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On Friday 29th August 2025 Robyn Hitchcock performed the Safe As Milk album live at The Chapel, San Francisco. A second set Deep Cuts & Classic Tracks  included a selection of other Beefheart songs from the later albums. The musical director for the show was Allyson Baker from the San Francisco rock band Dirty Ghosts. She and her husband played a couple of Beefheart songs with Robyn Hitchcock at The Chapel in May 2025 – Electricity and Zig Zag Wanderer – and enjoyed the experience so much that they wanted to do it again. By coincidence the promoter of the show that night had anRead More →

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Back in 2015 Robyn Hitchcock performed the whole of the Clear Spot album live at various UK venues – read about that here. On Friday 29th August 2025 he will be performing the Safe As Milk album live at The Chapel, San Francisco. A second set will include a number of other Beefheart songs from the later albums. At the moment this appears to be the only performance before Robyn heads off to perform Dylan’s John Wesley Harding album at several US venues. Along with Robyn will be some ‘special guests’ (although others, currently unknown,  are promised): Chuck Prophet Kelley Stoltz Blag Dahlia (The Dwarves)Read More →

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The Radar Station’s favourite Beefheart tribute band, Orange Claw Hammer, have a couple of gigs coming up soon. The band will be presenting their jazz inflected take on many Beefheart classics at this year’s Edinburgh Festival under the banner Sugar n’ Spikes and all things Beefheart. They will be performing at Bannerman’s in Edinburgh on Saturday 9th and Saturday 16th August 2025. Tickets are available in advance form the Fringe Box Office or online at www.edfringe.comRead More →

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Artist and musician Alison Mosshart talks about how Don’s artwork has influenced her “in millions of ways” in a video on the Harpers Bazaar website. You can find it here – https://www.harpersbazaar.com/uk/culture/bazaar-art/a63202571/alison-mosshart-the-art-that-inspires-me/ Alison covered ‘Dropout Boogie’ when she was in The Kills. She has also performed with Jack White, another Beefheart fan, in the band Dead Weather.  Read More →

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Astounding, astonishing, awesome and any number of superlatives all the way through to zut alors (or should that be zoot alors!) This tour de force is THE craziest attempt at covering Beefheart’s music ever … but it works. An exact five-part harmony a cappella version of every sonic second of one of the most challenging albums of all time. So exact, in fact, that you can play the original and the cover together and they will mesh perfectly! Here is the proof : This is not the first attempt by The 180Gs at covering the seemingly impossible. After an amble through the foothills of strangeRead More →

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An unexpected event – well, I didn’t see any adverts for it – was PJ Harvey’s appearance at Don’s art exhibition, Standing on One Hand,  in London between November 2023 and February 2024. Polly read several of Don’s poems. Does anyone know which ones? She finished her set with a poem, Man Can’t Anticipate Cat, that Don had written especially for her about her cat called ‘Garden’. Polly and Don often spoke on the phone and she sent Don some photos of her with her cat. Don loved cats. A recording of the poem is available on YouTube :Read More →

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Bury Art Museum & Sculpture Gallery are hosting an unusual Beefheart related exhibition from 11th November 2023 to 17th February 2024 called Rooms to Live. Rooms to Live is a collaborative piece by artists Derek Tyman and Andy Webster centred around two interrelated sculptural installations – Trout House Replica and So the Red Rose. As the name suggests, Trout House Replica recreates the interior of the Los Angeles Woodland Hills house where Beefheart dictated his legendary Trout Mask Replica album to the long suffering Magic Band. This space is being used throughout the exhibition as a performance space for musicians. As well as live performancesRead More →

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Gary Lucas will be presenting his Beefheart Symposium show in the Netherlands in July. Date : Friday 7th July 2023 Venue : The Royal Cinema, Heerlen, Netherlands The Symposium will include “lots of guitar, rare clips and Don Van Vliet’s beautiful art”. There will also be additional special feature. Gary will be playing live his score accompanying Orson Welles’s rare silent surrealist classic  ‘Too Much Johnson’. More info here – https://filmhuisdespiegel.nl/programma/1604/orson-welles-captain-beefheart/?fbclid=IwAR2euGlMTDvlbpYBgNury8o1jfyoUyg1NIwgQDrgRAdlPGCQlp_jSpFQPicRead More →

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Our favourite Beefheart tribute band, Orange Claw Hammer, have a number of live shows booked. You can check them out reworking the music of Captain Beefheart for the 21st Century on the following dates : 2023 Fri 7th July, 8pm. The Old Hairdresser’s, 27 Renfield Lane, Glasgow. Fri 14th July, 11am. Zappanale (Exhibition Hall), Bad Doberan, Germany. Sat 15th July, 8pm. Zappanale (Mystery Stage), Bad Doberan, Germany. Sat 19th Aug, 8pm. Edinburgh Fringe, Bannerman’s, 212 Cowgate Fri 25th Aug, 8pm. Edinburgh Fringe, Bannerman’s, 212 Cowgate 2024 Sun 25th Feb, 8pm. Backstage at the Green Hotel, Kinross.Read More →

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An interesting experiment has turned up on Youtube. Using AI software Ant 2 Man Bee has deconstructed the Trout Mask album. He’s taken each of the songs and isolated each individual track, breaking it down so you can hear Mark’s bass, John’s drums, Bill’s guitar, Jeff’s guitar and Don’s vocals separately. As Ant 2 Man bee explains: I was shocked at how good the neural net was after I tested using Sugar ‘n Spikes. While it isn’t perfect, it is still amazing how quickly the technology evolved when just a few years ago you couldn’t isolate instrumentations from whole songs without having a very goodRead More →

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I’ve been sent information by Frederica Caliandro who hosts an Italian web radio series called ‘Art Around Music’. On Thursday 12th May 2022 at 6pm she will be presenting a show about Don: The fortnightly appointment with ART AROUND MUSIC by Ki Kal Federica Caliandro is with Don Van Vliet alias CAPTAIN BEEFHEART, a total and experimental artist. Musician, songwriter, sculptor and painter active through the seventies and eighties, disseminating art everywhere, as intriguing and hypnotic as chaotic and oblique. Appointment in streaming on https://webradio.admr-chiari.it or via the ADMR Rock Web Radio app From the site you can also download the podcasts of previous episodesRead More →

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Are you looking for some live Beefheart music? Well, there’s some coming up in New York … THE WORLD OF CAPTAIN BEEFHEART featuring GARY LUCAS and NONA HENDRYX — with Fast ’N Bulbous and Gods and Monsters vets Jesse Krakow on bass, Richard Dworkin drums, and Jordan Shapiro keyboards — will perform for the first time in several years as part of Bang On a Can’s Long Play Festival in Brooklyn the last weekend in April. The group will perform at Roulette, the venerable avant-garde music club at 509 Atlantic Avenue at 8:30pm on Friday April 29th More about the festival and tickets here: https://bangonacan.org/longplay/Read More →

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Takes on more Captain Beefheart music. Song List Pachuco Cadaver Moonlight on Vermont Nowadays A Woman’s Gotta Hit A Man Low Yo Yo Stuff Semi Multicoloured Caucasian Abba Zaba When Big Joan Sets Up Suction Prints Alice In Blunderland Woe-Is-Uh-Me-Bop Kandy Korn Willie the Pimp (live) Tracks 1 – 11 recorded at The Clock Tower Studios, Edinburgh May 2019 & Jan/Mar 2020 Track 12 recorded live at Henry’s Cellar Bar, Edinburgh August 2019 Now here’s an album I’ve been waiting to hear. This is the follow-up to Orange Claw Hammer’s first outing Cooks The Beef which reworked a bunch of Beefheart tunes for the 21stRead More →

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Available on Bandcamp the PRF Monthly Tribute Series is an ongoing project which challenges musicians to attempt covers of a particular band or artist.  The musicians are given a month to record songs by that band, or about that band, or in the style of the band. In September 2019 the 63rd in the series it was the turn of Captain Beefheart. Situations – Grown So Ugly (3:19) – this track races along as a straightforward rock song rather than following the blues of the original Doctor Coffee – Dropout Boogie (2:42) – a similar arrangement to the SAM track complete with waltz-style break butRead More →

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Don would have been 80 years old today. To celebrate that milestone Gary Lucas has written a piece for the Please Kill Me website about the dysfunctional relationship between Don and Frank Zappa. Gary offers his take on the rivalry between to the two old friends and also looks at the recording of the last Beefheart album Ice Cream For Crow. Read the article – Don Van Vliet and Frank Zappa: Two Peas In A Misshapen Pod   Another album that gets mentioned in the article is Doc At The Radar Station which last year reached its 40th anniversary. Gary devoted three of his FacebookRead More →

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Originally published in the Wall Street Journal December 19, 2010 Noted avant guitarist and composer Gary Lucas was a colleague and friend to Don Van Vliet, better known as Captain Beefheart, who died Friday. Calling him “the most compelling conceptualist I’d ever heard,” Lucas once told the Journal that Van Vliet had “taken the structure of the jazz and blues and rebuilt it like no one else had.” We asked him to record his thoughts about his mentor and friend. Don Van Vliet was an American maverick visionary genius who single-handedly changed the face of music we know it over a dozen uncompromising albums. HeRead More →

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Has it really been that long? It has been even longer since he’d been really productive as an artist. He’d given up recording music completely to concentrate on painting but even that was denied to him as the MS he suffered from gradually took hold. It must have been frustrating for him as someone who had continually created, to whom it seemed to come so easily, always doodling in his drawing books, writing poems and lyrics, whistling, humming… He battled against the disease for as long as he could, some of his last drawings were no more than a few scribbled lines but they representedRead More →

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As you may know Gary Lucas has been regularly busking via his Facebook page during the lockdown. He has already devoted a couple of those sessions to the music of Beefheart. To celebrate the 40th anniversary of its release Gary will be focusing on the album Doc At the Radar Station during his sessions on Tuesday 1st September, Thursday 3rd September and Saturday 5th September starting at 3pm EDT which is 8pm BST. Find Gary’s Facebook page here – https://www.facebook.com/gary.lucas.5836Read More →

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In 1993 Gerry Pratt started publishing his amazing fanzine ‘Steal Softly Thru Snow’. It ran to only eight issues sadly but was an important source of information for many Beefheart fans in the days before the internet. Various problems caused its eventual demise and although it has now been superseded by websites such as this one (which owes a debt of gratitude to SSTS) copies are still highly sought after. It has always been an idea at the back of my mind to scan all the issues and make them available here on the Radar Station. This is a project that has been bubbling awayRead More →

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During the pandemic lockdown Gary Lucas has been live-streaming performances on Facebook from home several times a week. In a special three part series of performances in June 2020 Gary featured a Beefheart tribute. If you missed those streams or don’t like wading through the morass that is Facebook then hurry on over to Gary’s website to catch videos of all three of his Beefheart shows. You will also find there a selection of paintings and drawings by Don Van Vliet from his personal collection, including the backstory behind each piece. And there’s more … Gary writes about his Top 5 Captain Beefheart albums whichRead More →