The Age

File:The Age logo.svg
The front page of The Age on 6 June 2011
Type	Daily newspaper
Format	Broadsheet
Owner	Fairfax Media
Editor	Paul Ramadge
Founded	1854
Headquarters	Melbourne, Australia
Circulation	Monday - Friday 685,000, Saturday 844,000, Sunday 697,000[1]
ISSN	0312-6307
OCLC number	224060909
Official website	www.theage.com.au

The Age is a daily broadsheet newspaper which has been published in Melbourne, Australia since 1854. Owned and published by Fairfax Media, The Age primarily serves Victoria but is also available for purchase in Tasmania, the Australian Capital Territory and border regions of South Australia and southern New South Wales. It is delivered in both a hardcopy and online formats. The newspaper shares many articles with other Fairfax Media metropolitan daily newspapers, such as The Sydney Morning Herald.

The Age was founded by three Melbourne businessmen, the brothers John Cooke and Henry Cooke, who had arrived from New Zealand in the 1840s, and Walter Powell. The first edition appeared on 17 October 1854.

The Age currently has an average weekday circulation of 190,600, increasing to 275,000 on Saturdays (in a city of 4 million). The Sunday Age has a circulation of 225,400.^[2] The paper currently has a Monday to Friday readership average of 668,000, reaching an average of 857,000 on Saturdays. The Sunday Age attracts an average of 695,000 readers.^[2]

History[link]

Syme family[link]

The venture was not initially a success, and in June 1856 the Cookes sold the paper to Ebenezer Syme, a Scottish-born businessman, and James McEwan, an ironmonger and founder of McEwans & Co, for 2,000 pounds at auction. The first edition under the new owners was on 17 June 1856. From its foundation the paper was self-consciously liberal in its politics: "aiming at a wide extension of the rights of free citizenship and a full development of representative institutions," and supporting "the removal of all restrictions upon freedom of commerce, freedom of religion and—to the utmost extent that is compatible with public morality—upon freedom of personal action."^[3]

Ebenezer Syme was elected to the Victorian Legislative Assembly shortly after buying The Age, and his brother David Syme soon came to dominate the paper, editorially and managerially. When Ebenezer died in 1860, David became editor-in-chief, a position he retained until his death in 1908, although a succession of editors did the day-to-day editorial work. In 1891 Syme bought out Ebenezer's heirs and McEwan's and became sole proprietor. He built up The Age into Victoria's leading newspaper. In circulation it soon overtook its rivals The Herald and The Argus, and by 1890 it was selling 100,000 copies a day, making it one of the world's most successful newspapers.

A copy of the first edition of The Age

Under Syme's control The Age exercised enormous political power in Victoria. It supported liberal politicians such as Graham Berry, George Higinbotham and George Turner, and other leading liberals such as Alfred Deakin and Charles Pearson furthered their careers as The Age journalists. Syme was originally a free trader, but converted to protectionism through his belief that Victoria needed to develop its manufacturing industries behind tariff barriers. In the 1890s The Age was a leading supporter of Australian federation and of the White Australia policy.

After Syme's death the paper remained in the hands of his three sons, with his eldest son Herbert Syme becoming general manager until his death in 1939. Syme's will prevented the sale of any equity in the paper during his sons' lifetimes, an arrangement designed to protect family control but which had the effect of starving the paper of investment capital for 40 years. Under the management of Sir Geoffrey Syme (1908–42), and his chosen editors Gottlieb Schuler and Harold Campbell, The Age failed to modernise, and gradually lost market share to The Argus and to the tabloid The Sun News-Pictorial, although its classfied advertisement sections kept the paper profitable. By the 1940s the paper's circulation was smaller than it had been in 1900, and its political influence also declined. Although it remained more liberal than the extremely conservative Argus, it lost much of its distinct political identity.

The historian Sybil Nolan writes: "Accounts of The Age in these years generally suggest that the paper was second-rate, outdated in both its outlook and appearance. Walker described a newspaper which had fallen asleep in the embrace of the Liberal Party; "querulous," "doddery" and "turgid" are some of the epithets applied by other journalists. It is inevitably criticised not only for its increasing conservatism, but for its failure to keep pace with innovations in layout and editorial technique so dramatically demonstrated in papers like The Sun News-Pictorial and The Herald."

In 1942 David Syme's last surviving son, Oswald Syme, took over the paper. He modernised the paper's appearance and standards of news coverage (removing classified advertisements from the front page and introducing photographs, long after other papers had done so). In 1948, convinced the paper needed outside capital, he persuaded the courts to overturn his father's will and floated David Syme and Co. as a public company, selling 400,000 pounds worth of shares, enabling a badly needed technical modernisation of the newspaper's production. A takeover attempt by the Warwick Fairfax family, publishers of The Sydney Morning Herald, was beaten off. This new lease on life allowed The Age to recover commercially, and in 1957 it received a great boost when The Argus ceased publication.

1960–present[link]

Oswald Syme retired in 1964, and his grandson Ranald Macdonald became chairman of the company. He was the first chairman to hand over full control of the paper to a professional editor from outside the Syme family. This was Graham Perkin, appointed in 1966, who radically changed the paper's format and shifted its editorial line from the rather conservative liberalism of the Symes to a new "left liberalism" characterised by attention to issues such as race, gender and the environment, and opposition to White Australia and the death penalty. The Liberal Premier of Victoria, Henry Bolte, called The Age "that pinko rag," a view conservatives have maintained ever since. Former editor Michael Gawenda in his book American Notebook wrote that the "default position of most journalists at The Age was on the political Left.".^[4]

Perkin's editorship coincided with Gough Whitlam's reforms of the Australian Labor Party, and The Age became a key supporter of the Whitlam government, which came to power in 1972. Contrary to subsequent mythology, however, The Age was not an uncritical supporter of Whitlam, and played a leading role in exposing the Loans Affair, one of the scandals which contributed to the demise of the Whitlam government.

After Perkin's early death in 1975 The Age returned to a more moderate liberal position. It supported Malcolm Fraser's Liberal government in its early years, but after 1980 became increasingly critical and was a leading supporter of Bob Hawke's reforming government after 1983. But from the 1970s the political influence of The Age, as with other broadsheet newspapers, derived less from what it said in its editorial columns (which relatively few people read) than from the opinions expressed by journalists, cartoonists, feature writers and guest columnists. The Age has always kept a stable of leading editorial cartoonists, notably Les Tanner, Bruce Petty, Ron Tandberg and Michael Leunig.

In 1966 Macdonald took the fateful step of allowing the Fairfax's to acquire a stake in the paper, although an agreement was signed guaranteeing the editorial independence of The Age. In 1972 Fairfax bought a majority of David Syme shares, and in 1983 bought out all the remaining shares. David Syme and Co. became a subsidiary of John Fairfax and Co. Macdonald was denounced as a traitor by the remaining members of the Syme family (who nevertheless accepted Fairfax's generous offer for their shares), but he argued that The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald were natural partners and that the greater resources of the Fairfax group would enable The Age to remain competitive. By the 1980s a new competitor had appeared in Rupert Murdoch's national daily The Australian. In 1999 David Syme and Co. became The Age Company Ltd as part of John Fairfax Holdings Ltd., finally ending the Syme connection.

Previous Headquarters

The Age Headquarters in Collins Street, completed 2009

The Age was published from offices in Collins St until 1969, when it moved to 250 Spencer St (hence the nickname "The Spencer Street Soviet" favoured by some critics). In 2003, The Age opened a new printing centre at Tullamarine. The Headquarters moved again in 2009 to Collins Street opposite Southern Cross Station.

Currently there are two editions of The Age printed nightly. The NAA edition, for interstate and country Victorian readers and the MEA edition, for metropolitan areas. These two editions are printed in three separate editions, the earliest for country and interstate readers, the second edition for metropolitan and the final late edition THA, also for metropolitan areas carrying late or breaking stories not covered in the first two editions.

Friday's edition of the newspaper now includes a racing liftout which includes extended form and analysis for Saturday's major race meetings.

Like its Fairfax stablemate The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age announced in early 2007 that it would be moving from a broadsheet format to the smaller Berliner size, in the footsteps of The Guardian and The Courier-Mail.^[5] Both The Age and the Herald dumped these plans later in the year without explanation, to the amusement of The Australian's Chris Mitchell, who called the about-face "a bit embarrassing".^[6]

In 2009, The Age suspended its columnist Michael Backman after one of his columns condemned Israeli tourists as greedy and badly behaved, prompting criticism that he was anti-semitic. However a Press Council complaint against The Age for its handling of the complaints against Backman was dismissed.^[7]

Headquarters[link]

The Age headquarters, known as Media House, is shared with other Fairfax business units including: 3AW radio, Magic1278 radio, The Australian Financial Review Group, and Fairfax Community Network.^[8] Media House was designed by Bates Smart and built by Grocon for $110 million.^[9] The building was formally opened in October 2009.^[10]

Masthead[link]

The Age masthead has received a number of updates since 1854. The most recent update to the design was made in 2002. The current masthead features a stylised version of the Royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom and "The Age" in Electra Bold type. The crest features the French words Dieu et mon droit ("God and my right"). According to The Age's art director, Bill Farr: "No one knows why they picked the royal crest. But I guess we were a colony at the time, and to be seen to be linked with the Empire would be a positive thing."^{[citation needed]} The original 1854 masthead included the Colony of Victoria crest. In 1856, that crest was removed and in 1861, the royal coat of arms was introduced. This was changed again in 1967, with the shield and decoration altered and the lion crowned. In 1971, a bold typeface was introduced and the crest shield rounded and less ornate. In 1997, the masthead was stacked and contained in a blue box (with the logo in white). In 2002, in conjunction with an overall revamp of the paper, the masthead was redesigned in its present form.^[11]

Ownership[link]

In 1972 John Fairfax Holdings bought a majority of David Syme shares, and in 1983 bought out all the remaining shares.

Printing[link]

The Age was published from its office in Collins Street until 1969, when the newspaper moved to 250 Spencer Street. In 2003, The Age Print Centre was opened at Tullamarine. The centre produces a wide range of publications for both Fairfax and commercial clients. Among its stable of daily print publications are The Age, The Australian Financial Review and The Bendigo Advertiser. The Age Print Centre uses Norske Skog paper and is a member of the Publisher's National Environment Bureau (PNEB).

Controversies[link]

This article's Criticism or Controversy section may compromise the article's neutral point of view of the subject. Please integrate the section's contents into the article as a whole, or rewrite the material. (November 2010)

In 2004 Gawenda was succeeded as editor by British journalist Andrew Jaspan. Jaspan aroused controversy by initially not appearing to know that The Age was published in Melbourne,^{[citation needed]} sacking Gerard Henderson,^{[citation needed]} a prominent conservative columnist, from the paper and by making remarks critical of Douglas Wood, an Australian who was held hostage and tortured in Iraq. Jaspan accused Wood on ABC radio of being boorish and coarse for speaking harshly about those who kidnapped and tortured him.^[12]

The generally left-wing The Age is frequently compared with Britain's leftist Guardian newspaper.^[6] Henderson, writing in the Murdoch-owned competitor The Australian, is one of many to describe it as "The Guardian on the Yarra".^[13]

According to The Guardian newspaper, former Fairfax chief executive Fred Hilmer wrote in his memoirs that "he struggled to cope with a left-leaning editorial culture at papers such as The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, and was surprised that journalists saw themselves as advocates rather than simply reporters."^[14] Hilmer said that "Fairfax's default position was to turn left and be agenda-driven... Journalists often conducted campaigns where they persisted in covering stories long after readers had lost interest."^[14]

In February 2007 The Age took a prominent role to publicly advocate on behalf of the Free David Hicks campaign (where Hicks was a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay).^{[citation needed]}

'Reporting on 19 March 2010 an alleged corruption in religion, The Age claimed that the Vienna Boys Choir “has been caught up in accusations that pedophile priests systematically abused their choristers", even though the complaints were made against teachers and older pupils of the choir, which is a private organisation.^[15] Reviewing the matter, journalist Paul Mees in Crikey accused The Age of outright "fabrication".^[16]

In 2011, the Sunday Herald Sun's James Campbell revealed a so-called 'hacking scandal' involving journalists at The Age who were accused of illegally accessing the computers of a political party.^[17] Following a complaint by the Victorian Electoral Commissioner, the suspected journalists, including the editor-in-chief Paul Ramadge, are being investigated by Victoria Police.^[18] The journalists are expected to appear before a parliamentary hearing in 2012.^[19]

Editors[link]

See also[link]

	Australia portal
	Journalism portal

• Journalism in Australia
• List of newspapers in Australia

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• C. E. Sayers, David Syme, Cheshire 1965
• Don Hauser, The Printers of the Streets and Lanes Of Melbourne (1837–1975) Nondescript Press, Melbourne 2006

External links[link]

• theage.com.au - The Age website
• about.theage.com.au - The Age corporate website
• inside.theage.com.au - The Age information hub
• Half a century of obscurity (Sybil Nolan on the history of The Age)
• Sir Geoffrey Syme "Sir Geoffrey Syme Journalist & Managing Editor of The Age from 1908 until 1942"
• The Newspaper Works

Look up age in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Age may refer to:

• Ageing, the effect of time on a person
• Age (geology)
• Age (model theory), an aspect of mathematical model theory
• Age (journal), an international peer-reviewed journal operated by Springer.
• The Age, a daily newspaper published in Melbourne, Australia
• Agé, a god
• Åge, a given name
• Aage, a given name
• Âge, a Japanese media company
• Advanced glycation end-product, a type of chemical
• American Aging Association or AGE, an organization for aging studies
• Applied general equilibrium, a model in mathematical economics
• Agricultural & General Engineers, a group of engineering companies
• Arterial gas embolism
• Astrological age, a period in western astrology
• Agenore Incrocci or Age, an Italian screenwriter
• Esimbi language or Age, a language of the Cameroons
• Wangerooge Airport's IATA code
• The Age, a nineteenth century American newspaper edited by Melville Fuller

See also[link]

• Senescence, the biological effect of time
• Periodization
• Aging (disambiguation)
• AIG (disambiguation)
• AG (disambiguation)

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

Jam & Spoon was a German trance duo from Frankfurt. The group consisted of composers and producers Rolf Ellmer (aka Jam El Mar - classically trained composer) and Markus Löffel (a DJ, stage name: Mark Spoon). They also worked under the pseudonyms Tokyo Ghetto Pussy, Storm and Big Room. Under these pseudonyms, the credits on the albums are listed as Trancy Spacer and Spacy Trancer.

Biography[link]

Jam & Spoon's first album, BreaksUnit1, was released in 1991. They had their first hit with the 1992 song "Stella". It was widely played, remixed and bootlegged in the dance club community for years after its release. The pair also remixed the singles "The Age of Love" and "Go". Their first international and commercial success came in 1994, with the singles "Right In the Night" "Find Me" and "Angel". These tracks featured vocals by the singer, Plavka Lonich. The albums Tripomatic Fairytales 2001 and Tripomatic Fairytales 2002 were released in 1994, followed by Disco 2001 (1995) as Tokyo Ghetto Pussy, Kaleidoscope (1997), Stormjunkie (2000) as Storm, and finally Tripomatic Fairytales 3003 (2005).

In 2000 they remixed "The Chase," a 1979 Giorgio Moroder track. Credited to 'Giorgio Moroder vs. Jam & Spoon', the song reached number 1 on the US Billboard Hot Dance Music/Club Play chart. In June 2002, "Be.Angeled" peaked at #4 on that chart.

Markus Löffel died of a heart attack in his Berlin flat, on 11 January 2006 at the age of 39.^[1]

In September 2006, a two compact disc set entitled Remixes & Club Classics was released to celebrate Mark Spoon. It is the first compilation of the duo's collected works, and featured an exclusive track "Be.Angeled - Tribute to Mark Spoon", performed live at the 2006 Love Parade in Berlin.

Discography[link]

Albums[link]

• Breaks Unit 1 (1991)
• Tripomatic Fairytales 2001 (1993) - UK #71^[2]
• Tripomatic Fairytales 2002 (1993)
• Kaleidoscope (1997)
• Tripomatic Fairytales 3003 (2004)
• Remixes & Club Classics (2006)

Singles[link]

See also[link]

• List of number-one dance hits (United States)
• List of artists who reached number one on the US Dance chart

References[link]

External links[link]

• Jam & Spoon Discography at Discogs
• Jam & Spoon Unofficial Discography

The Residents are an American art collective best known for avant-garde music and multimedia works. The first official release under the name of The Residents was in 1972, and the group has since released over sixty albums, numerous music videos and short films, three CD-ROM projects and ten DVDs. They have undertaken seven major world tours and scored multiple films. Pioneers in exploring the potential of CD-ROM and similar technologies, The Residents have won several awards for their multimedia projects. Ralph Records, a record label focusing on avant-garde music, was started by The Residents.

Throughout the group's existence, the individual members have ostensibly attempted to operate under anonymity, preferring instead to have attention focused on their art output. Much outside speculation and rumor has focused on this aspect of the group. In public, the group appears silent and costumed, often wearing eyeball helmets, top hats and tuxedos - a long-lasting costume now recognized as their signature iconography. Their albums generally fall into two categories: deconstructions of Western popular music, or complex conceptual pieces, composed around a theme, theory or plot. They are noted for surrealistic lyrics and sound, disregard for conventional music composition, and the over the top, theatrical spectacle of their live performances.

History[link]

Origins[link]

The Residents hail from Shreveport, Louisiana, where they met in high school in the 1960s. In 1966 the members headed west for San Francisco, but after their truck broke down in San Mateo, California, they decided to remain there.

While attempting to make a living, they began to experiment with tape machines, photography, and anything remotely to do with art that they could get their hands on. Word of their experimentation spread and in 1969, a British guitarist and multi-instrumentalist named Phil Lithman^[1] and the mysterious N. Senada (whom Lithman had picked up in Bavaria where the aged avant-gardist was recording birds singing) paid them a visit, and decided to remain.

The two Europeans would become great influences on the band. Lithman's guitar playing technique earned him the nickname Snakefinger, after his frantic playing on the violin during the performance with the Residents at The Boarding House in San Francisco 1971, where his fingers' speed made them look like snakes in the eyes of the less-musically proficient, but imaginative Residents.

The group purchased crude recording equipment, instruments and began to make tapes, refusing to let an almost complete lack of musical proficiency stand in the way. Like all information pertaining to the early days of the band, this is provided by The Cryptic Corporation and may or may not be invented.

1969–1972: Residents Unincorporated[link]

In 1969 the group began to make the first of their unreleased tapes. Rumors have surfaced of two (of perhaps hundreds) unreleased reel-to-reel items titled Rusty Coathangers for the Doctor and The Ballad of Stuffed Trigger. The actual titles are in question (as is the notion that these were album-length recordings), but the first title has been confirmed by a former head of the now defunct Smelly Tongues fan club. Further evidence of pre-1970 recordings surfaced with the release of the song I Heard You Got Religion, supposedly recorded in 1969, and released originally as a downloadable track from Ralph America in 1999. Cryptic says there are lots of tapes dating back decades, but they were all recorded before the group had officially become The Residents so the band does not consider them to be part of their discography.

The album The Ballad of Stuffed Trigger has never been released in any form.^[2] "Uncle Willie", former Residents fan club president, wrote in his book Uncle Willie's Highly Opinionated Guide to The Residents that, while searching through the band's archives, he came across "a suite named The Ballad of Stuffed Trigger," but not a complete album.

In 1971 the group sent a reel-to-reel tape to Hal Halverstadt at Warner Brothers, since he had worked with Captain Beefheart (one of the group's musical heroes). Halverstadt was not overly impressed with the Warner Bros. Album (He describes it as "okay at best" in Uncle Willie's Cryptic Guide to the Residents), but awarded the tape an "A for Ariginality". Because the band had not included any name in the return address, the rejection slip was simply addressed to "The Residents". The members of the group then decided that this would be the name they would use, first becoming "Residents Unincorporated", then shortening it to the current name.

The first performance of the band using the name "The Residents" was at The Boarding House in San Francisco in 1971. That same year another tape was completed called Baby Sex. The original cover art for the tape box was a silk-screened copy of an old photo depicting a woman fellating a small child. (Considered artistically rude at that time, it would be viewed as child pornography today).

In 1972 they moved to San Francisco and formed Ralph Records.^[3] By this time, The Cryptic Corporation was operating as a partnership and incorporated to take over the running of Ralph Records.

1972–1980: Album era[link]

Before the Santa Dog single and while recording Meet the Residents, The Residents undertook one of their first major projects: the ambitious Vileness Fats film project. Intended to be the first-ever long form music video, The Residents saw this project as the opportunity to create the ultimate cult film. After four years of filming (from 1972 to 1976) the project was reluctantly canceled because of time, space and monetary constraints. Fifteen hours of footage were shot for the project yet only about three-quarters of an hour of that footage has ever been released.

Santa Dog is considered by The Residents themselves and their fans to be the "official" start of the band's recorded output. This is so because it was the first to be released to the public. Shortly after this release, the band left San Mateo and relocated to San Francisco. They sent copies of Santa Dog to west coast radio stations with no response until Bill Reinhardt, program director of KBOO-FM in Portland, Oregon received a copy. Santa Dog had the strange kind of sonic weirdness he was looking for and it was played heavily on his popular (Radio Lab) show. Bill met The Residents at their Sycamore St. studio in the summer of 1973 with the news of his broadcasts. They were overjoyed that they had finally got media acceptance and he was celebrated with the news that KBOO was the first station to play a Residents record on the air. Inviting him in and treating him like family, The Residents gave Reinhardt exclusive access to all their eclectic recordings, including copies of the original masters of Stuffed Trigger, Baby Sex and the Warner Bros. Album. He promoted these along with Meet the Residents regularly on his radio program. There was considerable resistance to the commercial viability of Residents material. To aid in their promotion, Bill was given 50 of the first 1,000 copies of Meet the Residents. Some were sent to friends, listeners and critics and two dozen were left for sale on consignment at Music Millennium Records where they sat unsold for months. KBOO DJ, Barry Schwam (Schwump, who also recorded with The Residents) promoted them on his program as well. Eventually KBOO airplay attracted many loyal fans and Portland became the epicenter of a worldwide cult phenomenon.

The Residents, at this time, were at a rough point in their career. According to official Residents lore, there was internal turmoil which resulted in a large, "embarrassing" food fight; they decided to resolve this tension in 1974 by recording what would later become Not Available —representative of N. Senada's Theory of Obscurity taken to its logical conclusion. The album was recorded and then placed in storage in order to be issued only when everyone had forgotten about it. However, contractual obligations related to the much-delayed release of Eskimo forced its release in 1978 after the band had almost forgotten about it. The Residents were not bothered by this deviation from their plan since the 1978 decision to release the album would not affect the philosophical conditions under which it was originally recorded.

The Third Reich 'n Roll came next, a pastiche on 1960s rock and roll with an overarching Nazi theme, represented visually on the album cover, which featured Dick Clark in an SS uniform holding a carrot, with a number of Hitlers dancing on clouds behind him. On each side of the record was a single composition, approximately 17½ minutes long, using recordings of classic rock and roll songs that were spliced, overdubbed and edited with new vocals, instrumentation and tape noises.^[3] The original songs were finally removed leaving entirely new and bizarre performances. The music video for this album was shot on the sets that were built for Vileness Fats.

Following The Third Reich 'n' Roll came Fingerprince, a particularly ambitious project not unlike the earlier Not Available recordings. The band's original intention with Fingerprince was to release it as the very first "three-sided" album – they had found a way to simulate a third side by arranging the grooves on one side of the vinyl album to play a completely different program of tracks depending on which series of grooves the needle was dropped on. However, this idea was dropped when the band discovered that the Monty Python comedy troupe had executed the very same idea three years earlier with their Matching Tie and Handkerchief album. The "third side" was later released as an EP titled Babyfingers, and the Babyfingers tracks have since been re-integrated into the Fingerprince album on the CD reissues.

The Residents followed Fingerprince with their Duck Stab/Buster & Glen album – their most easily comprehensible album up to that point. This album got the band some attention from the press (namely NME, Sounds and Melody Maker), and dropped most of their reliance upon the Theory of Obscurity.

Eskimo (1979) contained music consisting of non-musical sounds, percussion, and wordless voices. Rather than being songs in the orthodox sense, the compositions sounded like "live-action stories" without dialogue. The Residents remixed the "songs" in disco style, the results of which appeared on the EP Diskomo. Eskimo was reissued in surround sound on DVD in 2003. Eskimo's cover presents the first instance of the group wearing their signature eyeball masks and tuxedos, which would be featured in many subsequent releases, films, live appearances, and promotional materials.

Commercial Album (1980) consisted of 40 songs, each consisting of a verse and a chorus and lasting one minute.^[3] The songs pastiched the advertising jingle although the songs were not endorsements of known products or services. The liner notes state that songs should be repeated three times in a row to form a "pop song". The Residents purchased 40 one-minute advertising slots on San Francisco's most popular Top-40 radio station at the time, KFRC, such that the station played each track of their album over three days. This prompted an editorial in Billboard magazine questioning whether the act was art or advertising.

When MTV was in its infancy, The Residents' videos were in heavy rotation since they were among the few music videos available to broadcasters. The Residents' earliest videos are in the New York Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection and were eventually released together in 2001 on the Icky Flix DVD, which includes an optional audio track of remixes.

1981-1990: Performance art and concept albums[link]

The Mole Trilogy and The Mole Show (1981-83)[link]

In 1981, a trilogy of albums, starting with Mark of the Mole, was to be released.^[3] A tour ensued, and was narrated nightly by Penn Jillette. The Mole Trilogy is made up of parts I, II and IV. The performance featured The Residents performing behind a burlap screen, occasionally wearing disguises (such as their iconic eyeball masks), while dancers and actors appeared in front of painted backdrops used to help illustrate the story. Penn Jillette would come out between songs telling long intentionally pointless stories. The show was designed to appear to fall apart as it progressed: Penn pretended to grow angrier with the crowd, and lighting effects and music would become increasingly chaotic, all building up to the point where Penn was dragged off stage and returned, handcuffed to a wheelchair, to deliver his last monologue. During one performance, an audience member assaulted Penn while he was handcuffed to the wheelchair.

The 13th anniversary show (1985-86)[link]

After their Japanese distributor approached them for a two-week run in Japan, The Residents created the 13th Anniversary tour. While the musical performance was more mainstream, the stage show was another over-the-top spectacle, featuring inflatable giraffes, dancers in eye ball masks illuminating the darkened stage with work lights, and a lead vocalist who seemed to change costumes throughout the show from wearing his eyeball mask to wearing a Richard Nixon mask, and at one point wearing only a wig and fake ears. After the two-week run in Japan, the Residents took the show through the US. During the US leg of the tour the band encountered a few problems, including having the tour manager having to fan a member's keyboard because of overheating, being booked in a pool hall and having someone run on stage only to be thrown back into the audience.

Backstage at the Hollywood Palace show on December 26, 1985, one member's eyeball mask (Mr. Red Eye) was stolen, so it was replaced with a giant skull mask.^{[citation needed]} The eye was returned by a devoted fan who discovered where the thief lived and stole it back, although Homer Flynn said the person who returned the mask was most probably the thief. It was put into retirement because they said it was "unclean" and in a bad condition—a superfluous shell. After this, the lead Resident was known as Mr. Skull.^{[citation needed]}

The last show of this tour was in January 1987 at The Warfield in San Francisco, with a special appearance by Penn & Teller.^{[citation needed]}

Cube E (1989-1990)[link]

"Cube E" was a three-act performance covering the history of American music. It was a step up from previous shows, featuring more elaborate dance numbers and sets. It was also the first show composed exclusively of music written for the show. The show was almost entirely backlit, with blacklights highlighting fluorescent pieces of costumes and set.

They introduced the first part, which covered cowboy music, on German television as "Buckaroo Blues". It featured the singer and two dancers wearing giant cowboy hats around a glowing campfire. Part two was called "Black Barry" and focused on slave music and the blues. The act ended when a giant cube head rose from the back of the stage. Part three, "The Baby King," featured Elvis songs performed by an elderly Elvis impersonator for his grandchildren. The show ended with an inflated Elvis dying as a result of the British Invasion.

Other works[link]

In the late 1980s, they created the epic recording God in Three Persons, a story about the exploitation of two Siamese twins with healing powers by a male dominant force and The King & Eye, a surreal biography of Elvis Presley and the birth of rock and roll.

1991-97: Multimedia projects[link]

In the 1990s, they created Freak Show. This marked the beginning of The Residents' obsession with emerging computer technology in the 1990s.^[3] Much of the music was made with MIDI devices. Freak Show also served as the name for a CD-ROM released by the Voyager Company on January 1994^[4], shortly after Laurie Anderson's first multimedia CD-ROM experiment, Puppet Motel. Freak Show was also a stage performance by a theater company at the Archa Theater in Prague that premiered on November 1, 1995, and a comic book. Several of the songs were also performed live during the 1997 25th anniversary concerts at the Fillmore in San Francisco. After the CD-ROM's success, the album was re-released as The Freak Show Soundtrack with a different cover. A limited edition, The Freak Show Special Edition, was released in 2002 to mark their 30th anniversary.

Other multimedia projects by The Residents included The Gingerbread Man and Bad Day on the Midway.

1998-2008: Tours and storytelling projects[link]

Wormwood (1998-99)[link]

Based on Bible stories, Wormwood featured the Residents departing from pre-programmed music and again using a live band. The band wore ecclesiastical robes and performed in a brightly lit fluorescent cave. The male and female lead singers switched leads, depending on what characters they needed. Act one consisted of one-off stories about individual Bible characters. Act 2 focused on suites of songs about Bible figures such as Abraham, Moses, and King David. During a performance in Athens, Greece, Nolan Cook, their guitarist, had to leave the stage after taking a rock to the head from an audience member.

Demons Dance Alone and Animal Lover (2002-05)[link]

The Residents recorded the dramatic album Demons Dance Alone (also a tour and DVD in 2002) and Animal Lover in 2005. Singer Molly Harvey began as a Ralph employee but by the mid-90s contributed to virtually all of The Residents' many projects. The Residents' increased reliance on Harvey, essentially handing her half of the vocal duties since at least Demons Dance Alone, parallels their artistic revitalization. Nolan Cook, Carla Fabrizio, Toby Dammit, Eric Drew Feldman, and many other artists continuously worked with the band over the last five years, recording and performing live. The new artists helped to counter what Allmusic derided as a "sonic palette [confined to] factory presets from their new Macintosh audio" of the CD-ROM era.^[5]

In February 2005, The Residents toured Australia as part of the What is Music? festival, performing a two hour retrospective set titled the 33rd Anniversary Tour: The Way We Were. These shows saw a fairly minimal band; three eyeball-headed Residents (one on guitar and two laptop/sample operators), a "stage hand" performer, and a male and female vocalist in costumes reminiscent of the Wormwood Tour. Video projections and unusual flexible screens were added to the stage set, creating an unsettling ambiance. The performances on the Way We Were tour were recorded and were released on CD and DVD in 2005.

Storytelling projects (2006-09)[link]

Summer of 2006 brought the internet download project, River of Crime (Episodes 1–5). River of Crime was their first project with Warner Music Group's Cordless Label. Following the success of River of Crime, The Residents launched their weekly Timmy video project on YouTube. In 2007 they did the music for the documentary Strange Culture and also released a double instrumental album, Night of the Hunters. On the Fourth of July, 2007, the planned October release of their latest project with Mute Records, The Voice of Midnight (a music theater adaptation of E.T.A. Hoffmann's short story "Der Sandmann"), was announced on their website.

On the May 21 they announced on their website that their first North America tour since Demons Dance Alone for a project titled The Bunny Boy was set to begin on October 9 in New York – later an earlier date was added for Santa Cruz. Soon, it was announced that the tour would also include Europe, starting November 13. On June 3, the Residents.com website boasted the planned release of The Bunny Boy which was released on September 1. The website had posted information in which Foxboro claimed this would be a Farewell Tour; it was later revealed that this was nothing more than a mistake by Foxboro.

November 3, 2009 saw three new releases. The Ughs! is a mostly instrumental album made up of music composed earlier in their career, which had been completely reworked for the Voice of Midnight album. Ten Little Piggies is a futurist compilation, ten songs from projects that may or may not be released in the future. Finally Is Anybody Out There is a DVD collecting all the Bunny Boy videos from the series posted on YouTube. The episodes are streamlined and not exactly the same as the originals.

2010-present: Talking Light and beyond[link]

In January 2010 the Residents began a series of tours titled Talking Light, touring North America and Europe. During the tours, which lasted until April 2011, The Residents appeared as a trio (with the explanation that the fourth member "Carlos" had grown tired of the music business and "gone home" to Mexico to care for his mother) and adapted new identities and costumes. The singer, Randy, wore an old man mask, and the other two, keyboardist Chuck and guitarist Bob, wore dread lock wigs and some kind of illuminated optical gear over their faces. The songs were stories about various characters' obsessions with ghosts, imaginary people and supernatural phenomena. One of these performances was featured as part of the edition of the All Tomorrow's Parties festival curated by Matt Groening in May 2010 in Minehead, England. The band released several albums related to the Talking Light concept, including the instrumental albums Dollar General and Chuck's Ghost Music, live album Bimbo's Talking Light, and studio album Lonely Teenager.

In October and November 2011, the Residents presented an early version ofSam's Enchanted Evening at The Marsh performance center in Berkeley, with the lead singer appearing as Randy Rose.^[6]. A new version of "Sam's Enchanted Evening" was subsequently performed in March 2012 at Henry Street Settlement in New York City in a production directed by Travis Chamberlain, co-starring Joshua Raoul Brody and Jibz Cameron (aka, Dynasty Handbag).

On January 10, 2012, The Residents released "Coochie Brake"; it focused on an ambient, slightly ethnic sound, with lyrics in Spanish spoken by, apparently, a new singer.

Identity[link]

Much of the speculation about the members' true identities swirls around their management team, known as "The Cryptic Corporation."^[7] Cryptic was formed as a corporation in California by Jay Clem (born 1947), Homer Flynn (born April 1945), Hardy W. Fox (born 1945), and John Kennedy in 1976, all of whom denied having been band members. (Clem and Kennedy left the Corporation in 1982, much to the chagrin of some fans.^[8]) The Residents themselves do not grant interviews, though Flynn and Fox have conducted interviews with the media.

Nolan Cook, a prominent collaborator with the group in both their live and studio work (as well as being a live member of I Am Spoonbender), denied in an interview that Fox and Flynn are the Residents, saying that he has come across such rumors, and they are completely false. However, Cook himself is considered a member of the band by some, as he is known to wear the same head coverings as the rest of the group during live shows, even wearing the trademark eyeball mask during the Wormwood tour.

William Poundstone, author of the Big Secrets books, compared voiceprints of a Flynn lecture with those of spoken word segments from the Residents discography in his book Biggest Secrets. After noting similar patterns in both, he concluded "the similarities in the spectograms second the convincing subjective impression that the voices are identical." He posited that "It is possible that the creative core of the Residents is the duo of Flynn and Fox." A subset of that belief is that Flynn is the lyricist and that Fox writes the music. In addition BMI's online database of the performance rights organization (of which the Residents and their publishing company, Pale Pachyderm Publishing (Warner-Chappell), have been members for their entire careers), lists Flynn and Fox as the composers of all original Residents songs. This includes those songs written pre-1974 (the "Residents Unincorporated" years), the year Cryptic formed.^[9]

Simon Reynolds wrote in his book Rip It Up and Start Again: Post Punk 1978-1984 that "The Residents and their 'representatives' were one and the same",^[10] elaborating on one of his blogs that "this was something that anybody who had any direct dealings with Ralph figured out sooner rather than later." Reynolds quotes Helios Creed, who identifies The Residents as a keyboardist named "H", a singer named Homer, and "this other guy called John"; and Peter Principle of Tuxedomoon, who claims that "we eventually figured out that the guy doing the graphics and the engineer in the studio were in fact the Residents."^[11]

Cryptic openly admits the group's artwork is done by Flynn (among others), under various names that, put together, become Pornographics, but the pseudonym is rarely spelled the same way twice (examples: Porno Graphics, Pore No Graphix, Pore-Know Graphics); and that Fox is the "sound engineer" — meaning that he is the main producer, engineer, master, and editor of all their recordings. (Since 1976, the Residents' recordings have all listed their producer as "The Cryptic Corporation," presumably meaning Fox in particular.) Many other rumors have come and gone over the years, one being that 60s experimental band Cromagnon shared members with the band.

Most recently, the group's Facebook presence lists the members of the Residents as "Randy, Chuck and Bob." Furthermore, a synopsis for their 2012 stage production Sam's Enchanted Evening provides the name Randy Rose as that of "the Residents' lead singer." While it is clear that the Cryptic Corporation has chosen to share this information publicly, no further confirmation--nor any context as to the roles of "Chuck" and "Bob" in the group, or if these names are, indeed, the names of the group's members--appears to have been issued to date.

Discography[link]