Mike Sinclair is a Nottingham based guitarist and writer who has led or worked with many groups since 1977. Originally from Hull but growing up in Loughborough, he moved to Nottingham at the turn of the eighties. He is currently in the band Hurtsfall.

List of bands:
The Midnight Circus 1975-1983
The Perfect Party 1981-1982
SSURAEA 1983-1987
The Wonderful Wild (ex-The Conspiracy) 1988
The Katskill Disciples 1988 and 1990
Senior Love Daddy 1990
Big Red X 1991-1993
Optimum 1995-1999
SugarBox 1999-2002
Gosh! 2005-2009
The Invisible Friends 2005-2006
Mabel’s Husbands 2009
Dark Horse 2009 to 2013
Dick Venom & The Terrortones 2010-2015
The Death Notes 2016-2018
In Isolation 2017-present
Hurtsfall 2018-present

2024: I spoke to Mike and found out the whole story

Early days and the beginnings of The Midnight Circus

“I was born in October 1960 and spent the first three years of my life living near Hull. In 1963 my parents moved to Nottingham, and later to Loughborough where I went to junior and secondary school. I then spent a year at Swansea University, which I hated, and finally moved back to Nottingham to go to the Polytechnic. I dropped out of my course in 1982 when it looked as though the band I was in at the time was going to get signed by a major record label (spoiler: they signed Wham! instead).

Both of my parents were musical. My dad was a reasonably proficient piano player although I think that had a lot to do with his upbringing rather than any genuine musical talent. Mum mum has sung with several serious choirs and now in her 90s plays in an oldies ukulele group that probably does more gigs a year than I do. However I don’t recall much music being played in the house when I was growing up, and pop music in particular was frowned upon as it was not considered to be “real music”.

I can’t remember having any significant interest in music until the summer before my 11th birthday when I went away for two weeks to Scout camp where Radio 1 was on all day every day, and came back, much to my parent’s horror, obsessed with pop music – in particular T. Rex and Slade. For me the influential bands were all those who were part of the emerging Glam Rock movement, especially The Sweet, the first single I bought was “Hellraiser” and Bowie, my first album was “Ziggy Stardust”. My parents did their best to discourage my interest in pop and rock music and so I didn’t have a lot of records during my teenage years. However they did own a reel-to-reel tape recorder which I commandeered to tape interesting songs off the radio, mostly from the Sunday Chart Show. After glam rock fizzled out, like many people my age I dabbled with prog-rock while I was waiting for something more musically inspiring to come along. In Loughborough there was a tiny rock orientated record shop called “Castle Records” in the arcade, and then I discovered that I could get a return bus ticket to Nottingham for 36p and found Selectadisc and their second-hand and reduced price selections. Because of this my early record collection was a fairly eclectic mix of genres, and often if a record looked interesting and was cheap enough second hand I would buy it and hope that I would like the music. I discovered Greenslade and The Pretty Things among others this way.

Loughborough wasn’t a particularly great place for gigs, and although the University Students Union put on plenty, unless you were a Student Union member or looked over 18 (I didn’t) in order for someone to sign you in, it wasn’t possible to go to any of them. My first gig was Dave Greenslade at Newark Palace Theatre in 1977. I went with some class-mates from school by train and got stranded in Newark because the gig finished after the last train back. We did “Rock/Scissors/Paper” to see who was going to have to phone their parents to come and get us. Luckily it wasn’t me.

I didn’t really start buying records and going to gigs on a regular basis until I went to university in 1979. As I said, back then, Swansea wasn’t a particularly pleasant place, but they did have a Student Radio station that I got involved with and Virgin Records in the town carried most of the records I had heard on John Peel and liked. Nottingham was another step up again. My first gig after I moved here was Bauhaus at The Ad Lib Club in the Summer of 1980, and after that I was going to see local bands plus those I’d heard on John Peel or read about in the NME two or three times a week. But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself…

In 1973 my mum signed up for an evening class in “Folk Guitar” in order to improve her skill set as a primary school teacher and I managed to persuade her to let me go too. For some reason we already had two guitars in the household a nasty steel-strung folk guitar, with painfully high action, bought from a catalogue and a beginners classical guitar that my mum had bought a few years earlier. “My” guitar was barely playable and because of this and the less than inspiring choice of songs we were being taught, I didn’t really make much progress learning to play. Luckily, during the summer holidays, I got hold of The Beatles Complete songbook and suddenly something clicked and I found I could at least strum along to all the songs I knew in a recognisable manner.

I pestered my parents to buy me a better guitar for my 14th birthday. What I wanted was anything electric, but they pretty much said “no” and instead I ended up with a fairly decent Japanese-made acoustic guitar. My playing continued to improve even if it didn’t sound much like the records I was listening to. The following year I sold all my model railway track and trains and took a trip to Leicester with the intention of buying an electric guitar and amplifier. After visiting several musical instrument shops and looking at what they had for sale I realised that I could only afford either a solid electric guitar, but no amp, or a small amplifier and a pickup for my acoustic guitar. I chose the latter deciding that a solid electric guitar would be pointless without an amp. With my acoustic guitar amplified, I still didn’t sound much like the guitarists on my favourite records, but it was a step in the right direction.

Around this time the band that would ultimately become The Midnight Circus started to take form. It was basically a group of people all from my class at school with similar musical tastes who were interested in playing music. We first got together during the school holidays in 1975 and really had no idea what to do next, now that we were all in the same room together with our instruments. It never occurred to us that maybe we should start by playing “covers”. I seem to remember there was a big deal in the music press at the time about bands who wrote their own songs being superior to those who had people like Chinn and Chapman write for them. Therefore it was a given that would write our own songs too. The fact that our instrumentation was limited also had a big influence in our musical direction. We didn’t have a drum kit or a bass guitar, just one electric guitar, my acoustic with a pickup and amp, another acoustic, and some home-made percussion. We also had access to a piano although none of us could really play it and it was often out of tune. I think our first composition was a four chord sequence that I played over and over, whilst a more musically accomplished band member played an “improvised solo” over the top. The others played along the best they could on guitar, those piano notes that were in tune and percussion. By the end of the first day we decided that we could play this piece well enough to commit it to tape, using the same tape recorder I had used for recording tunes off the radio. We were mightily impressed with the result, although I don’t think our parents or other classmates were.

The school friend with the electric guitar left shortly after this to join a typical covers band of the era playing what is now considered “classic rock” but back then was just rock. Myself and my other class mates carried on developing our own unconventional music using our growing selection of unconventional but cheap instruments, along with anything more conventional we could borrow from people we knew at school. I think we finally decided to call ourselves “The Midnight Circus” (taken from a Pretty Things song) in 1977. We would get together during each school holiday to write and record songs mostly for our own amusement. Recording was done live and the “mix” was achieved by the positioning of the instruments and amp(s) in relation to the tape recorder microphones. We would play each song over and over until we had a take without any obvious mistakes, and then move on to the next. By the time we had finished school in the Summer of 1979 we had several hours worth of our own songs and instrumentals recorded. We’d also built up a substantial collection of instruments and noise-making devices including an electric guitar I’d made at school, spending all my free time when I should have been doing study for my ‘A’ Levels in the school woodwork shop.

With everyone going their separate ways to university, that should have been the end of the band. However I didn’t like university much. Swansea was pretty grim at the end of the 70s and I really had enough of formal education, but it was expected of me to go, so I dutifully did. Instead of getting on with my degree course (Marine Biology), what happened was that I got seriously involved with student radio and as a result would spend most evenings listening to John Peel and in between scouring NME and Sounds looking for interesting new music to play on my radio show. One day I spotted in the news section of NME a paragraph about a band called “The Instant Automatons” and how, if you sent them a blank cassette and a stamped, addressed envelope, they would record their album “Eating People – Hints For The Housewife” for you. This sounded intriguing so I dug out an unused C90 and put it in the post. Several weeks later the cassette came back with the music recorded on it along with a photocopied A4 sheet that conveniently folded down to cassette cover size. The revelation for me was not the music itself, which was in my opinion somewhat variable, but the fact that this appeared to be an effective way of getting people who weren’t my immediate friends and family to hear my band, and if people liked the music of the The Instant Automatons, then maybe some of them would actually like our music too.

The rest of The Midnight Circus agreed, and therefore during the Christmas holiday at the end of 1979 we recorded some new, slightly more punky, songs to go along with the “best” of our more prog-rock influenced back catalogue and put together 60 minutes of music under the title of “The Bland Craze” by The Midnight Circus. In January of 1980 I sent off a “press release” to NME and Sounds and by some stroke of luck both publications printed it. And then the cassettes started to arrive. For the first few weeks I was getting 2 or 3 a day which is pretty good going for a home-made album by a band no-one had ever heard of before. To be honest it was a bit of a struggle getting all the cassettes duplicated in a timely manner. Each one had to be done in real time, and in between all my other university activities. Unsurprisingly my academic attendance started to take a back seat to copying cassettes, and writing letters to send back to our listeners.

Over the course of the next 6 months I made over a hundred copies of the album for people who had been intrigued enough to send me a blank cassette. Not only that but we were getting good reviews in fanzines and by the word of mouth from people who had got the album and liked what we were doing. And then The Instant Automatons asked us if we would like to have four and a half minutes on a double EP they were planning to release showcasing what they thought was the best and most interesting DIY cassette music. A proper vinyl release for a band that existed mostly on tape and hadn’t even done a proper gig? How could we say no? In June/July 1980 we booked a day in a 4-track studio on the outskirts of Leicester to record “Silicone Baby” and “The Hedonist Jive” as well as a handful of tracks to complete our second cassette album. Just before the end of the year I was surprised to hear John Peel say that on his program that night he’d be playing a track by The Midnight Circus! A week later I took delivery of our 25 copies of “Angst In My Pants” a double 7″ EP on Deleted Records. And that was the proper beginning of my musical “career”.“

Here some Midnight Circus on YouTube.

MIDNIGHT CIRCUS Silicone Baby
MIDNIGHT CIRCUS The Hedonist Jive
The Midnight Circus – Guernica
The Midnight Circus – Suburbia Nervosa

The Midnight Circus

“The roots of The Midnight Circus can be traced all the way back to Easter 1975, however we didn’t start using the name, which comes from the Pretty Things song “Cries From The Midnight Circus”, until 1977 when the line-up finally settled down with the three “core” members, Chris Baker, Phil Shaw and myself. We had met through being in the same class at school in Loughborough. In the early days there weren’t really any defined musical roles. The band existed almost exclusively through home recording and who played what would depend on who wrote the song and who could play each part the best. Chris was by far the most musically accomplished of the three of us having learnt the cello at school. However we all had a go at all the available musical roles.

In 1977 we had very little in the way of conventional “rock band” musical instruments. Chris and myself both had acoustic guitars fitted with pickups, and I had the only amp in the band. Phil had made himself a “drum kit” fashioned out of various cheap percussion instruments – bongos tambourines and anything that made a suitable noise when hit. I seem to remember that “beer can” featured quite heavily on many recordings. This was all held together using home made stands with clamps which we had “acquired” from the school chemistry labs. We also had two electric reed organs from local junk shops, which had different sounds and chords, but were also out of tune with each other so only one could be used at a time and therefore the overall tuning of any song would depend on whether we were using one of the organs and if we were, which one. Chris had an electronic hobby kit which was wired up to produce a variable pitch tone generator as a very primitive synthesiser. When possible, we would also borrow additional instruments and amplification from people we knew at school for our recording sessions, so occasionally we would have a bass guitar or even a proper electric guitar and amps.

Until 1980 our recoding venue was Phil’s parent’s lounge while they were away on holiday. We would take over the house for 3-4 days, set up all our equipment and record the songs we had written since we last got together. Recording was done live, directly onto a stereo cassette deck, the mix being achieved by moving the instruments, amps and mics around the room until we had a sound we were reasonably happy with. Because there was almost no opportunity for us to play live we only practiced and played the songs until we had recorded a reasonably error-free take, at which point we’d move on to something new. Although punk rock was in full flow by then, musically we were still very much in debt to the rock bands that came before, although our instruments and technically abilities meant we didn’t really sound anything like our influences. Occasionally we would play what we had recorded to school friends who we thought might be interested but mostly it wasn’t particularly well received. Even though we were definitely middle-class in our upbringing the music we produced fell very much into what is now called “outsider art”. It would take until 1980 before we discovered that we were not artistically alone.

By the time we got together for what we thought was going to be our final set of recordings both Chris and myself had added proper electric guitars and fuzz boxes to the instrumentation, but the music still didn’t really sound very conventional. We had even played a few of our songs live in front of an audience at two school events, to the almost complete bemusement of everyone in attendance, and had provided an improvised sound track to a school drama evening organised by ex-pupil Bill Brookman who would much later find “fame” on Britain’s Got Talent. With everyone going off to various universities we all must have thought that would be the end of The Midnight Circus. And if I had never seen that news article about The Instant Automatons in the NME it probably would have been.

When we got back together during the Christmas Holidays in 1979 we also added Richard Maccabee, who had briefly been in our very first musical get-together, on vocals, reed organ, percussion and toy trumpet and recorded a handful of new songs with a more punk/post-punk influence as well as updated versions of a couple of our past favourites. These along with some older recordings made up our first cassette album “The Bland Craze”. The cover featured our Roger Dean-esque “mascot character” created by Phil’s brother-in-law who was an artist. I put it all together into a cassette sleeve using a typewriter, scissors, glue and a photocopier at university along with a press release that I sent to NME and Sounds. The deal was that if you sent us a blank C60 cassette and a stamped, addressed envelope, I would copy the album onto the cassette and send it back along with the sleeve and labels. We really had no idea what to expect, and I was rather surprised to find that following publication I was getting 2-3 cassettes in the post every day. I hadn’t really considered the practicalities of how I was going to duplicate this quantity as they had to be done one at a time in real time, and consequently found myself during all my time free time in one of the university radio studios trying to keep on top of the backlog. I also hadn’t taken into account that every copy was costing me 20p in photocopying charges, and often sending the cassettes back would delayed until I could afford to pay for another run of covers out of my very meagre student grant.

By the end of the university year I had made well over 100 copies of the album. Often I would be sent other DIY cassettes in exchange for ours, which how I discovered that compared to the majority of artists on the cassette scene, especially those who weren’t charging for them, The Midnight Circus came across as a fairly accessible pop band. Having an album that was available for “free” that was mostly composed of music with a recognisable song structure and actual tunes, was making the band rather popular within the scene. We got a number of favourable reviews in various fanzines and were asked to provide tracks for several cassette complications often alongside better-known artists who had also released actual vinyl records. During the Easter holidays we got back together, this time in the garage at Richard’s parent’s house to record new songs for what would be our second cassette album “Pre-Natal Counselling” still using the same live onto cassette method we had done before. We sent a copy of the newly recorded title track to The Instant Automatons for their “Deleted Funtime” cassette compilation and then they asked us if we would be interested in being on a vinyl compilation they were putting together.

We booked a day at “Modern Music” a 4-track studio behind a musical instrument shop in Leicester, and recorded “Silicone Baby” and “The Hedonist Jive” for the record as well as a number of other songs to complete “Pre-Natal Counselling”. Around this time I had decided that I didn’t want to go back to Swansea University. I didn’t really like the place or the course, and that meant it wouldn’t be as easy for me to carry on duplicating our cassettes. To this end we were able to persuade The Instant Automatons to take over copying and distribution for us, so from September 1980 onwards our back catalogue and any new recordings were released through their Deleted Records label.

Sounds had started printing reviews of DIY cassettes and they gave “Pre-Natal Counselling” a fairly favourable one. The Deleted Records compilation EP seemed to take forever to go through the production process, and it wasn’t until December 1980 that I heard “Silicone Baby” on John Peel’s Radio One show. The following week the band received their promised 25 copies of “Angst In My Pants” a double 7″ EP featuring a selection artists from the DIY cassette scene. Among the other artists were the much better known Instant Automatons, The Door And The Window (who included Mark Perry of Sniffing Glue fanzine and Alternative TV on drums), The 012, and The Digital Dinosaurs.

By the time we came to record our third cassette album in 1981 I had bought a bass guitar and Phil had got a Boss Dr Rhythm drum machine. With these we were starting to get more defined musical roles, Richard on Vocals, Chris on Guitar, Phil on Drum Machine programming and Percussion and myself on Bass and occasional Guitar, and also sounding more like the sort of off-beat post-punk band you’d hear on John Peel rather than the musical weirdness that had come before. We also did our very first proper gig at The Ad-Lib club in Nottingham supporting But Is It Art? However because we didn’t know who from the band was actually going to be able to perform we decided not to call ourselves The Midnight Circus, but instead were on the posters as “Sickle Clowns” which is another Pretty Things reference. In the end it turned out to be the only live performance with the full line up of Chris, Richard, Phil and me that we ever did.

At the end of 1981 The Midnight Circus was asked to provide a track for a vinyl compilation album being produced by a record label in Cardiff. Phil and myself had been working on a new song which we recorded and mixed using multiple overdubs in 3 hours at a 16 track studio in the centre of Nottingham (on St. James’ Street if I recall correctly). Unfortunately the album never got released and the master tape and our part of the cover artwork were lost. All I have is a cassette copy of the final mix.

Chis and me wrote and recorded a fourth Midnight Circus album “Galvanising The Dead” later that year. I can’t remember why Phil wasn’t available to be on the recordings, but he was able to borrow a reel-to-reel tape recorder for us, so we could do some basic overdubs in mono and we also had a Casio VL-tone for some drum machine and very primitive synth sounds. By now Phil and myself were both living in Nottingham and we were in the process of putting together our next band. However having got a taste for gigging we decided to use the backing tracks for “Galvanising The Dead” as a basis for some live performances, with me playing guitar and doing (very bad) vocals and Phil playing percussion over the top. We got our first outing in this format simply by turning up to a multi-band gig at the Ad-Lib Club with our instruments and blagging our way onto the bottom of the bill as The Midnight Circus. By the time we were ready to sound check there were no channels left on the PA for our backing tape, so it had to be put through one of the guitar amps on stage. The sound left much to be desired, but we battled our way through the set. A local fanzine compared us very favourably to Throbbing Gristle which wasn’t the intention at all, but it did open the doors for us to do a number of gigs in this format until our next band was ready.

In April of 1982 Chris, Phil and myself got together in Loughborough to record what should have been the fifth album. By now I had bought a Wasp synthesiser and we borrowed a decent reel-to-reel tape recorder and small mixer and the results were much more like a typical post-punk band with a drum machine and synthesiser. However we only managed to record about 30 minutes of music, and this coupled with the fact that Phil and me were very busy gigging and recording with our new band, meant that it never got completed or released. Some of the song ideas got re-purposed later on.

The last Midnight Circus recording was made in summer 1983. At the time I was in the process of recording the first SSURAEA demo using equipment borrowed from Nottingham band Fatal Charm. On a free day, Phil turned up with Richard and Splat!/Howdy Boys guitarist Gary De Bank and a song idea. A few hours later we had come up with a complete arrangement and recorded and mixed two versions of it.

Later that year The Midnight Circus played their final gig at The Hearty Goodfellow with The Untouchables. The line-up was Chris on guitar, me on bass, Phil on drums (an actual drum kit). Richard wasn’t available so vocal duties were handled by a friend of ours, Chris Oxley, who was later singer and guitarist in the Nottingham band Melodia. It wasn’t a great gig, we weren’t well enough rehearsed and the PA system kept picking up radio interference from taxis and the Police. It all fell apart during the final song when it turned out someone was being arrested right outside the venue and the sound was swamped with radio messages about it.

And once again that should have been it. I was about to unveil my new synth-pop band, SSURAEA, Phil was playing drums with My Rash Heart and would later become part of Clint Bestwood And The Mescal Marauders while Chris and Richard had apparently given up music.

However after SugarBox split at the end of 2002, I found myself at a musical loose end and one evening I idly typed “The Midnight Circus” into whatever search engine was popular at the time. To my surprise, in the first few results, there was a revue of our contribution to Angst In My Pants by one Johan Kugelberg in his “Top 100 DIY Singles”:

“34. V/A -Angst In My Pants double EP (Street Level UK 1979) Imagine how good the previous 33 records on this list are, as I guarantee by risk of punishment of rock writer hyperbole, that this is doubtlessly one of the finest records I’ve ever heard, and the second greatest compilation in the history of rock! How can I say this wonders Rutger the Punk from his bedroom in Krakow ? Well the proof is in the pudding: Not only does the record include some of the finest recorded moments by the legendary Instant Automatons (who unknowingly channel the Monks!), 012 and the Door and the Window, but furthermore a rare vinyl appearance by the Digital Dinosaurs, heralded by me, Mario and Geoffrey in that most smug sort of way as unheralded gods of music! If that ain’t enough you get some fine TVP-related spurts from the Missing Persons and extremely do it yourself DIY frenzy from the Midnight Circus. Who in “Silicone Baby” and “Hedonist Jive” have out-poignanted a tow-truck full of Aimee Mann’s and Michelle Shocked’s edgy humanity and funny as shit to boot.”

This review which had originally appeared in Ugly Things Magazine #19 had been republished on the website of Hyped To Death Records. I sent an email thanking them for the review and the very next day I got a reply from label owner Chuck Warner asking if The Midnight Circus had any recordings other than those on Angst In My Pants and The Bland Craze cassette, which he actually had a copy of! When I told him that we had almost 5 hours worth of recorded material, he came back and asked us if we would be interested in releasing a retrospective compilation on CD. After much back and forth between Chuck and various members of the band, Phil and myself put together what we though represented an accurate history of the band including tracks that people who were aware of us would know as well as the opportunity to release for the first time, some of the songs from our last two recording sessions. We struck a deal where Hyped To Death would organise and pay for the production of the CD and we would produce the cover and tray insert. I thought that with my graphic design printing contacts I would be able to get the paper parts done nice and cheaply. Unfortunately we were over-ambitious with the design and it proved rather expensive to produce. The final result was “Richard, Roger, Rodney, Rastus, Raoul, Roderick, Randy, Rupert” (it’s a line from our song Pre-Natal Counselling) which came out on Hyped To Death’s Messthetics sub label a year later. We got a number of reviews on-line most of which were positive, but I got the impression that the CD never sold as well as their other releases by better known DIY artists. We also had a track included on the Messthetics Greatest Hiss compilation CD.

Hyped To Death no longer appear to be in business. The website was “under construction” for several years and now has completely vanished and therefore I am no longer able to get in contact with Chuck Warner. There are apparently some copies of the CD still available through retailers in the US and it does turn up second hand fairly regularly at reasonable prices. On the other hand good condition copies of Angst In My Pants now seem to be worth around £70 minimum. None of the Midnight Circus cassettes appear to have made it on to the second hand market, at least I’ve never seen any being offered for sale. Be aware that there are several bands called The Midnight Circus with recordings available now and often on-line services get them mixed up. Only the ones listed below are from my band.

“The Bland Craze” Cassette LP, Bland Craze Recordings, 1980

“New Day Dawning” Cassette LP (includes 2 tracks by The Midnight Circus), Tika Tapes, 1980 (I also designed the sleeve for this cassette)

“Deleted Funtime” Cassette LP (includes 2 tracks by The Midnight Circus), Deleted Records, 1980

“Pre-Natal Counselling” Cassette LP, Bland Craze Recordings through Deleted Records, 1980

“Angst In My Pants” Double 7″ EP (includes 2 tracks by The Midnight Circus), Deleted Records, 1980

“A Bagful Of Angst Vol. 1” Cassette LP (includes 2 tracks by The Midnight Circus), Sexy Records, 1980

“A Bagful Of Angst Vol. 2” Cassette LP (includes 1 track by The Midnight Circus), Sexy Records, 1981

“Do Modern Atoms Wear Fashionable Clothes?” Cassette LP, Bland Craze Recordings through Deleted Records, 1981

“Galvansing The Dead” Cassette LP, Bland Craze Recordings through Deleted Records, 1981

“Richard, Roger, Rodney, Rastus, Raoul, Roderick, Randy, Rupert” CD LP, Hyped To Death/Messthetics, 2005

“Messthetics Greatest Hiss” CD LP (includes 1 track by The Midnight Circus), Hyped To Death/Messthetics, 2008

This is only cassettes, vinyl and CDs that were actually available to the public and doesn’t include unreleased recordings. There may be a couple more cassette compilations with contributions by The Midnight Circus but until I have access to my record collection again these are all that I can recall from memory.

I think I’ve covered all the various line-ups in the text. Assume that the line-up is always Chris, Phil and me with Richard on about half of the first cassette and all of the next two plus Angst In My Pants, unless mentioned otherwise”.

Much more coming …..

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Notes:
Steve just been looking at the Notts Music Archive website and see that I’m already mentioned as well as many of the people who would at various times be in bands with me.

My listing comes under “Adrian Armstrong” as I was the bassist for Dark Horse from 2009 to 2013 when I had to leave because Dick Venom & The Terrortones were becoming too busy for me to be able to be in both bands.

I was also briefly the bass player in a new version The Invisible Friends around 2005/2006 along with Karl Niemz and Phil Shaw (the same Phil Shaw who was in The Midnight Circus and The Perfect Party).

I think that I had forgotten to mention both these bands in my original band listing, probably because being covers bands (the version of The Invisible Friends I was in was all covers although very much done in our own style) we didn’t make any recordings and also because both bands ran simultaneously with other, more prolific, bands I was in.

You’ll find that my musical “career” is very much intertwined with lots of other Nottingham bands.