Monday 25 August 2025, 7.30pm
Jackie-O Motherfucker was founded by Tom Greenwood in the mid 90’s, the group has had more than forty members over the years drawn from the U.S. experimental scene, notably Natalie Mering, who now records under Weyes Blood, briefly on bass. The current line up is a 4 piece lead by Tom Greenwood.
Jackie-O Motherfucker's music draws from a variety of subgenres including various folk musics of the world, drone, free jazz, psychedelia, and noise rock, and is heavily improvisational in its nature.
The group has had recordings released by many different labels including Fire Records, Ecstatic Peace, Feeding Tube Records, ATP Recordings and their own U-Sound Archive and has been on several international tours including several performances at All Tomorrow's Parties Festivals by way of Sonic Youth. The band played the 2002 and 2004 festivals curated by Sonic Youth and the 2007 festival curated by Thurston Moore.
Born in 1966, a child of the high Dakota plains, Tom Greenwood showed intermedia tendencies early on. While in high school he divided his time between visual arts (winning a scholarship from Kodak for his photographic work) and sonic arts (playing “Purple Haze” at biker rallies). He bounced around art schools of the frozen north, before ending up on the streets of Minneapolis, where he took his degree in Media Arts.
After spending the end of the ‘80s immersed in the aesthetic milieu of rural scum rock, creating the splendid Project A-Bomb record label in the process, Greenwood drifted into the open bowels of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Tom found work as an art director and participated in the Maynard Monroe-curated group show, URBAN ANALYSIS (with Nan Goldin, Rene Ricard, Lady Pink, a.o.)
Greenwood ended up in Portland, Oregon in the mid ‘90s, where he headbirthed the seriously disturbed musical project that continues to this day – Jackie O Motherfucker. An extraordinarily mutable feast, Jackie O’s music encompasses everything from industrial ho-hum to acid-volk readymades, and has included hundreds of participants over its lifespan. Under the influence of mysterious Northwest bohemians (often associated to some degree with the Holy Modal Rounders), Greenwood studied how to spin garbage into garlands. This technique proved invaluable when he drifted back to NYC, where he connected with Thurston Moore, who encouraged his conceptual moves.
In the 21st Century, Greenwood has created dual vistas of strangeness, all of them whistling like the rings around the o-mind. The musical projects – Jackie O, the U SOUND series, various shows and galleries – have blended into the visual ones, and splattered in a million unexpected directions.
Simon Finn has been given another crack at the troubled profession of singer/songwriter, his story the stuff of legend: A lone wolf troubadour from the mid-’60s U.K. scene, he rubbed shoulders with the likes of Bert Jansch. The powerful Pass the Distance, released to critical acclaim, seemingly lost for- ever... Since, a new record has surfaced – capturing the past and the present, a seamless transition despite the quarter century Simon Finn has won over fans worldwide – including Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and ex-Blur gui- tarist Graham Coxon – with his passion, his wit and his soul-shaking music.
Aside from his solo shows Simon also plays guitar in a band called Current 93, which were the cover story of the July Wire. In 2006 his original album, Pass the Distance, was made in 1969, with David Toop (author of The Rap Attack and Oceans of Sound) and Paul Burwell. It was produced by Vic Keary who ran Mushroom records at the time.
His 2007 release, Accidental Life, has also been recorded and mastered by Vic Keary. Playing on it are: Joolie Woods, David Toop, Karl Blake (Lemon Kittens) Keith Godman, with backing vocals from Danielle Dax and Rose McDowall (Strawberry Switchblade).
