Nottingham / Chesterfield Synth-pop band. (1976 – 2015)

Line up:
Dave Grandy – Vocals
Rob Williams – Keyboards
Andy Williams – Guitar
John Geks – Guitar
Alan Athey – Bass
Chris O’Connell – Drums

Rob Williams and the rest of the band put together a biography in January 2025.

BIOGRAPHY

None So Blind formed in the late 1970s in Chesterfield, the home of Alan, John, Andy and Rob. The original singer was Mark Mills, a flamboyant auteur with a taste for subversive lyrics and wordplay. Rob met Dave at Nottingham University in 1978, and as Mark had moved elsewhere, Dave joined the band, singing some of the original songs and adding new ones with his own and Rob’s lyrics. Drum duties were fulfilled by machine during this time, and early recordings were made in the rehearsal space at the YMCA in Chesterfield using a pair of stereo tape decks and an HH mixing desk. The first recordings we ever released from those sessions formed a cassette album called “Dancing Lessons” on our fictitious “Beat Trouser” label.

None So Blind (the name randomly plucked from a paperback book at Alan Athey’s parents’ house) started to play Nottingham gigs at this time, starting with the University Buttery Bar and Portland Building, and soon in the other local venues supporting or double-heading with other bands at that time – 23 Jewels, If All Else Fails, The Howdy Boys and so on. The band were largely well received (we never got bottled off!) and started to pick up a regular following. By now the songs were starting to develop a post punk feel to them.

From September 1979, one year after Dave joined the band, Rob disappeared to Germany for a year of teaching as part of his University course. The band were busy writing during that time, with each member developing musical influences from a range of sources. Depending on who came up with the ideas, songs could be very varied and different. This was always encouraged, making for a very eclectic set list! When Rob returned in 1980 None So Blind were ready to start serious gigging and promotion. We were regulars at the Ad-Lib club, Hearty Goodfellow, Yorker, and many other Nottingham venues, as well as in other cities in the Midlands.

Posters from 1982. £1.50 at the Irish, but we put 50p off vouchers everywhere! Nottingham Music Combine allowed bands to find venues and work with bands they hadn’t met before. Longest Day festival at the University was ambitious. Some might say overambitious!

We were interviewed at the University radio station by Chris, who pointed out what had been clear to us for some time. We needed a drummer. We signed him up on the spot! Over the next couple of years we would challenge him with drum parts which were more machine than man, or played part by him and part by drum machine. It just worked!

In the Summer of 1982 a new music newspaper was launched, called Musician’s Weekly, which was trying to attract a readership by running lots of competitions. We had already won a little Boss drum machine by coming up with a name for a future drum machine invention, which we had called ‘Tin Drum’. Then another competition was offered, whereby bands could submit a 4-song demo cassette, which would be judged the Eurythmics – the prize being a recording session in their studio for the winning track. We submitted four songs that we had been playing for a while – and won, with our song ‘My Favourite Eyes’. A date was set for February 1983 to go down to the Eurythmics’ London studio and record it.

At the time Eurythmics were relatively unknown. Their 1981 album ‘In The Garden’ was the kind of thing some of us were listening to, but it hadn’t made much of an impact. The ‘Sweet Dreams’ album was released in January 1983, and by the time we went to meet the band, it was beginning to create some ripples. We recorded the track, making use of the lovely Oberheim synth and Movement drum machine, which transformed the sound from our original version into something much more recognisably ‘eighties’. The next step was for Dave Stewart to mix and produce it for us in a couple of months time.

By then the Eurythmics had exploded in the charts, on TV, in the press… Apologizing profusely, Dave admitted that he was not going to have time to produce the record for us. In the end, his engineer Adam Williams made a fantastic job of the mix, working closely with the band, and Dave Stewart gave it a listen and approved. So now we had a single! All we needed was a B-Side, and in true eclectic style we picked a very different track. My Favourite Eyes is sequencer based, danceable, killer chorus, duelling guitars, insistent rhythm section. The flipside – The Virus – is relentless, dark, more experimental, without a chorus and fairly angsty. Chris got us access to the University radio station studio and we recorded it there in one night on a borrowed Fostex A8 8 track tape recorder. With both sides recorded we looked for someone to press and distribute it.

We went with Nine Mile and The Cartel, both big names in the independent record industry at the time. The Cartel was a co-operative set up to distribute records from independent labels such as Nine Mile, Rough Trade, Red Rhino and more. In the illustrious company of bands like Joy Division, Cocteau Twins, Depeche Mode and The Smiths, the co-operative was seeding our single into record shops, and we were busy promoting it with press copies, radio and gigs. We weren’t going to get rich (we funded the record ourselves and would need to sell more than half of the pressings to break even), but it was good. Then, very suddenly, the Cartel went bust. The warehouse was emptied and we never found out what happened to all of our records! We had a handful of copies, and that was that. Strangely, copies turn up in Eastern Europe from time to time.

But for a while, before the Cartel crumbled, we were out there promoting, gigging and writing. Even John Peel played the single and said nice things about it. When the Eurythmics came to Nottingham for a gig at Trent Polytechnic (later Nottingham Trent University) they asked us to support them. A great gig, with the added highlight that Eddie Reader, on backing singer duties for Annie Lennox, came up to us to say she’d been playing My Favourite Eyes on the tour bus and couldn’t stop listening to it.

By the middle of 1984 things were changing fast. Chris had decided to leave Nottingham and go back to his native Isle of Wight. He’s still there now playing in multiple covers bands. Alan left at the same time, and we recruited talented multi-instrumentalist Mike Wilson (later part of Curt Glance and more recently doing a fabulous Jake Thackerey tribute) in his place for a while alongside a disastrously poor but extremely enthusiastic drummer called ‘Tony the Hairdresser’. Rob was already playing in 2 bands, having joined Mike Sinclair’s Ssuraea the previous year. Inevitably None So Blind disbanded (ultimately temporarily!) just after that. John had been playing in Zero Option and Substitute Flesh and teamed up with Andy and Dave in a project called Tangled Mass.

Rob continued with Ssuraea, then hair rock band Fotograffe and indie band Big Red X into the 1990s. Meanwhile Dave, John and Andy teamed up with a talented musician called Nigel Bull to form The Last Cosmonauts – named after the unfortunate spaceman Sergei Krikalev, stranded in space station Mir when the Soviet Union fell in 1991, technically stateless. In 1993 Rob joined the Cosmonauts to help with keyboards and programming for an album, and stayed on after Nigel left. This 4 piece band eventually rebranded to None So Blind again and stayed that way to the end of the decade (well, century actually!). After John left due to work and family commitments the 3 piece None So Blind (Dave, Andy and Rob) kept going, writing, recording and occasionally gigging until finally disbanding in 2015 when Andy moved to France.

The final releases from None So Blind were the 4 track EP ‘I Was Ray Mears’ released in 2010 and available on 10 inch vinyl). This was recorded in Pro Tools at the thoroughly marvellous Foundry Studios in Chesterfield, with our friends Nic Bate on bass and Stuart Owen on drums.

In 2013 we released the 4 track EP ‘Training At Altitude’, also for free on Bandcamp. These songs were recorded on our own equipment at Bloc Studios where we rehearsed.

Our one last Huzzah is on Bandcamp as well. 6 tracks recorded completely live in our final resting place, the wonderful Bloc Studios in Sheffield where we rehearsed until disbanding in 2015. This was an attempt to record the last music we wrote, but also acts as hard evidence that we could actually play the songs live!

Anyone who would like any of these things, including the Last Cosmonauts recordings, for free – please just contact us via our page on Bandcamp and it will be our pleasure to send you some goodies. We’re all proud of what we did and of the friends we made along the way and we have no problem boasting about it!

None so Blind 2025

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My original page down below before Rob Williams got in touch.

They released a single with a picture sleeve My Favourite Eyes / The Virus, Beat Trouser Records, pant 01, 1983. Producer, Engineer – Adam Williams

The A side “My Favourite Eyes” was recorded at a 16 track studio in Camden, London with the help of Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics. Dave’s interest didn’t last long, however. The B side “The Virus” was recorded at Nottingham University’s 8 track studio. The single was distributed through Red Rhino and Cartel.

None So Blind also appeared on the various artists cassette release “The Bomb Party” with “My Favourite Eyes”. Hear the whole album here.

They also appeared on the various artists cassette release “Bright Lights” with “My Mind” (Live). “My Mind was recorded live at Chesterfield Art College on December 22nd 1983, a gig supported by Ssuraea (so I was on twice that night!)”. 

Hear the whole album here.

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Rob Williams:
“I also worked (late 80s and early 90s) For Square Dance Studios in Derby, and then again as an audio retailer at the Square Centre after it moved to Nottingham. I wasn’t an engineer so I can’t tell you about bands who recorded there. I was selling pro audio equipment (at Derby we were one of the very first to sell computers for musicians). I worked for Carlsbro in Hockley (twice actually!) so I must have met most of the bands at the time…”

Rob, Dave and Andy carried on playing until they split up in 2015 after Andy moved to France.

You can hear more None So Blind on their Bandcamp.