Back in the late ‘80s I was in a band. Then again, who wasn’t? It star­ted off as simply muck­ing about in a mate’s gar­age in Molash — first as “Kick­ing the Kerb” and then “Addi­tional Noise”. Finally we settled on a name that we felt suited us, taken from a track on Adam and the Ants’ first album, “Dirk Wears White Sox”.

The line-up at the time con­sisted of me on bass, Phil Har­vey on gui­tar, Dar­ren Reed on drums and Bry­ony Rag­gett on vocals. To be hon­est, we were just hav­ing fun — we all wrote the lyr­ics and the music between us: we didn’t like to do cov­ers, on the premise that if we played our own stuff nobody could tell us we were play­ing it wrong!

It was a magic time. We played local ven­ues in and around Ash­ford in Kent, plus a couple of gigs in Lon­don — includ­ing the Rock Garden in Cov­ent Garden and the Tun­nel Club. We prac­tised in the vil­lage hall at Molash, as it was con­veni­ent for us all and we gen­er­ally just had a laugh doing it.

Phil left the band in 1989 and Aran Brookes took over bring­ing a rocky edge to our per­form­ances. I left in 1989/1990 and Ben Wat­son took over from me on bass. The band went through two more name changes with dif­fer­ent lineups as “FON” and then “The Dale Coopers”.

Sadly, I have no pho­tos of the whole band in its ori­ginal form and have lost con­tact with Dar­ren and Bry­ony, but Phil is now a suc­cess­ful pho­to­grapher and his work can be seen on his web site.

How­ever, recently my Dad took away some of the old cas­settes I had lying around and con­ver­ted them into digital. Below is a sample of some of our work from a full-day stu­dio ses­sion we did in Ash­ford when it was me, Phil, Dar­ren and Bryony.

Enjoy.

Flash required

*UPDATE* — had some good news today when I finally tracked down Bry­ony through Face­book! Gotta love social net­work­ing sometimes!