King Crimson was that he "could play in 17/16 and still stay in a decent hotel". Presumably as long as he promised to stop playing at 11:00 PM so as not to disturb the other guests.
Naturally, he also talks about his Foruli limited edition.
12 Jan 2012
We are very excited to have received photographs from Paiste in Switzerland, showing the prototype of the Bill Bruford limited edition 10" splash cymbal. Each will be handmade by Paiste's craftsmen, with a process which in addition to their normal cymbal manufacturing techniques additionally includes printing, engraving and lasering. Only 25 cymbals will be made available, exclusively with the Deluxe Edition of Bill Bruford: The Autobiography. These are available to order now, with delivery expected in January.
Topside of the limited edition Bill Bruford 10" splash by Foruli and Paiste
Underside of the limited edition Bill Bruford 10" splash by Foruli and Paiste
Close-up view of the laser numbering of the limited edition Bill Bruford 10" splash by Foruli and Paiste
05 Jan 2012
In which the estimable Mr Bruford refers to his publishers as being "like a pack of vultures [who] stripped the place bare of early drum-heads, backstage passes and letters".
23 Nov 2011
The paperback edition of Glenn Hughes' autobiography, which Foruli licensed to our friends at Jawbone Press, is now at Number 1 in the amazon.com music reference book chart. Many congratulations to Glenn and his co-author Joel McIver!
10 Nov 2011
We were delighted by the number of award winners who visted the Foruli area at the Classic Rock Awards at the Roundhouse in London on 9th November 2011. Limited editions by Glenn Hughes and Bill Bruford were on display and we received some very flattering comments.
Here are a few photos from the evening:
Above: (L-R) Ian Gillan, Ian Paice & Roger Glover of Deep Purple
Above: Roger Taylor of Queen
Above: Brian May of Queen
Above: Nicky Wire of Manic Street Preachers
Above: Lemmy of Motorhead
25 Oct 2011
.jpg "Bill Bruford Foruli autobiography pack shot")
The image below shows the disc cut from one of Bill's own gig-played Paiste cymbals which is included on the spine of each copy.
02 Oct 2011
Shockwaves/HardRadio podcast #54: Bob Nalbandian interviews legendary bassist/vocalist Glenn Hughes (Deep Purple, Black Country Communion) and That Metal Show Host Eddie Trunk.
Click the logo to hear the interviews:
THe podcast can be downloaded free from iTunes HERE
16 Sep 2011
Foruli have been working hard with Jac Holzman, Mick Houghton and Bruce Botnick to create a lavish limited edition of Becoming Elektra: The True Story of Jac Holzman's Visionary Record Label. The set includes a hand bound book and a 10" album of classic archive Elektra tracks remastered by The Doors producer, Bruce Botnick. More news soon...
07 Sep 2011
Foruli met with legendary music photographer Mick Rock today. We have are several projects in development together. Watch this space...
In the meantime, here is a new portrait of Mick by our Consultant Art Director Andy Vella.
03 Sep 2011
Foruli met Chad Smith, drummer in the Red Hot Chili Peppers, for lunch on 3rd September 2011. He described our Glenn Hughes editions as "works of art".
Chad Smith with the Signature (left) and Deluxe (right) editions of Glenn Hughes' memoirs
11 Aug 2011
Mike Portnoy, founder member of Dream Theater and now drummer in the supergroup Adrenaline Mob, has written a foreword for the Foruli limited edition of Bill Bruford: The Autobiography.
Mike Portnoy (left) with Bill Bruford
08 Aug 2011
Fashion designer John Varvatos received a gift of a Deluxe Edition of Glenn Hughes' memoir at his birthday party in Hollywood on 8th August 2011. Also present were Sebastian Bach (ex-Skid Row), Matt Sorum (Guns 'n' Roses, The Cult, Velvet Revolver) and Franky Perez (Scars on Broadway).
 Frankie Perez, Hollywood Hills Aug8th 011.jpg "John Varvatos birthday party, Hollywood, 8th August 2011")
From left: Joyce V, Sebastian Bach, Glenn Hughes, Matt Sorum, John Varvatos (holding his gift), Frankie Perez
09 Jul 2011
Foruli met with Lars Ulrich, drummer in Metallica, backstage at the Sonisphere festival in Knebworth, England on the 8th July 2011. Lars wrote the foreword to Glenn Hughes' memoir Deep Purple & Beyond: Scenes from the Life of a Rock Star. We took the opportunity to present Lars with a Deluxe Edition and a Signature Edition. He was very complimentary about the books and we are pleased that he now has copies in his personal library.
Lars Ulrich with copies of Glenn Hughes' memoirs in the Metallica backstage area at Sonisphere
21 Jun 2011
21 Jun 2011
16 Jun 2011
Limited edition double 10" album with art prints
Catalogue number FEP4/5
Double vinyl 10" album - 500 copies, only available with the limited edition packages of Bill Bruford: The Autobiography.
Bill Bruford’s notes on From Conception to Birth
It’s surprisingly uncommon practice, but I thought it might be interesting to offer some sketches of how several of my tunes began life. These audio demonstrations - or ‘demos’ for short - are extremely rough because they were only intended for the ears of the musicians whose job it would be to bring them to life. Had they been required for a record company executive’s decision for investment - the more usual purpose of demos - more care and attention would have been lavished. Musicians will tend to see the general thrust of the music more quickly than business people, and are happy enough with the rougher stone.
In the visual arts it’s quite common to see preparatory studies alongside the finished work. Indeed some prefer the incomplete sketch, holding out as it does an open-ended promise of how things might be or might have been. Audio demos or original sketches of the finished musical item have been increasingly possible with the advent of simple home-recording devices, and it was a visit to the Van Gogh museum to see the artist’s Potato Eaters and attendant sketches that provided the gestation for From Conception to Birth.
The vinyl album From Conception to Birth has 17 tracks. 8 demos precede the relevant sections of their 8 released masters, allowing direct comparison, and there is one additional demo that never made it to master stage. The demos reflect my chequered history in the realm of home recording. Given my efforts with electronic percussion - or perhaps because of them - it may surprise some to learn I’m something of a technophobe, and nothing of a recording engineer. Early demos were more or less straight into what we used to call a ghetto-blaster. That was followed briefly by Teac Portastudio 4-track cassette recordings, which rapidly morphed into my favourite axe, the Roland MC500. I played in the midi data from my Yamaha keyboard, and outputted to sounds from my Korg O1/W orchestra-in-a-box. Everything on sides 2, 3, and 4 was recorded that way. Low tech it certainly was, but I was pleased with my Holdsworth ‘soundalike’ guitar playing on Lingo, my cheesy 12-string guitar that I had the nerve to play Ralph Towner before the sessions for If Summer Had Its Ghosts, and the drumming on the unreleased Banyan.
There is an honourable – if fatal – tradition among musicians of ‘falling in love with the demo’. In this, the composer has played his weedy version to himself so many times that he comes to hear its manifest flaws as attributes. He becomes deaf to the beauties of the new version being produced on the session, and wastes many hours trying to recreate the un-recreatable original. Not me. I was relieved and grateful, but not surprised, when this material sprang instantly to life in rehearsal rooms under the hands of the skilled musicians with whom I was lucky to play it. The way my amateurish sketches began to breathe and flex and break free from the stone-lined, midi-data encasements in which they were conceived was a constant reminder of the value of all-at-once human playing and the value of musical relationships of the flesh-and-blood rather than the automated kind.
I never quite made it to the laptop and software world of composition that seems made for more agile brains than mine. I had written the tunes on this album and many like them because my various bands needed something to play. When I retreated from organising groups, that need evaporated, and I ended up mostly as an improvising musician. Arnold Schoenberg allegedly offered the notion that all composition is just very slow improvisation, and I accept the corollary to be true, that improvisation is extremely fast composition. Things sound best to me when the composed sounds improvised and the improvised sounds composed. I was always most comfortable in the cracks between the two.
Bill Bruford, June 2011
12 May 2011
Glenn Hughes was interviewed by Chris Tarrant on Radio 2 on Thursday 12th May 2011. Glenn's limited edition book and record packages were designed by Andy Vella, and impressed Mr Tarrant mightily.
Click on the arrow to play:
05 Oct 2010
We enjoyed this review from The Quietus so much that we thought we would reproduce it in full:
"75 quid?!" asks Steve Jelbert in his review of The 10 Rules Of Rock & Roll by Robert Forster of The Go-Betweens
The raging anti-consumerism of 'Know Your Product', the Saints' fabulous punk age update of '(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction', set a standard no other Brisbane band could ever hope to match. Robert Forster, co-founder of that city's other famous musical export The Go-Betweens, happily concedes this within the pages of The 10 Rules Of Rock & Roll when describing the long overdue reunion of Messrs Bailey and Kuepper in 2007. But any casual readers - not that there will be any - will surely delight in Forster's perverse commercial logic. In an age where music is routinely given away and books are under pressure from copyright theft and indifference, this ragbag compilation of Australian magazine articles written for an Australian audience, and not one assumed to be blessed with knowledge either, is on sale to Brits. It's signed and in a box, mind you, and accompanied by a four song EP of new Forster tunes for a mind-bending 75 quid.
Hang on, this is Robert Forster we're talking about. Not Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen or anyone good. He was in The Go-Betweens, for fuck's sake, not the Velvet Underground (and he knows it, even including a perceptive essay on how the VU lit his own path, certain to resonate with anyone who grew up in the sticks and their own heads, in no particular order). Hell, as 80s flops went, even Prefab Sprout had a couple of actual hit singles. Though The Go-Betweens stock is high right now - despite successfully marrying soul and punk there is no Kuepper-Bailey bridge in Brisbane, but there is a G-B span, named by public poll - this may be a gouge too far.
Let's emphasise this crassness, crassly. 75 fucking quid! As a writer Forster might be charitably described as keen. Few would argue with his essentially uncontroversial views, but these pieces read like a middle-aged man giving it all up to pursue his youthful dream of holding a staff job at the New Yorker. Most unexpectedly, Forster the critic trades in tropes that would never have found their way into a GBs lyric. It's less a war against cliché than an accommodation with it (incredibly these tepid efforts have won awards down under, leaving me wondering just how bad other Aussie music writers can be). At least Forster's musician's ear gets a workout as he dwells lovingly on technical details of sound production that surely elude today's MP3 generation (and before them, the boombox generation, and before them the AM generation, and before them the wax cylinder generation etc.)
It's sweet to read a man who cares about front of house sound so much that he makes excuses for those who man the mixing desk, but it also suggests that he actually believes a shared way of hearing even exists. Touchingly this 50-year-old hauls himself around Brisbane's Big Day Out site trying to find the perfect spot to hear Arcade Fire clearly, eventually climbing a fence into what may well be the disabled enclosure - he's unclear on this, and possibly ashamed - just in time for the last two tunes.
Occasionally though, there's something delightfully right about Forster's wrongness; a literal world turned upside down. Growing up in 70s Pig City - Queensland was then perhaps the most corrupt English-speaking place on earth - unsurprisingly he romanticised distant art and music. This urge to escape or even transcend one's surroundings while simultaneously craving acceptance is equally present in the early works of fellow boarding schoolboys the Birthday Party/Boys Next Door, who also took certain Velvets lyrics too literally (Forster never rolled round on the skagpile, although he did once dye his hair silver, a safer way of saluting Warhol).
Even 30 years later he thrills to the relative dispassion of a Nana Mouskouri performance at the Sydney Opera House, fascinated by the relatively unassimilated audience and imagining himself back in a sophisticated era when Nana wowed La Dolce Vita in Paris, Rome, Athens, Beirut and (for Brits) also warbled on The Two Ronnies every Saturday night. Less comprehensible to those from a different hemisphere are descriptions of Aus-talgia shows hosted by the ageless Molly Meldrum - Oz's Fluff Freeman I guess - and a serious minded analysis of the now forgotten Delta Goodrem, pitched somewhere between OK and academia. Incidentally his 10 rules are hardly contentious, if somewhat less than convincing. 'Great bands tend to look alike' he suggests - did anyone tell the Ramones or the Birthday Party or [insert your choice here]?
A sweet tribute to his bandmate Grant McLennan, presumably written in shock, effectively admits that despite the cosiness engendered by 30 years collaboration, McLennan's inherent sadness had always eluded him - even as Forster sang along with his gloomy and revealing songs. The sight of a copy of the New York Review of Books around his friend's house leads Forster to wonder if he was the only rock star to have a subscription and this thought warms him. Yet 48 year-old-men often take the NYRB, and McLennan was a 48 year-old-man more than he'd ever been a rock star. (One of the most depressing and undignified performances I've ever seen was a crouched McLennan strumming his guitar in the corner of a meet and greet at New York's CMJ conference in the mid 90s, his thoughtful songs unable to compete with free canapés and the chance to shake hands with the Mid-West sales team.)
But according to Forster, McLennan possessed an acutely tuned cultural sensibility (or 'bullshit detector', in Australian) equal to his unworldliness. It's a pity we don't have any examples to compare with his old co-worker, who now has his name on a book spine, just like J.D. Salinger and Katie Price. We'll never know what he would have made of such a book selling for 75 quid, but had he lived this book would not exist. No great loss.
14 Sep 2010
This is a design concept by Andy Vella for a proposed limited edition of the Factory Records history 'Shadowplayers' by James Nice. It is not now going ahead, but we thought it looked so good that we would show it to you anyway.
The book provides an historical account of the record label. Therefore the concept was to make the whole book seem document-like. Every page would look like it had been copied - in fact faxed - with old-style pixellated type for the body copy, leaving in the mistakes that naturally happen as part of this process.
The book was to be bound by a single ring of metal with various translucent items and a specific number. It would appear as a bunch of loose-leaf pages printed on very stable waterproof paper, bound by one object, then rolled and set within an airtight & watertight stainless steel canister which itself would be individually numbered.
22 Jul 2010
Here is a photo of Hooky playing one of the six handbuilt HAC51 custom bass guitars, available with the Ultimate Edition of his book. The design was conceived by Peter Hook & Chris Hewitt, and turned into reality by custom guitar builder Brian Eastwood. The other guitars are all part of Hooky's personal collection.
.jpg "Peter Hook playing a Hac51 custom bass guitar")
Further details of the custom bass guitars are HERE
30 Jun 2010
There are two versions of this song. The official one is on The Monkees third album 'Headquarters'. The other is a lovely softer take on the tune done by the band for their previous album 'More Of The Monkees' – this version is available on the recent Rhino editions of the groups back catalogue.
The Monkees for me have always been an album band. There are the hits, and then there all the strong tracks spread over their records - the first four especially. 'I'll Spend My Life With You' was written by Boyce&Hart, who are perhaps best known for writing the bands first chart-topper, the sublime 'Last Train To Clarksville'. Boyce and Hart were also in a mid sixties LA pop band that had one of the best band names in the history of rock – The Candy Store Prophets. Beat that.
They were pop writers in the best sense, and with 'I'll Spend...' they wrote a gentle, melodic, and romantically heroic song. Our version has the strum up high – we are in love with the melody, simple guitar lines run through the mix played by the session's bass player Scott Bromily, and hopefully total joy is heard in our recording.
Brisbane boys and a little nasty. I love the mood of this and the hypnotic two chord verse melody that then bursts onto the third chord at the end of the vocal line. The lyrics evoke post punk London 1978, and you can perhaps hear that I very much enjoyed singing this. It came easy.
The Saints were a Brisbane band and 'The Prisoner' is off their third and best album 'Prehistoric Sounds'. The band were an inspiration to the local groups that followed, including The Go-Betweens, who saw in The Saints not only good songwriting and attitude, but a group that managed to get out of Brisbane and snag an album deal in London. This was fuel for the local scene circa 1978 -80.
Grant McLennan my songwriting partner in The Go-Betweens wrote this for the b- side of 'Part Company' in 1983. Which shows the band was either crazy to put material as strong as this on a flipside, or we had so many good songs and this was the only home it could find.
This is a beautiful ballad from Grant. Melodically strong as always, and with a lyric that really cuts and evokes a person and a scene. Normally I never asked Grant what his songs were about, but this one so took me at the time that I asked him who the subject of the song was. He said it was Nick Cave, whom Grant was close too at the time. I don't know what I thought when he told me that, but listening to the song now, and singing it, it sounds nearer to a portrait of Grant himself.
A final note added as humbly as I can. The guitar solo on this is by me, and I think it is one of the best things I've done.
I love this band and dug them from the get go. Their first album is a classic and was one of those records that pop up very occasionally and make you re-assess what can be done with drums, bass, and guitars. Plus they had 11 cracker songs that had a fresh lyric slant and showed brilliant pop roots. The whole African influence debate and the yuppie student moan a big distraction to strong songwritng and inventive record production. That also impressed. No indie rock, heavy name producer. They did it themselves, so the flavours are full, and that made the impact of the album even stronger. Enough frothing from the mouth from me.
'Walcott' is not the best song on the album. But I am going to be cheeky here – it is the one that I thought that I could have written. The fast strum, the strong middle eight, the Velvets like glide of the whole thing. Our recording has taken out a lot of the production tricks of the original and played it as a straighter, more naive pop song. A bit of Buddy Holly. The first guitar solo is mine and the second – the stunner – is by Scott Bromily, he of the bass and also a member of The John Steel Singers (great current Brisbane band). He had a big grin on his face as he put it together in the studio, telling us at one stage he was channelling Clarence White. He got there.
Warm regards,
Robert Forster
Brisbane, 30th June 2010
29 Jun 2010
Peter Hook has been very nice about the Foruli limited edition of The Hacienda: How Not To Run A Club. Check out this video:
© 2010 Foruli Publications ACCESS ALL AREAS | EDITIONS | RECORDS | SHOP | BLOG | Site by Virtual Inc
