>
<

Tapete

TIMES, THE - Go! With The Times

More than four decades on, with yet another round of punk anniversaries safely behind us, heres a chance to remind ourselves that not everyone believed or indeed peddled the myth of the Year Zero. Maybe thats because they were young enough not to have to prove their youth. A good three years junior to Johnny Rotten and six years to Joe Strummer, Edward Ball had spent his 1960s childhood equally entranced by the Beatles on the radio and Patrick McGoohan playing The Prisoner on TV. And while the promises of a popular culture infused with fresh art school ideas had gone stale by the 1970s, a teenage Ed Ball would recognise the dawning of an independent DIY culture as a chance to rekindle them in a brand new way. To do so he had to bypass the corporate machine, then otherwise busy selling the Year Zero narrative to a gullible media, and set out on an unbeaten path that would soon converge with the leftmost edges of the nascent mod revival. Having formed his first band O-Level in 1976, Ball found a kindred spirit in school friend Daniel Treacy. For a while their bands Television Personalities (fronted by Treacy) and Teenage Filmstars (fronted by Ball) existed in tandem until the latter morphed into The Times. Following a legal dispute around the name of their DIY label Whaam!, obviously monikered after Ray Liechtensteins 1963 painting as opposed to a certain pop band of the day, Ball launched his bands very own Artpop! imprint. Having released six Times LPs between 1982 and 1986, by the end of the decade Ball reemerged on Alan McGees Creation Records, delving into electronic psychedelia and supplementing his recording career with a day job as a friendly executive/receptionist at the companys London of office. There he would sit behind a desk in front of one of his own paintings, sometimes speaking dismissively of himself in the third person to unsuspecting visitors. Sometime later, Ball would return to writing observational pop songs destined for the lower reaches of the charts as a fully paid up member of the Mill Hill Self Hate Club. . . . Here is that rarest of things: British guitar pop history without baggage. Because only the best went with The Times back in the early eighties. - Robert Rotifer, Canterbury, 2017.

  • Sale
  • Regular price $29.00


After nearly a decade of false starts, multiple game plans veering off the rails, and a handful of shattered hopes and/or dreams, the odyssey is finally complete—the new Fusetron site is here.

This is the first phase of a multipart rollout that will span the next few months: the currently browsable stock includes miscellaneous new releases from the past 8+ months (we have a lot of catching up to do), plus approximately a third of our backstock. Note that we’ve reduced/slashed prices on many titles and will continue to do so in order to make room for new stock. We’ll also be expanding / tweaking / improving / debugging the site itself (for example, we still have work to do on the automated international postage system, not to mention the inevitable inventory discrepancies that come with transferring an ancient and massive database to a new system).

Over the next few months, as we take inventory, clean house, and delve into our storage, we will be uploading thousands of additional items, gradually, on a near-daily basis. This will include the majority of the LPs, as well as many titles, in all formats, once thought long-gone. Many currently “sold out” items are likely to resurface.

Finally, once our general backstock is up (probably in the next two or three months) we’ll begin making our extensive stockpile of rarities available online for the first time: tons of random out-of-print titles, "deadstock," warehouse finds, secondhand collectibles, etc., accumulated over the past few decades.

Frequent/returning customers will be getting early access to these items. Details to follow on how this will work (a priority mailing list? a 'frequent flyer'-like program?), but it will not be based on dollars spent. We want to reward those who consistently support us, especially in the discogs marketplace era (to those who show up trying to poach five copies of a one-off rarity, and nothing else, ever… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ).

So—we suggest you take some time to dig through the site—even we’ve been surprised by what’s been turning up, and there’s much more to come.
I understand these terms

Sale

Unavailable

Sold Out