When David Bowie died, like a lot of of people I thought of the musical influence he had, and in particular on me. I thought of this song, I wrote it 20 years ago and roughly recorded it in 1998 with my friends Ben Drury who pretty much improvised the slide Guitar and Neil Hodgkins on Drums I can't even remember who played bass, It may have been Drury or Nelly or me. I didn't play this version to many people I was always a little disappointed with its loose feel, but now without the restrictions of my youths insecurities I love it for what is... my good friends and me half a days work in a studio and a homage to Bowie! If only I was this productive in every half a day!

Mushroom Head

Oh my god this is amazing! L.A.R. or Last Automatic Retreat (for Long) I think the average age of the band when we made this recording was about 17.5 years old. The band were Ben Drury - Guitar/Vocals Patrick Hasler - Bass Mark Turnbal - Drums and me on Vocals. Drury and Hasler wrote all the songs with me squeaking out the vocals. Beautifully naive but not typically 6th Form, we didn't sound like anyone and nobody sounded like us. We were a strange mix of influences, Drury came from a mixture of Simon and Garfunkle meets Gilmour meets Hendrix - Husler played in about 3 other heavy metal bands and Turnbal.... well he was from another planet and his drumming usually consisted of one big long solo... It was amazing. Drury was the driving force and arranged all our gigs, which was impressive as he wasn't even old enough to enter most of the venues we played at, It's not surprising he has become a very successful entrepreneur. Drury wrote this track after we had shared a little U2 binge (not that it sounds like U2) but it was more about the driving Bass line... Hear those 70s Pink Floyd guitar influences, the drums were immense and I'm not sure the engineer in the small 16 track studio new how to handle them, I think he may have EQed them to death..... We saved up £300 to do this recording with 4 other songs back in 1993.... Amazing times. 

Ben Mottram