Spectacle Music was launched in 2013 to help promote and sell the recordings and writings of Ian Paul Lowery and his associated musical and writing ventures. The name 'spectacle' was chosen due to Lowery's attentive and reflective views upon 'La Spectacle' - a concept that was theorised by the French Situationists, whom Lowery had been studying as part of his art college course in 1978. He continued to study and be influenced by 'La Spectacle' for many years.
After Lowery’s death in 2001, his elder brother, tried to to locate many of the recorded but unreleased material that Lowery had worked on during the course of his musical career. Many years were spent trying to locate lost master tapes with limited success, but in late 2013 & early 2014, by pure chance and serendipity, many of these were finally discovered. Instantly, approaches were made to major record labels, but needless to say; none were interested. The only way to get Lowery’s ‘lost’ music released and heard was to create and establish a new record label. Thus, Spectacle Music was born.
An old friend of Lowery’s and former bandmate with Ski Patrol and Folk Devils, Nick Clift, was working on a project with his label Definitive Gaze. This was to release a compilation album of Ski Patrol recordings and it became inevitable that Definitive Gaze and Spectacle would work together to release ‘Versions of a Life’ (Ski Patrol Recordings 1979-81) in April 2014.
Later that year Spectacle Music released ‘Get Out the Sun’ - a compilation album of some of Lowery’s best unreleased material. After the success of the first album, in September 2015, another album of previously unreleased material was quickly released; the now iconic ‘Ironic’.
In October,2017 Spectacle Music and Clift produced the profuced yet another album. This was a remastered release of the original Drug of Choice album 'Cooler' now repackaged as 'Agent Orange '92 plus Drug of Choice Sessions.'
With the growing interest in Lowery's work Spectacle Music released 'The Eye of the Beholder' album. This was a digital download album of tracks that hadn't been included on the previous albums.In 2020,following the discovery of more lost master tapes - this time the last tracks he recorded with his second band,the Wall. Titled 'Ian Lowery's Long Lost Last Tracks with - The Wall' - it was a huge success.Following further negotiations with Cherry Red a further compilation album of The Wall (featuring Ian Lowery) was released in 2021- the highly acclaimed 'A New Way to Peroxide'
In July 2021 a new album was released- 'Leviathan', this folllowed the discovery of a demo. tape, made in 1994 for a future album on Beggars Banquet, that sadly never came to fruition.
In 2023 after major resoration work on old discarded, broken and unravelled cassette tapes, an album was produced charting the musical transition from Ski Patrol to Folk Devils. The album 'Under The Radar' featured the collected works of F for Fake and Phantom White Limb.
In May,2024 a another gem was unearthed- a rehearsal session from 1978 of Lowery's first band,The Prefabs- recorded in a disused warehouse in Sunderland!! Now that's what you call Punk! This was followed,in Oct. 2025, by another lost artefact of Lowery's career: " Allied Propaganda" by The Wall featuring two live gigs from 1979.In April 2026 a compilation album 'Born To Swing' was released to accompany the release of a biography of Ian Lowery's Life in Music also titled 'Born To Swing' by acclaimed author Ian Fawdon.
Ian Lowery passed away in 2001. When Folk Devils reformed in 2016 to celebrate a career retrospective compilation, there was only one man they trusted to step into Ian's shoes as frontman: his old friend Dave Hodgson.
It was during that same period that Ian's elder brother David unearthed something remarkable — a collection of home-recorded cassette demos from the 1980s. Hidden in plain sight, often tucked beneath tapes labelled The Stooges or REM, were embryonic song sketches: Ian's voice suddenly appearing mid-tape, introducing ideas that had never seen the light of day.
In 2025, those recordings found their way to Dave Hodgson. Armed with the technology now available to him, Dave spent months in deep experimentation — stripping back Ian's original audio, re-recording with his own vocals, and rebuilding each track from the ground up. The result is something that honours the source material while giving it an entirely new life.
The project is released under the name Hank Deadwood — a character born in Folk Devils' celebrated song Hank Turns Blue, and one that both Ian and Dave have inhabited when performing the song live. It felt like the only fitting name for a collaboration that transcends time.
Another project between Spectacle Music and Clift resulted with two more albums released in quick succession, from one of Lowery’s most successful bands; Folk Devils. First, an anthology album of recordings titled ‘The Best Protection and the BBC Sessions’ was released in November 2015 on the Beggars Banquet label. Second, the highly acclaimed ‘Beautiful Monsters - Singles and Demo Recordings (1984-86)’ was released in September 2016, on the Optic Nerve record label.
An enthusiastic and renewed public interest in Lowery and his musical ventures has resulted in his material being included elsewhere. The classic Folk Devils track ‘Beautiful Monster’ features on a new compilation album 'Silhouettes & Statues: A Gothic Revolution' released in June 2017, on Cherry Red Records label.
In June,2018 Beggars Banquet renewed their faith in Lowery by re-issuing a re-mastered compilation of all King Blank(aka Ian Lowery)recordings; " The Real Dirt Album plus Singles A & B sides". Beggars Banquet continued with the re-issue of yet another re-mastered album of Lowery's work " The Ian Lowery Group-' King Blank To'(30th Anniversary Edition)" in August 2019.In 2022 Cherry Red Records released "C85"' featuring the best of the burgeoning indie scene' and a natural inclusion was,yet another, Folk Devils classic " English Disease"!
More information on these albums can be found by clicking here, or by returning to the Homepage.
For a more in-depth look at Ian Lowery and his musical career over the decades, head over to ianlowery.com
