12. The Lavender Jungle
That one’s got one of those interesting stories. It’s a club that had a kind of label and a house band. It was kind of greasy, it’s all quite saucy stuff, and it’s quite like, lo-fi exotica. It’s weirdly recorded and has lots of strange subject matters. There’s one track on there to which the story goes this guy came into the club one day, I think he might have been an escaped convict, and he held up the band and the club and was like, "You guys are going to record a song for me, because I love your label and I love your sound" and they did it! It’s on the compilation, I can’t quite remember which track it is, I have a feeling it’s ‘Sabrosito’ by Raul Garcia, but I just thought what a mental story!
I don’t think today something like that could really happen. It feels like the product of a particular time and place, in a good way.
Ha, no, it’s proper Wild West stuff. It wouldn’t be socially acceptable now. I think it was like a proper greasy club though. It was a modelling agency as well I believe, so it was just all these like sculpted, Adonis kind of guys in tiny leopard print thongs, kind of flexing; if you look at the cover you can see it’s this really greasy-looking guy and I guess he was the mastermind behind it all. But it’s proper Hollywood stuff, you know. That was a different world back then, and it sprung up all this weirdness I think.
