And Rock and Roll shall rule the Earth

Once upon a time, and a very, very long time ago it was too, there existed a band. It was called the Strychnine Mangoes, and it was the Most Terrible Band That Never Was™. I should know, I was in it.

The ridiculous name, by the way, was not generated by the Band Automatic Name Generator, but by real honest-to-goodness teenagers. Both of us.

The core line-up included this joker on keyboards, drum machines, vocals, sporadic bass, acoustic guitar, harmonica, ukelele (once), and bongos (also once), and this guy on electric, acoustic and bass guitar, vocals and occasional drum machines. This guy occasionally played bass and sang, and every now and then vocals were also provided by none other than the future Mrs. Ricardipus, although she probably doesn't like to be reminded of that very often.

With a modicum of talent, enthusiasm to burn, and a fan base of absolutely nobody, we were going nowhere at all. And not even fast. But fast enough, it must be said, to produce two classic recordings, "Live #!?%$# In The Blue Room" and "Greatest Hits", each on glorious chrome cassette tape and available in a limited edition of two copies. One each, you see.

Highlights included covers of Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here, Patience by Guns 'N Roses, various Eric Clapton and Cream tunes, Assault and Battery by Hawkwind, and a few blues standards. We both liked Blue Öyster Cult and Jethro Tull, but we couldn't figure out the songs, which in retrospect seems like a blessing. There were also a reasonable number of originals, none of which will ever see the light of day. You can thank me for this later, although it must be said that the ukelele part on Firezone kicked some serious butt.

There was also a short-lived punk spin-off called Strychnine Headache, the highlight of which was a re-working of the Robert Johnson blues classic Rambling On My Mind, entitled Ramblin' To Hell. This featured me playing electric guitar over a speed-thrashing drum machine riff, and if you ever do shuffle off this mortal coil and ramble your own way down to Hell, I expect that this song will be what's on the soundtrack, for your listening amusement, over and over, forever.

However, today's subject is a recording presented here by popular demand (ok, one person asked for it, a long time ago, in the comments box of somebody else's blog, until I mentioned it a few days ago, when regular Ricardiblog reader Wonderferret also dialed in a request). It's a cover of Cream's Sunshine Of Your Love, featuring the core line-up of Syl on electric guitar and bass, and Ricardipus on bongos. One of the two is singing, but unfortunately the liner notes have been lost and it is therefore impossible to determine who. Shame really.

Audio path: Fostex 160 four-track cassette to chrome cassette to laptop for noise reduction and other massaging to mp3 to Rik's web space and thus to you, by way of a link from here. Hi Fidelity, all the way, but fortunately not Hi Infidelity, which was something different, although more or less contemporaneous, give or take a few years.

Click below, and don't say I didn't warn you. There are many reasons I was never a rock star, and this is most definitely at least one of them.

(Bongo) Sunshine Of Your Love - 128 kbps mp3 (3.3 Mbytes), hosted courtesy Rikaitch.