This album is part of a crowdfunding campaign for Flashback Records, currently closed due to the Virus. This album is available here free on the day of release (1/5/20), when Bandcamp are waiving their fees. We are asking you to make a donation to Flashback Records to help keep our three London Shops going during this crisis. Just make your contribution by paying whatever you feel like to purchase this album. All funds will go directly to help Flashback and its staff weather this storm. www.flashback.co.uk

In the dappled green broken spring of 1991 psychedelic legend in his own lunchtime Todd Dillingham (still a few months away from recording his first fab album Art Into Dust with the mighty Bevis Frond) was attending a gig down at the Aquatic Fern in Hendon by local psych pop band The Serious Concerns. And by the chanciest of chances he fell in with a strange and inexplicably smoke filled freak who went by the name of The Slithy Tove that fuzzy fateful night. Todd had been invited up on stage by the Concerns to add his trade mark, bend your mind backwards guitar solo style for their encore and suitable impressed by what he heard The Slithy Tove approached Todd with an idea of no little merit. With waist length hair and beard, a remarkably prominent hawk like nose and a peculiar habit of always going barefoot in public, The Slithy Tove was a good ten years older than anyone in the room and had decided long since to stay put in 1971 and ignore the passing of the years there after. Not much was known or indeed knowable about this mysterious fellow other than the fact that he took salt in his tea rather than sugar, liked to use the terms “Oh get on the bus man” and “Cut your job and get some hair” with alarming frequency and he had been the bass player in Blodwyn Pig for about six hours in 1970. He had been working on his own sprawling double concept album “In the Church of the Buddha Kittens” for the last two decades and wanted Todd to overdub his blistering lead guitar over the whole album. Todd always happy to oblige readily agreed and on the next Wednesday met up with The Tove down at a shabby little five track basement studio “Tulse on the Pulse” in Tulse Hill. Always fast in the studio it took Todd a little over two hours to nail his parts and with the studio booked for another fourteen hours The Slithy Tove suggested they record a load of Todd’s own songs with the remaining time. Staggering, blinking into the early morning light with the master tapes in his bag Todd knew they had created an acid dripped monster that night which he was proud to call his own. He never heard from The Slithy Tove again and was never able to find any trace of the man himself in the years since. He had simply vanished in a cloud of exotic smoke of his own making it seems…or possibly, moved to East Finchley…no one really knows. A seven song cassette was assembled from the master tapes and ten copies of Stalking the Wily Chub were released soon after.

Fast forward to 2013 and Flashback head honcho, Mark Burgess finds a copy of the cassette in a dusty old box at a carboot sale in Cuffley and utterly smitten by what he hears, immediately contacts Todd, now living in Florida with the idea of remixing and releasing this long lost classic. Todd contacted his brother Mick who serves as keeper of the extensive tape archive Todd left behind and soon enough the original masters are in Mark’s hands for restoration, recreation, and release. Delayed again by Todd’s illness and untimely passing in 2018, finally here it is, nearly 30 years later, the first proper release for Todd’s long lost classic first album for your delight and about time too.