As 1989 began, Hawkwind and Huw Lloyd-Langton were still the biggest musical forces in my life, and throughout February and March, my continued home recordings reflected that. I made my last full tape, called Nocturnal Experiments during this time. It was the usual mix of my own music, alongside four Hawkwind cover versions and a couple more Lloyd-Langton group covers.
After 10 years in the band; Huw Lloyd-Langton left Hawkwind in the March of 1989. We had spoken on the phone some time afterwards, and as a friend I would always support him in his choices, as any friend would. But as a Hawkwind fan who followed the band live throughout the 1980s, I couldn’t help but feel gutted. And although in the fullness of time, I would see them live another three or four times, including one more time with Huw; I felt that it would never be the same again. And although other musical influences were already bringing themselves to bear at this time; with Huw’s departure, I felt that my personal Hawkwind era was over. This happened just around the same time that I’d completed my last tape, and my normal procedure was to carry over any remaining tracks onto the next tape. But apart from a few oddments; I did not record anymore music; partly because I’d begun to feel the pull of working in a live band again after more than eighteen months away from the gigging scene. At this point in time, there were a couple of leftover recordings which didn’t see the light of day until I digitised the cassettes over twenty years later. These were my last tributes to the mighty Hawkwind.
Whilst all this was going on, I’d made a new friend towards the end the previous year. Dave Drury was a great guitarist who I’d started having regular jams with over the previous few months; and he introduced me to quite a bit of new music. Dave was a big fan of Black Sabbath and Jimi Hendrix, amongst others; and was also into jazz/rock fusion, and guitarists like John McLaughlin. He introduced me to such guitarists as Alvin Lee, and other jazz/rock stuff like Colosseum II; featuring ex-Thin Lizzy guitarist Gary Moore. Dave was a big fan of intense blues/rock players in the vein of Hendrix, such as Stevie Ray Vaughan, Johnny Winter, and Canadian guitarist Jeff Healey, who had burst on to the scene the previous year with his debut album; See the Light.
Along with other discoveries like guitarist Walter Trout, all this ‘new’ blues oriented music, most notably the discovery of Stevie Ray Vaughan, definitely influenced the direction of my playing around this time. I began to get much more interested in blues based rock; prompting a returning interest in Jimi Hendrix, and reigniting my passion for Led Zeppelin again; this time as a guitarist rather than a bass player.
My curiosity was piqued by jazz guitar to some extent. In my conversations with Huw Lloyd-Langton, he had mentioned the influence of jazz guitarists such as Wes Montgomery and Django Reinhardt. My attention had recently been turned in this direction slightly, after seeing a documentary about one of the creators of the electric guitar; Les Paul; which included concert footage of him play jazz standards like Lover, Dark Eyes, and How High the Moon.
I’d also been reintroduced to rock ‘n’ roll through a belated interest in the Stray Cats, via an album lent to me by Jim Ward, and I began to recognise the jazz flavoured influence in the playing of Brian Setzer and Alvin Lee.
As my passion turned towards playing blues/rock, the lure of gigging in a live band began to take hold again. It felt it was time for something new. In the autumn of 1989, I formed a new band as a vehicle for this change in direction; with my friend and previous band mate Jim Ward on bass guitar, along with his older brother Dave on drums. This would be a blues/rock band with myself and Jim sharing vocal duties, and we would play mostly original material of our own with a few covers thrown in. Jim came up with the name: Dark Horse; and we began to rehearse material. Things gelled quickly and easily, and within a couple of months we were ready to roll.
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