Jame's Solo Project, "In The Room"...

This set of recordings was the first ‘mass produced’ ‘release’ I ever made. With the help of friends I got a sleeve made up and ran off 20 copies to give to important people in my life. The contents were a scraping together of examples of the-best-I-could-do-up-to-now-ism. Funny though but now this website is here it has become a curious historical document and is included here with a sense of beginnings from it’s tiny box. The cassette is almost 30 years old and is the only source of this material so the sound quality is.... well if you’ve got this far you’ll understand. My musical meanderings had been very enjoyable but I wondered what it would feel like to have my own little album. As it turns out it contains some of the very first recordings of material that later came to find a big audience with Druidspear. The pick of the bunch includes ‘Silver Wheel Mother’ with Ed Buller, who later went on to find fame as a record producer (Suede/Pulp etc..), it had just been written and went on to become ‘Silver Sister’ – a Spear staple to this day.

Ed appears on another couple of tracks but my favourite is ‘Sixteen Dream’, which was recorded on the equipment visible in this photo (left), during a day off from touring with the Psychedelic Furs for the poor love. Elsewhere Dave Bessel crops up on guitar. Dave went on to form Node with Ed and Flood. Hi, Dave!

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Shine-Glo, Underpin, The Chariot and myself were in a band called ‘The Pressure’ and Go Birch’s first contact with me in a musical sense was when he came up to check out a rehearsal. Later we played a gig which has become famous for us having to ask the audience if anyone could play the drums as Dave’s wife had suddenly gone into labour. Incredibly a drummer was found and we actually managed to do the gig! A yet more pertinent point is that the other band on with us had a young guitarist called Andrew Done who I later went on to work with as ‘Nuada’. Andrew was, of course a member of Druidspear through some true landmark moments including the B.B.C. session and the recording of ‘....Slow’.

Elsewhere are moments that capture ‘Apache Lawn’ which was a band including Doug Dent, Simon Lilly and me.