Miracles and Wonders: A meandering, cacophonous concordance of The Jazz Butcher songbook Kindle Edition

Miracles and Wonders is a story of sex and travel, of drink and drugs and rock’n’roll, and of stegosauruses and elephants and kittens. The Jazz Butcher band strode the world, unafraid, recording 15 studio albums over a 40-year career. They repackaged true stories as miracles and wonders and sold them back to us as brilliantly astute, wry, wrought and occasionally just plain silly pop songs. Enemies of indie, new wave and hair metal, they chose their own rocky path, one beset with touring anarchy, escapades and adventures. Rubbing shoulders with the great and good along the way, and also acquainting themselves with the apparently insignificant and the very, very bad. When Pat Fish, the Butcher himself, died suddenly in October 2021, many thought his classically trained brain, his remarkable memory and his talent as a raconteur had died with him. Well, not entirely. He and his long-suffering co-author have captured, catalogued and meticulously described each recorded song, peppered with the true stories that inspired them. It is a meandering, cacophonous concordance of The Jazz Butcher songbook. A volume big enough to serve as a doorstop in a stampede. With hundreds of illustrations, many uniquely sourced from the Fishy Mansions Archives.Pat Fish (1957-2021) lived, sometimes barely survived, the life of a professional musician from 1982 to 2021. He was the co-founder, primary songwriter and driving force behind his band The Jazz Butcher Conspiracy. JBC albums included ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ with Glass Records, ‘The Cult of the Basement’ with Creation, ‘The Last of the Gentleman Adventurers’, and the posthumously released ‘The Highest in the Land’ with Tapete. Pat was a champion of socialism and animal rights and a staunch world citizen. He was born in London, studied in Oxford and lived in Northampton, NN1 with a long rollcall of feline companions.Philip Snow once apologised to Pat that he worked for the Government, guzzled gas and ate meat. He is still a Knowledge and Information Management professional working in Government, but he has taken the foot off the gas and no longer munches on the flesh of other species. Philip wrote a ghost story, ‘The Dutch Doll’ (2007) and a biography of Victorian writer Jessie Saxby in ‘Tales from Wullver’s Hool’ (The Shetland Times, 2018). Beyond this current obsession with The Jazz Butcher Conspiracy, Philip is planning to be kept awake nights further pondering on the subject of polar explorer Peter Freuchen. He lives in Kettering, or as Pat would say, Ketamine, NN15. Read more