Barely Human

I know this website and the show art is questionable, but this is only half an accident: it's meant ot look this way. When designer Alex Dabi Zhevi ( MoodWar ) and I sat down to talk about show art, I'd just finished researching the electric eels episode. A band with very few formal references, the research necessarily had to lean on websites of  mid-2000s chic like ClePunk  and the electric eels  'official' web page.

It lives! The trailer for the Barely Human series has just gone online. Click through below for a taste and preview of what's to come in January 2020. There's also a playlist previewing some songs of the people featured in the upcoming series which you listen to here ... see you in the new year....

Here is some pre-promotion in blog post form. Proto-promo? A background to how Barely Human became a 12-episode podcast series. This project began as a one-off zine / print essay published through MoodWar in 2016, called  Barely Human; I Like Randy Newman. ( This was a gag at the expense of Distort writer DX's zine series Life Stinks; I Like the Kinks, find it and read it instead of this!) It was a crackpot exorcism of my shameful superfandom of my favourite unfashionable musician. It generated a number of corrections from Randy fans (you can't edit print), sold out in a month or so, and was posted to Randy Newman's house (thank you Garry) never to be heard from again (until Episode 2 of this series). Barely Human; I Like Randy Newman (2016) &  Life Makes Me Nervous; I Like the Butthole Surfers (2017)

Barely Human is a podcast series about footnoted underground musicians of the past fifty years. From sixties counter culture to contemporary sub culture, it reveals a cast of characters who are rarely considered alongside each other. Under the umbrella of the barely human, we'll find artists who were watched by the FBI, who sparked artistic movements, and who self-sabotaged and antagonised for the sake of it.... It's an alternate history, a polemic and an investigation of what happened and how we got here: to the state of underground music in the year 2020. First episodes will begin releasing weekly from January across all podcasting platforms. This blog will be updated with show notes, links and visual company for each episode as they happen, with news about the series and the project in general as it comes. Can't wait for you to hear it! Follow Barely Human on... Facebook / Instagram / Twitter