Saxawhaman

 The first time I heard of the French band Saxawhaman was on the first "Skankin' 'Round the World" compilation with the song Le Robot. I'm willing to bet that's when you first heard the name too. In those days it was easy to find out information about every band on that compilation except for this band. When I first started exploring the internet this is one of the bands I was looking for but I never found anything about them.

Thankfully Discogs came along and I could, at least, know what else they recorded which eventually revealed that they released very little. 

The band later changed their name to Les Saxas and they released even less. Officially Les Saxas only ever put out two songs for the good people of the world. The song Chez Fefer from the "Vive le Ska" compilation from 1989 and the song Gueule De Bois which was not released as an audio track but on a video called Bar'ouffs from 1990 that was only released on VHS - probably Region 2 which means that American VCRs wouldn't have been able to play the tape. (NTSC as opposed to PAL) but, despite that, I have included the song in this download. 

 

The music offered in this download is a lot of incredible rare pieces of ska history but the sound quality of these tracks are not very good. If you are a casual ska fan you might want to skip this one but if you are a true skarcheologist (I forget who coined this term many years ago, but I thank them!) you will really appreciate this post. 

 

 Saxawhaman - Maquette* (demo tape recorded on the 11th of April, 1986)

1 Fuera de la Lei

2 Midnight Madness

3 Sweet Honey Moon on My Blue Bird

Saxawhaman - Saxawhaman* (demo tape from 1987 with re-recorded versions of two songs from the first demo tape)

1 Zombie's Night

2 Fuera de la Lei

3 Sweet Honey Moon on My Blue Bird

This, and the song Le Robot, is all I have by this band aside from a few live songs I found on YouTube:

*Fuera de la Lei (live)

*White Man (live) - Clash cover

*La Bamba (yes, this is a cover too - Richie Valens - but you knew that)

And then I threw in the first song that Les Saxas played the first time they played live. It's an instrumental and I don't know what the title of the song is. I stole it from YouTube. 

Then there are these three Les Saxas songs

*Chez Fefer

*Guele de Bois (from the VHS tape)

*Saint Kemar

They actually do have other songs floating around out there but I don't have them. If anybody does, please let me know.

DOWNLOAD from MEGA

DOWNLOAD from Zippyshare

*For the record I do own these original cassettes and I am willing to part with them. If you need to own these artifacts - these museum pieces of ska history - let me know. We'll talk.