The recent arrival from New York of my boxes -- all my earthly possessions, basically; mostly books, records and tapes -- means that I've been delving, on recent rainy days, into my past: fishing out tatty treasures, reliving old glories and digitizing the cassette tapes, which -- before the internet came along -- used to be the centre of my world.



As a result, today I can proudly present, live from a pile of boxes in my kabaretkeller, a sort of Momus Basement Tapes podcast -- an mp3 of 80 minutes of my home-recorded demos from the year 1988.

Amazing Blonde Women: Momus demos from 1988 (mono mp3 file, 80 mins, 36.6MB)

So, rewind twenty years. It's 1988. I'm an ambitious Creation Records artist living in a tiny room (with a red plush curtain, a bed, a basin, some bookshelves and a sheet of Chinese newspaper covering a yellow fluorescent bulb) in a rather grand back street near the top end of the King's Road. I'm writing the songs that'll make up the bulk of my "Tender Pervert" and "Don't Stop the Night" albums. On these demos (made with a Casio SK1, a guitar, and a Fostex 4-track) I'm both praying and playing, toying with my three main interests: literature, my own fated (or ill-fated) fame, and the love of women. This Momus is a singing author, a pervy 80s moralist, a displaced French chansonnier and -- as Alan McGee later put it -- "a legend in his own lunchtime".

Morality is Vanity
How Do You Find My Sister?
Amazing Blonde Women
Junk Jewelry
Trust Me, I'm a Doctor
Junk Jewelry (reprise)
The Guitar Lesson
Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous
Ice King
I Was A Maoist Intellectual
Bishonen
Susceptible
The Charm of Innocence
The Homosexual
In the Sanatorium
Blame Mame
The Hairstyle of the Devil
Last of the Window Cleaners
Tango Ballad (Brecht / Weill)
Lord of the Dance