BANDS

The first time I ever played music with other people was at around the age of thirteen or fourteen. The other people in question were Colin Freeman and John Blackwell, both a year younger than me but to be fair, both more talented than me. John Blackwell was a guitarist whose primary rôle model at the time, I seem to recall, was Steve Howe of Yes. He was an excellent young guitarist whose knowledge of music, both theoretical and practical, undoubtedly exceeded mine at the time. Inasmuch as I was self-taught on both drums and keyboards, I learned a lot from John in the few years that we played together as teenagers. John was also the first person to introduce me to Emerson, Lake & Palmer - I remember him playing "Take A Pebble" from their first album, and me being decidedly lukewarm about it at the time! Colin was in John's class at school, in the year below me, and since the requirements of the moment were that we needed a bass-player and vocalist, Colin promptly became both. I don't remember much of the music we played in those early days : the only things that stick in my mind are Led Zeppelin's "Stairway To Heaven" ( this was when it had only just come out and it was still cool to be able to play it on guitar ), Argent's "Hold Your Head Up", and a song John wrote as a tribute, called "Howe The Hell" ( an excellent song, by the way! ). The first two stick in my mind primarily because we somehow blagged our way into playing at a school assembly one morning, and these were the two songs we played. That was my first real experience of playing in any kind of band in front of an audience ( of about five hundred, as I recall ), and I still remember sitting behind the organ after we'd finished "Hold Your Head Up", the stage lights dimmed and the comforting glow of the power lamps from the keyboard and the amps, and thinking that this was only the beginning.

And so it was. Around a year or so after John, Colin and myself first got together, I heard a new girl in school, Helen Borowski, singing in assembly one morning. She had this fantastically pure, classically-trained voice, and I knew immediately that I wanted this girl to sing in my band. With a little cajoling, she did, and over the next couple of years the lineup of the band changed somewhat : Colin left, I met a guitarist called Howard Oates, who later played bass, and my best friend since the age of seven, Richard Wood, completed the lineup that took me through my early- and mid-teenage years. I seem to remember that the name of the band changed a couple of times along the way, as well as the lineup - at one point I believe we were known as Star Child - but White Hydra was the name that stuck.

As the band grew to a five-piece - Howard, John, Richard, Helen and myself - we slowly but surely increased our repertoire. I can't remember everything we used to play, but I know that the set included the Moody Blues' "Nights In White Satin" and "Voices In The Sky", Gilbert O'Sullivan's "Alone Again - Naturally", Carole King's "It's Too Late", a very primitive version of Curved Air's "Back Street Luv" ( quite how we managed that without keyboards - I was playing drums at the time - I'm glad I can't remember! ), Atomic Rooster's "The Devil's Answer", and I've a feeling that there were a couple of the requisite Beatles songs in there, but I can't remember which ones.

After I left school, the ties between myself and the others slowly unravelled, as these things do, and White Hydra was finally and officially declared extinct, as far as I can remember, somewhere around the end of 1972. I saw John once in a pub about ten years later - I believe he was still playing in a band at that time, but we only spoke briefly and I haven't seen him since. Colin Freeman now runs a successful music shop in Hornchurch : by dint of life's way of creating coincidences, my son Richard did his work experience at that very shop. Helen Borowski is now Helen Ramsay and is living happily in Wiltshire with her husband and children. She gives singing lessons, and is also a practising Reiki master. I haven't seen Howard for many years : the last I knew, he was still working for the Civil Service ( as he was doing when I met him ) and living, I believe, in Chelmsford with his wife and children. Richard Wood remains a good friend to this day : although ( like Helen and I ) we had not seen each other for some twenty-odd years, we met up again a couple of years ago courtesy of Friends Reunited. He now lives in Basingstoke as he has done almost since leaving college, having risen through the ranks of a national pharmaceutical company.

After the demise of White Hydra, I found myself at a loose end musically, and set about looking for musicians to form another band. Through an agent with whom I'd become acquainted, I was introduced to Kenny Hanlon, a young drummer whose influences included Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich. The fact that we didn't have a bass player or singer didn't deter me from putting together a small set of instrumental stuff, which included everything from a halting version of Emerson, Lake & Palmer's "Hoedown" ( having by that time become a total convert ) to the likes of "Moon River", "Greensleeves", and if I remember correctly, "Lara's Theme" from the film Dr. Zhivago. The fact that the music of E L P was unlikely to receive much critical acclaim in the working men's clubs of Rainham was lost on me at the time, as was the fact that my / our rendition of it left, shall we say, much to be desired. Having only recently made the transition from drums to keyboards, I had somehow formed the opinion that by imitating Keith Emerson and learning some of E L P's music by heart, I would become as good as Keith Emerson. It took me many years to realise the folly of this plan, and in any case, at the callow age of seventeen, my ears could quite happily deceive me that what I was playing was very little different from the original. The reality, of course, was that listening to Kenny and I play "Hoedown" was much like listening to the 1812 Overture rendered on a stylophone by a blind, tone-deaf monkey with boxing gloves on.

Unfazed by my lack of talent and the fact of there only being two of us, I arbitrarily named the "band" Trilogy, after the then-recent album by Emerson, Lake and Palmer. In an effort to emulate not only the musical skills but also the appearance of Keith Emerson, I took one of my old black school blazers and fashioned this stage jacket from it, with the name "Trilogy" proudly emblazoned on the back, and curtain-ribbon trimming the front. I can't begin to think what I must have looked like, but thankfully, no photographs survive from any of the few gigs that Kenny and I did together. It's probably something of a blessing that to my knowledge, no tapes from that period have survived either.

I haven't seen Kenny since we split up sometime around the late Summer of 1973. I have no idea where he is or what he's doing now, but I wish him the very best of luck, wherever he is.

That I ever became Cannon's keyboard player was, all things considered, a miracle. I'd just started work at Spillers Grain and Feed in Barking. It was slightly before my seventeenth birthday and Kenny and I had just called it a day. I was looking for a new band, and I saw an ad in a local shop window for a keyboard player - a band called Reflection had just lost their rhythm guitarist, Ken Adams, and were looking to replace him with a keyboard player instead. I had seen Reflection once before - they were a covers band who had played together for a couple of years and were quite well-known on the local circuit, but with the departure of Ken Adams, they were looking to become more of a rock band and to introduce some original material into the set. This, of course, was 1973, a time when Progressive Rock was on the upswing of it's meteoric rise, and at that time virtually all "serious" bands had a keyboard player. Since the band was planning to do, amongst other things, Deep Purple covers, a keyboardist seemed the logical next move, and that, as it turned out, was where I came in.

I replied to the ad, and when drummer Pete Burgering and friend of the band Gerry Sweeney first came to see me, their hearts sank - unbeknown to me at the time, they had witnessed a Trilogy performance a short time before, and were understandably less than enthused by the experience. After an initial meeting with the band, I was given the organ solo from Deep Purple's "Highway Star" to learn as homework for the first "proper" rehearsal, at the Hind's Head pub ( as it then was ) in Chadwell Heath, Essex. I learned later that this was intended as something of a baptism of fire - on the strength of my performance with Kenny, the expectation was that a Deep Purple organ solo would probably floor me by the end of the first bar or two. I'm pleased to say that didn't happen. They obviously thought I was good enough, as I spent the next seven years with the band.

Despite the initial mission statement of being a rock band and doing more original and less cover material, the realisation dawned after the first year or so that as noble as that goal was, it wasn't going to pay it's way. Gigs for new rock bands were relatively few and far between, whereas pub and club gigs for established covers bands were comparatively easy to come by and provided a necessary bread-and-butter income to pay for such necessities as a new P.A. system and a van. So, amidst a certain amount of dissent ( I was still idealistic enough at that age to think that the music was justification enough in itself, and things like the P.A. and van would take care of themselves - presumably courtesy of Santa Claus ) we agreed to learn a new covers set and start playing pubs and clubs.

Thus it was for the remaining six years that the band was together. Once the set was learnt, we quickly re-established ourselves on the pub and club circuit, and became successful enough not only to buy the much-needed van and P.A. system, but also to buy the odd beer on top. We did do a sprinkling of rock gigs, and numbers like "Born To Be Wild" and "Black Night" were always included in the covers set anyway, so we managed to retain a certain amount of musical integrity whilst churning out the crowd-pleasers like "Tie A Yellow Ribbon" ( always a personal nemesis of mine ) and "Smile" ( likewise ).

Despite achieving semi-professional success on the East London and Essex circuit, the problem with being a pub-and-club covers band is that that's what you become known as, and after six years we'd firmly established ourselves as exactly that. The first to say enough was enough was Andy, our bassist, who decided that after what for him was something like eleven years in total of hauling equipment around various venues east of the capital, he was going to call it a day. It was a sad time for all of us : Cannon was as much a family as it was a musical outfit, and it did not take the rest of us long to agree that replacing Andy simply was not an option. We had a number of gigs lined up for the coming year, and after a short discussion, we agreed that we'd play out those gigs with me playing bass on the Mini Korg synthesiser that my parents had bought me for my 21st birthday. It was not ideal, of course, but at least it was still us. So, we saw the year out, and as the age of Punk heralded the death of Progressive Rock, Cannon drew to a close.

Andy stuck by his decision to leave the music business. Although he's continued to write songs both on his own and in conjunction with singer Ken Oldfield, his last gig with Cannon was his last live gig ever. Pete and I were destined to play together again some years later ( see below ). Ken, like Andy, continued to write songs, and the two of them have recorded some of their material in my studio at home over the course of the last couple of years. Ken's brother, guitarist Bob Oldfield, currently plays in a sixties covers band.

By the end of Cannon's collective lifetime, it was obvious that I was going to have to look elsewhere for musical fulfilment. At the time, everybody was in a band, and no exception to that rule was my good friend Terry Allfrey, who like me had been in bands since his teens. During the last year of Cannon's life together, he was singing in a band called Dark Star, with bassist Keith Shears, guitarist Jim McCann, and drummer Ian ... whose surname I can't remember. As I was going to be at a loose end in the fairly near future, they recruited me to play keyboards, and we set about rehearsing in a warehouse in Canning Town, East London, owned by the father of Jackie, Terry's girfriend at the time. In no time at all the inevitable arguments over the band's name had arisen - someone mentioned that there was already a "Dark Star", so we had to look for a new name. As always, trying to get five people to agree on a band name is virtually impossible, and it would be fair to say that "Quebec" was not so much a concensus decision as a line of least resistance. In the long run, it was immaterial anyway : by the beginning of the new decade, we had gone our separate ways, the argument over the band's name having been merely a portent of bigger things, not least transport problems - Keith lived in Dulwich, South London, whereas the rest of us lived in and around Romford in Essex. As far as I can remember, we never actually played a gig during the time I was in the band, which is a shame, because the music itself was worthy enough; it's also a shame that I have no recordings of anything we did during that period, but hey, that's the way the rock band crumbles. Terry and I remained close friends for some time after the band broke up, and in fact he was best man at my wedding in July 1983. Always something of a wandering spirit, however, a while after that he upped sticks and decided to tour the world. We met again briefly several years later, at which time he'd met a Japanese girl and was, so far as I know, planning to settle down with her; whether that happened or not, I have no idea, as I haven't seen Terry since. If you're reading this, Terry, give me a call! As for the other members of the band, I never saw Keith or Ian after the band broke up; Jim and I remained friends for some while afterward, but we too had drifted apart by the middle of the 1980's.

LEE BROWN

Stable Sound Studios

- November 1999

After the breakup of Dark Star in 1981, my involvement with music ground to a halt. I had met Joyce, my wife-to-be, in October 1979, and by this time I was becoming preoccupied with the relationship. When we married on July 16 1983, the course of my life changed significantly. Rock bands, nine-minute organ solos and arguments over band names gave way to family, Homebase and ~~arguments~~ discussions about baby names. And there you had it really : for the next sixteen years or so, that's the way things were, up until the spring of 1998, when on nothing more than a whim, I decided to go out and buy myself some keyboard equipment - or more precisely, all the keyboard equipment I could never have afforded when I was in my twenties.

This was to prove quite a spree. During the first week of April 1998 I visited the Soho Soundhouse in London's Charing Cross Road and proceeded to buy a Yamaha P150 electric piano, a Roland VK7 organ, a Roland JP8000 synthesiser, an Access Virus synthesiser and a Roland A33 controller keyboard. Lurking in the garage, I still had the H/H IC100 amplifier and 2 x 15" speaker from the days of Cannon and the Mini Korg synthesiser that my parents had bought from friend Pete Parish on my 21st birthday. Of course, this was a lot of equipment to have set up in your living-room ( although I did, for a while! ), so I had to find a better alternative. The garage was the obvious choice, so with the help of my two sons, I set about stripping it bare and getting it ready to accommodate the keyboards. My sons Scott and Richard re-concreted the floor, and over the next few months carpet tiles were laid on the floor and walls, and lo and behold, the studio was born. An electrician came and fitted about two dozen electrical sockets, and by the summer of 1998 the keyboards were installed in what was to become their home for the indefinite future.

By sheer coincidence, at around the same time, there was a reunion of the ex-members of Cannon. It was purely a social event - there was no suggestion of re-forming the band, and in any case I had no expectation that any of the others would be interested in playing in a band again so many years after Cannon. As it happened, however, I was wrong : Pete had sustained an interest in music over the years, and because of the noise implications of playing the drums, had instead taken up the guitar. We discussed the possibility of a band, and Pete came down with his friend Matt, who was learning the drums at the time, to see how things went. It didn't work out : Matt still had much to learn as a drummer, and it was quickly apparent that the only way this was going to take off was if Pete once again picked up his drumsticks. So, he did - and we then set about advertising for the remaining members of the band.

A number of bassists replied, but only one was good enough : Gary Bennett, who by a stroke of luck happened to live less than ten minutes' walk from me. On June 4 1998 he came and auditioned with us and shortly afterward, we joined forces. Gary in turn introduced us to his friend of many years, guitarist Lee Brown, who joined us on July 28 1998. All we needed now was a singer.

Or so we thought. About six months after he had first joined the band, Gary's then wife Philippa had a daughter, Amy, and with this new addition to the family, Gary did not feel able to commit himself fully to the band, and left. We were still advertising for a singer, and now we added "bassist" to the ads once again.

The problem in finding the right singer was to haunt us for the remainder of the time we were together. We advertised copiously, and promptly found ourselves wrapped up in the Pop Idol syndrome. The ratio was simple and constant : on average, about one in five of the people who replied to the ads was male ( we were looking specifically for a male singer at the time ); of those, about one in five could actually sing; of those who could sing, about one in five would be interested in singing our material; and of those, about one in five would actually turn up for the audition. It would be fair to say that we weren't exactly spoiled for choice. After what seemed like an age, in July 1999 I had a phone call from Lee Power, a classically-trained singer who lived in Epsom in Surrey - some twenty-five-odd miles away. What were the chances of this guy turning up for the audition - never mind commuting to rehearsals twice a week?

Not only did Lee turn up for the audition, he did indeed religiously turn up - on time - for rehearsals twice a week. The fact of having now found a singer galvanised Gary into re-joining the band shortly afterward, and by early August 1999 we were a five-piece for the first time. In November 1999 we recorded our first "proper" demo at Stable Sound Studios in Wickford under the helpful auspices of Trevor Holliday, ex-bassist with Slade and latterly A & R man for BMG Records.

Finally, by the beginning of January 2000, we were almost ready for our first gig, when that phrase that has haunted bands since time immemorial cropped up - "musical differences". Having spent seven years with Cannon doing mostly covers, I had vowed at the onset that it would be different this time. This time we were not going to do covers - at all. Rightly or wrongly, that was the mission statement, and everyone in the band knew my feelings on the subject. Whether or not they wholly agreed with me, you'd have to ask them, but in any event they respected my feelings. Lee ( Power ), however, felt differently, and when it came to the stage where we were on the verge of gigging, he announced that, in his own words, he was "not prepared to go on a stage unless we were doing at least a couple of covers". At that point, the rightness or wrongness of doing any given amount of covers became immaterial : Lee had made a stand, and the decision confronting the band was clear : accede to his terms, or allow him to leave. After what had been about a year of learning a set and being now poised on the verge of gigging, it would be fair to say that there was dissent amongst the rest of us as to the best way to go. Consign a year's work - including having recorded a demo of five songs, with Lee singing - to the bin, or press on having established the precedent that any single member of the band could dictate terms if they chose to. Without delving into who said what, the final majority decision was to allow Lee to leave, and so in January 2000 we found ourselves a foursome once again.

It was somewhere around this time that the question of the band's name became an issue also. When the four of us had first got together, I mentioned that in the sixteen or so years since Cannon and Dark Star, I had occasionally daydreamed about being in another band, and that in the daydreams, the name of that band was Flash. At the time, there were no arguments, and Flash was what we became. However, at around the same time as Lee's departure, someone mentioned that there had in fact been a band back in the seventies of the same name. Added to the fact of being named after a floor-cleaning product, there was a growing feeling amongst the others that we should find another name, and so we set about trying to come up with something that everyone approved of. After endless to-ing and fro-ing, we eventually settled on the name "Terra Nova", although even then there was disagreement as to whether this should be two separate words or joined to form a single word.

With no singer, however, we had bigger problems than the band's name to worry about, and once again the ads went in the papers and the shop windows. This time we were rewarded about five months later with Tracy Gilmore, a singer from South Ockendon in Essex. We were unsure at first about a female singer - virtually all of the songs in the set had originally been written with a male vocalist in mind - but Tracy convinced us that she could handle the job, and so as the summer of 2000 came to an end we began once again the task of teaching her the set.

Whilst this was going on, someone discovered that - you guessed it - there was already a band called Terra Nova, and so the whole process of choosing a name began all over again. It was no easier the second time around - the difficulty of finding a name that everyone liked now having been compounded with the difficulty of finding a name that no-one else was using. Eventually some bright spark suggested that the band should be named after it's founder member - me. There were precedents, after all, of bands being named after an individual : Bon Jovi, Van Halen et al. I pointed out that Bon Jovi and Van Halen were probably stronger names than Dellow to begin with, but on the other hand it did have the virtue of not being used by anyone else, so there it was : as of September 2000, we were officially Dellow.

Tracy learned the set in an incredibly quick five months, and by December 15 2000 we were ready for our first gig ever, at the Ruskin Arms in Manor Park, one of East London's best-known rock venues. The gig went incredibly well, despite the frenetic rushing about to get gear on and off the stage inbetween the three bands that were playing there that night. We were on second, "supporting" an AC/DC tribute band, although we actually had the largest audience of the night. However, something had to go wrong, and sure enough it did. Shortly after the new year, a dispute within the band resulted in Pete deciding he'd had enough, and so we found ourselves short of a drummer.

My son Richard had been using Pete's drums virtually since the band began in 1998, and had become proficient enough by this time that the rest of the band agreed that we should ask him if he wanted to take Pete's place. It was a daunting task for a sixteen-year-old, but since we all agreed that even at sixteen Richard was better than several drummers many years his senior, we were confident that he would be equal to the task. We were right : he applied himself to learning the set, and by May 28 2001 we were ready for our first gig with Richard on drums, at the Rock Garden in London's Covent Garden. Again, the gig was a resounding success : again, it was to presage yet another disaster for the band. After yet more internal upheaval, Tracy was the next to leave after just one more gig, at the end of June 2001, shortly followed a couple of months later by Gary, who could not face the thought of finding and training up yet another singer.

This double whammy proved the death-knell for the band. Although Lee, Richard and I soldiered on for another six months, the strain of trying to maintain impetus whilst searching for a bassist and a singer proved too much, and Lee finally made the decision to call it a day on March 12 2002, almost four years after the band had first sprung into being.

Apart from having helped me out with recording, Tracy has had no further involvement in music, having since given birth to daughter Danielle and therefore having her hands very full. Lee Brown has settled down with partner Emma ( Pete's daughter ) and daughter Jody, and to my knowledge at the time of writing, has also had no further involvement in bands since Dellow split up, other than playing guitar on some of the songs I've recorded. I haven't spoken to Lee Power since shortly after his departure from the band in early 2000; as far as I know, he had had an offer of a part in a musical at that time and was intending to take his career in that direction. Gary played with two other bands after leaving Dellow, namely Rose Bayonet and Flame, but ultimately hung up his bass for good ( so he tells me ) in August 2002. Pete gave up the drums at the same time he gave up the band, and so far as I know has not played since. We see each other occasionally, and to my knowledge he has no aspirations to return to the music world full-time. Richard continues to play the drums and has all the makings of becoming an excellent professional drummer. And as for me ...

All information published on this website is correct to the best of my recollection. I apologise to anyone concerned in the event that I've got any of it wrong.