This was the year that my passion for Hawkwind slipped on to the backburner. A performance in Nottingham was filmed and shown on TV as part of the ‘Bedrock’ series, and was released on VHS, and later on DVD as: ‘Classic Rock Legends’.
Simon House had returned on violin, and I remember feeling the old Hawkwind buzz as they launched into Assault and Battery. Even without Huw on guitar, it sounded great. The keyboard sound was superb, and Simon’s violin worked wonderfully. As they segued into The Golden Void , I was thinking how well they had managed to re-invent themselves, as they had done so many times before. And then the magic was lost by the vocal being thrown away on new member Bridget Wishart; whose thin voice quavered on and off the edge of the key. The Golden Void had long been a personal favourite and Dave Brock’s vocal was an integral part of it. I was so put off by Bridget’s vocal that it was an instant fall from grace for Hawkwind.
A few months later, Dewi brought round their newly released album: Space Bandits. I felt that it had two or three good tracks on it, but I was not persuaded to go and see them on tour, after the disappointment of the ‘Bedrock’ performance. Hawkwind for me, continued to remain in the background to everything else that was going on for me musically, that year.
My interest in blues/rock was given a major boost with the release of a fantastic album by Gary Moore, called Still Got the Blues. His fiery and ultra-passionate, hard-rocking approach influenced my guitar playing somewhat, in the new blues/rock band that I formed in the latter part of the previous year, called Dark Horse.
In the meantime, I did a training course in studio engineering in 1990, where each participant of the course got to record a track of their own, and a certain amount of collaboration was required. As a result of this, I was asked to play lead guitar on tracks by some of the other participants, from which I received very good feedback.
Meanwhile, one of the other chaps on the course; called Rob Young; played bass on my recording, which was my own take on the Jimi Hendrix blues classic; Red House.
By this stage, Dark Horse was up and running. We had rehearsed a good repertoire of material and started doing some gigs at the Masons Arms, and another new music venue, the Portland Arms.
We had few cover versions in our set, including the aforementioned Red House, and a version of Freddy King’s guitar instrumental called The Stumble, which was directly inspired by Gary Moore’s new rendition of it; a bonus track from the Still Got the Blues sessions.
But most of our set was original material, including some songs I’d previously written for my home recordings a couple of years earlier; like Psychedelic Buskers and Pretty Little Schoolgirl. Whilst there was some completely new songs by both myself and Jim, including Boozer’s Blooze and Down the Line.
Late that summer we went into the Bandwagon studios to record a live demo tape, which was engineered by former Savage drummer; Mark Brown. Jim and I shared the vocal duties, some of which were overdubbed afterwards. Here are four of the six tracks from that demo:
Early the next year, we were at the forefront of trying to get a regular Blues night going at the Masons Arms. But in the spring of 1991, a musical revelation took place that was to change course of my life for almost all of the next thirty years.
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