10+10 fishers against the wind. 15) Charlie Tweddle/Eilrahc Elddewt
Eilrahc Elddewt - Four empty bottles After a brief pause (worried, huh?), the fishers against the wind are back!
And this one is really special...
Charlie Tweddle is a true cowboy: big hat, bushy mustache, country music and all the rest. Only, in the late '60s to early '70s, our Charlie takes a detour into stories of aliens and flying saucers (perhaps aided by some "strange substances" and encounters with the Raelians), changes his name to Eilrahc Elddewt, and releases, in '71, this "Fantastic Greatest Hits" in a run of about 500 copies.
The few who came across this record (well before it happened again with the Jesus & Mary Chain and others) took it back convinced it was broken...
Indeed, Charlie had created the most incongruous, deformed, unheard-of, abnormal hybrid one could conceive: country and musique concrète (held together with spit and remnants of psychedelia), absurd lyrics and ambient noises, prairies, stars and... stables!
As if Skip Spence had been born in Nashville, as if Pierre Schaeffer had made a record with Dolly Parton...
When, in 1999, Matmos released "The West" (unconsciously I believe borrowing the idea from Charlie/Eilrahc), everyone shouted genius strike, absolute novelty (someone remembered Fahey's "Requia," but that was just a resonance), yet nobody remembered Charlie.
A true injustice!
The record, of course, became a must-have among collectors and seekers of "strangeness"; until it was reissued in 2004, via Companion records.
Today, Charlie designs, produces, and sells (at quite remarkable prices) cowboy hats (and "ceremonial" hats of his own creation), which are also in high demand.
