Home    The Ghost Trade

Camberwell Now

The Ghost Trade
LP Black $21
LP Color $25
2LP Bundle Black $35
  • First vinyl re-issue, includes bonus track “Daddy Needs A Throne"
  • Official re-issue in collaboration with original members
  • 24 bit/96 kHz re-master from original analog tapes
  • Restored art, expanded to a gatefold tip-on jacket
  • Includes download card, 8 page booklet with track notes by the artists, lyrics and archival photos
  • PRE-ORDER EDITION:
    “Ghost Swirl” 3 color wax limited to 400 copies. Limit two per customer.

  • 2 LP bundle includes: The Ghost Trade (MCR 921) and The EP Collection (MCR 922) on black vinyl

Description

Camberwell Now features This Heat’s vocalist/drummer Charles Hayward, who assembled an unusual lineup comprising Stephen Rickard, a former BBC sound engineer, on field recordings and tape manipulation and Trefor Goronwy on bass, vocals and ukulele. “We had a very specific set of skills,” says Hayward, in new liner notes compiled for this long overdue reissue, “and it wasn’t immediately clear to us how best to bring them together so that we could play live.”

Arriving in 1986, The Ghost Trade, the group’s sole full-length LP, was what existed at the confluence of live performance and studio experimentation. Similar to This Heat’s process, the group spent two years in Cold Storage experimenting with the studio and assembling finished songs from vast quantities of tapes. Their two EPs, re-issued as The EP Collection, were borne of a similar process but each with unique yields.

The tracks that eventually formed The Ghost Trade were songs forged in the bleak beauty of Thatcher’s London. “To me, the sounds invoked humanity trapped behind and inside a world constructed of glass, steel, and concrete, frozen inside the textures like prisoners of the twilight zone, humanity haunting a landscape it had made for itself,” says Hayward.

Artist Bio

Camberwell, in South London, appears infrequently in pop culture. Perhaps you know it from the "Camberwell Carrot," the heroically-sized joint smoked in cult movie Withnail & I, or perhaps - if you're attuned to experimental music - you know of Camberwell Now, formed from the ashes of art-noise group This Heat.

Not so much a supersession as a continuation of that group, Camberwell Now featured This Heat’s vocalist/drummer Charles Hayward, who assembled an unusual lineup comprising Stephen Rickard, a former BBC sound engineer, on field recordings and tape manipulation and Trefor Goronwy on bass, vocals and ukulele. “We had a very specific set of skills,” says Hayward, “and it wasn’t immediately clear to us how best to bring them together so that we could play live.”

Preview Tracklist

  • 1 Working Nights
  • 2 Daddy Needs A Throne
  • 3 Sitcom
  • 4 Wheat Futures
  • 5 Speculative Fiction
  • 6 Green Lantern
  • 7 The Ghost Trade