THE SHEEP RECORDS STORY #9: CHARLOTTE'S BIONIC BLIMP "1999 / HERE WE GO AGAIN" (1998)

Sheep Records was a Swiss underground label specialized in Garage-Rock, Surf, Lounge and other Rock'n'Roll oddities. Run by Christian Müller from Zürich, along with friends Andi Frick and Andreas Egi, it was active from 1996 to 2004 and published about 30 releases, mostly on 7" vinyl singles.



In october 2006, after about two years of hiatus, all the contents of the now defunct Sheep Records website were deleted from the Internet, and replaced with a blank page announcing that "Der Kebab ist gegessen" ("The kebab is eaten"), a last goodbye and a reference to the label's cataloguing system that included the prefix "kebab" for vinyl releases and "gigot" for CD releases.



The ninth Sheep Records release was the one and only official 7" by Charlotte's Bionic Blimp, a side-project created by Colette and Jason Savall and co-produced by Jordan Tarlow. Both Tarlow and Savall are ex-members of the mighty Garage-Rock band The Fuzztones.

The single was released in September 1998, it was limited to 300 copies on purple transparent vinyl and 700 copies on black vinyl, for a total of 1.000 copies. It came in a nice artwork designed by David Burns.

Here's the optimistic Sheep original short press-release:

"Potentially the 1st chart breaker for Sheep! Charlotte's Bionic Blimp (featuring Jason Savall of the Fuzztones) from L.A. perform a New Wave influenced version of the Prince classic '1999'. 'Here We Go Again' on the flip is a beautiful pop song with a lovely female chorus. This might be their only release before getting very big."

It seems that the band lasted at least until 2001, and they often played live concerts in the Los Angeles area with an extended lineup that included a bassist and a drummer. During their short lifetime they were often compared to the B-52's, the Sparks, The Cars and Stereolab.

They shortened their name to Bionic Blimp and in 1999 they debuted on CD with "Exploring Automatic Rhythms", released on their own imprint TGTBT Music. This release seems to be quite rare and I wasn't able to find a single copy available for sale on the Internet; rest assured that the search will go on and you'll be notified if I'm successful...





Here's the track list for this 7" single:

01. 1999 (3:01)
02. Here We Go Again (2:41)

Both tracks were remastered from vinyl in January 2013 and are available in FLAC lossless format or high-quality 320 Kbps MP3 files, both formats include scans of the original item in PDF format. Please have a look at the comments for the download links.

Charlotte's Bionic Blimp at the Jack's Sugar Shack in Los Angeles (December 18, 1998)

The following video offers a preview of the remastered single: "Here We Go Again"!

More information about Sheep Records, Charlotte's Bionic Blimp and The Fuzztones is available here:

http://www.surfnroll.de/interviews/sheep/sheep.html

http://www.allmusic.com/album/exploring-automatic-rhythms-mw0001143593

http://mrhollywood.0catch.com/baby/blimp.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fuzztones

http://www.fuzztones.net/

The Sheep Records story will continue in the next months. All your inputs are more than welcome, if you want to get in touch please write to stereocandies [at] hotmail [dot] com or leave a comment in the box below, thank you!