KID MONTANA

Belgo/American duo in the eighties.

Kid Montana was the brainchild of Jean-Marc Lederman, a synth freak who started out with the punk band Digital Dance, moved to London in the early eighties (played gigs with The The, Frank Tovey, Gene Loves Jezebel ...) and started out with Kid Montana as a solo-experiment. A first single "Statistics Mean Nothing When You Get On The Wrong Plane" was issued in 1982.

A year later, Lederman met Washington-born Dudley Kludt, a singer who had meandered to Belgium and got stuck here in the then flourishing avant-garde-wave residing in Brussels (eg. Anna Domino, Paul Haig, Tuxedomoon ...). In 1983, the first release (with Lederman on most of the instruments, Kludt doing the vocals and Michel Zyl & Phil Wauquaire (both ex-Digital Dance on bass & drums) was released on Antler Records : the result ended up a being a mix of Japan & Soft Cell called "Revisiting Yalta".

After this, the band moved to Les Disques du Crépuscule, and recorded a mini-album "The Las Vegas God Rush", with Marc Moulin (Telex, Placebo ...) behind the knobs.

One year later, the producer became Gilbert Lederman (earlier with Bernthöler etc, later A&R man for record company EMI-Belgium). The result, the album "Temperamental" is still worth hearing today, and showed quite a mixture of influences such as Aztec Camera, Marc Almond, Tuxedomoon, and some pieces even coming closer to Front 242 ... On the album, there were guest-appearances of Anna Domino (vocals on Love & Trouble & Joey came back home), Marc Moulin on guitar & string, and even Eric Melaerts (see Soulsister, Yasmine) on guitar. The end result was reviewed in "Mad in Belgium" as "garagerockers won't be able to get wild with "Temperamental", industrial adepts won't get numbed down by it, and avant-gardist won't find a deeppsychological and socio-economic analysis. But this album is BEAUTIFUL".

One track of the album "Spooky" (the only cover of the album, of the song made famous by Classics IV) was later also released as a single without mentioning who was behind it, so this single can both be attributed to Kid Montana or The Weathermen (another project of Lederman, with Bruce Geduldig of Tuxedomoon, which enjoyed a little bit more fame than Kid Montana later on).

Although this album ("dedicated to the four-letter word that makes the world go round")was well-received and still enjoys some cult fame to this date, this is where the story of Kid Montana ended.

Dudley Kludt (or Dudley Klute) was last spotted as one of The Three Terrors (a project with a cover programme of vocalists who "sing the saddest songs they know", with Stephin Merritt & Ld Beghtol) or as a guest on Magnetic Fields' "69 Love Songs" (a NY band of Stephin Merritt again). Jean-Marc Lederman went on with The Weathermen, later did some composing for CD-Roms or Alain Bashung.

Leden :
- Dudley Kludt / Klute (vocals)
- Jean-Marc Lederman (instruments)

Koop CD's van deze groep bij

Albums / Releases :
- Statistics Mean Nothing (Maxi, New Dance, 1982)
- Revisiting Yalta (Maxi, Antler, 1983)
- Love May Be Blind (Maxi, Crépuscule, 1985)
- The Las Vegas Gold Rush (MLP, Crépuscule, 1985)
- Temperamental (LP, Crépuscule, 1986 - in 1989 also released on CD with extra tracks)
- Still Color Waiting (12" and 7", Crépuscule, 1987)

Websites :
- discography of Kid Montana at the site of S.Werquin
- The current whereabouts of Jean-Marc Lederman
- The Three Terrors with Dudley Klute.
- A short Dudley Klute biography with a good picture of the man

Forum :
- Lees de berichten over Kid Montana
- Voeg een bericht, vraag, cd- of concertverslag ... over Kid Montana toe