R Stevie is fast turning into a 40 year overnight sensation. A recent cover star of The Wire and a record store day split single with The Vaccines have meant that people want to know what R Stevie is doing.

For the last 4 decades, R Stevie has been making albums and creating an impressive back catalogue. That back catalogue consists of over 500 albums. The task of compiling ‘Lo Fi High Fives’ was something O Genesis supremo Tim Burgess had to keep moving on, sure in the knowledge that once they'd all been heard, R Stevie would have recorded another handful that would have to be pored over.

‘Lo Fi High Fives’ is just the tip of the giant foam finger, check out David Quantick’s sleeve notes below for a real flavour of the man. Add him on facebook. His back catalogue is best appreciated when he posts his songs and his own hipspeak messages. 

Notes to Editors (David Quantick's sleeve notes)
R STEVIE MOORE
“How much music can we take?” asks R Stevie Moore on the song 'Show Biz Is Dead', and it seems an odd question for this extraordinary artist to ask, for there can’t be anyone as prolific and as good as him working today. R Stevie Moore has a back catalogue that some record labels would be proud of, let alone some artists. 

Since 1968, he’s recorded more than 400 albums and written enough songs to fill several festivals to the brim.

Another things that’s great about R Stevie Moore – apart from his name, which makes him sound like a robot in an Isaac Asimov novel, even though his music is far from robotic and emotionless – is that he doesn’t just write songs called 'Pop Music', he makes Pop Music.  

There’s a kind of received truth that’s grown up in the last few years, that anybody who’s cool and underground (by which I mean that they don’t release their music through major labels or have blisterpacks of badges with their name on for sale in large music shops) isn’t supposed to make great pop songs, they’re supposed to sound clanky and bad and write songs on an old plank and live in a hedge. They’re not supposed to sound like George Harrison channeling Beck, or Cheap Trick remembering a Residents song they once heard on a strange radio, or The Beach Boys recording a session for John Peel in 1979. But that’s what R Stevie Moore is. He writes songs that should be, or would be, hits and maybe are in a distant galaxy. He’s a brilliant songwriter and he doesn’t bury his talent in the shed gunge of deliberately bad production; these are songs which sound as good as they ought to, at once both smooth and hard, shiny and gritty. It takes brilliance to do that.

You can hear the people who R Stevie Moore has listened to in his music – or at least you think you can, for all we know he’s never listened to any music in his life and is just making it from inside his extraordinary mind – but that doesn’t mean R Stevie Moore is one of those people who take bits of pop and rock that have gone by and glue them together to create something ironic or Frankensteiny. This is music that you have never heard anywhere else other than on a record by R Stevie Moore. This is an original voice – literally.
If you have everything by R Stevie Moore already, then you probably are him. If you don’t, this is a wonderful collection and you should put it in your music system, your car, your heart and your mind. This is Pop Music like you have never heard it.

DAVID QUANTICK, 2012