RIP Tony Ogden...

Last week was a bit of a shock.  In the midst of doing the Poptones thing I got an email forward from Alan McGee from John Robb about Tony Ogden’s death.  Tony used to front the World of Twist and was one of the last psychedelic angels from the Manchester scene.  I never discovered World of Twist until I wrote about the Mum and Dad album that came out on Twisted Nerve.  Mum and Dad were warped freaks with a geniunely skewered take on British pop.  There was one track that I came too and listened over-and-over again—Dawn Rider—which Tony Ogden co-wrote.  I googled Tony Ogden and came up with the World of Twist…

i got the album and soon after I became addicted to the World of Twist.  I emailed Iain Rainford from Mum and Dad to ask him about World of Twist.  He told me tales of acid rock’n’roll debauchery that would have put Hammer of the Gods to shame.  I chatted with Alan about it—he just said ‘Genius, Tony Ogden is an insane pop genius—we were going to put out the second album on Creation REcords after they got dropped from Virgin’.  It was then I started to track down the lost World of Twist albums through Gary Virtek and Iain Rainford.  There was a copy.  Full of sound interference because those weren’t the original tapes—the original tapes were destroyed by Tony Ogden in an attempt to get back at Virgin.  There was a campaign to release the tapes of teh second lost album but it petered out.  I wrote a magazine article about the World of Twist to urge the release of the lost second album but nothing came from that.  I put it up on the Poptones website (you can read it here. I didn’t know the man.  But I think the tapes should be released.  Do you agree?  Then email me at the usual address.....

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