From the bottom of our hearts, we’d like to wish the biggest, most loving happy birthday to Nikki Sudden. Born in Solihull during the year of 1956, Nikki would have been 56 today. Celebrate Nikki by enjoying the music he loved so very much. Listen to “Jangle Town” above.
Five years after the late great Nikki Sudden recorded a live session at the WFMU studios in Jersey City, the station has made the recordings publicly available for the first time on their website. These tracks were laid to tape less than a week before Nikki’s unexpected death in March 2006, in a session that clearly made an impact on WFMU host Mike Lupica.
Read about their memorable visit and download the session at WFMU’s Free Music Archive HERE.
Nikki Sudden & Dave Kusworth’s The Jacobites “Don’t You Ever Leave Me” video from Heart Of Hearts (1996, Por Caridad Procucci):
NIKKI SUDDEN’s final album The Truth Doesn’t Matter is being released by Secretly Canadian on October 10, 2006. Completed just a week before he left for his final American tour in March of 2006, there could not be a more perfect swan song for a man whose personal life and rock & roll life knew no boundaries. Nikki was glowing with excitement when he flew across the Atlantic for his final US tour. Not only was he ready to tour, but he was so pleased with the new album he had in his satchel, and had just completed his autobiography to boot. If Nikki’s 49 well-lived years and 30+ years making music publicly could be summed up in any way, shape or form, it was in the two documents he had under his arm – one compact disc and one manuscript. While we may have to wait a while longer for the latter, we can now bask in the wonder of the former.
With all sentimentality aside, we will say that The Truth Doesn’t Matter is the best album Nikki has made in over 20 years. But knowing that Nikki was never one to put sentimentality aside, we will unabashedly employ it when we assert that this is the best album of Nikki Sudden’s career. Recorded in Berlin in the latter months of 2005, it was made on a steady diet of later period Marc Bolan glam, Rolling Stones’ honky blues, Bobby Womack’s soiled R&B, and ’70s disco comps (with some repeated Isley Brothers doses). While the fifteen tracks on the album show these influences, more than anything, they reflect the flamboyance and wonderful character of a man who seems to have come from another time – a poet whose passion for the written word and delight in its expression in multiple forms was his life’s dedication. This album is a celebration of music and friendship, and just seeps with Nikki’s love for life. Listen closely and you may hear the hoofbeats approaching in this poet’s head on album closer “All This Buttoning and Unbuttoning”.
