No New Address

From 19 October 1986 onwards...

The No New Address story begins in early October 1986 when a certain Steven Wilson called me at home and told me about a project he had in mind. Steven had taken it upon himself to get together a group of musicians far beyond the average band member in Hemel Hempstead. I vaguely knew Wilson from his days in a synth band called Karma where he and fellow keyboardist, Simon Vockings, played support at the very first Dora gig in Edlesborough in August 1985.

The initial concept that Steven had was to try to gather the best of each type of instrumentalist from any of the existing bands around as well as people who were not currently working. This probably meant that nobody would know anybody and that in itself made the project more unlikely to succeed, but never the less on October 19th 1986 at Basement Studios in Watford there was a gathering of eight people in Studio Four. Four of the members from that evening remained in No New Address, the other four were Steven himself on lead guitar, Seamus on DS3, Paul on bass, and Mark who didn't seem to do much at all.

From that first meeting where none of us really knew each other, within two weeks we had cut the band down to just five: John Whitbread, Geoff Whitbread, Simon Vockings, Robert Alexander, and Steven Wilson.

Things stayed that way up until December when just before Christmas we did a sort of gig at Gaddesden Place with a friend of John and Geoff’s - Philip Lynch; and really from then on Steve Wilsons' days with us were numbered. Steven Wilson is, and always has been a pretentious and weedy little shit. Not only did he annoy the crap out all of us intensely with his weird and wacky ideas about music, he was a very poor guitarist for the kind of work we were doing. He went on to bigger things, but on January 11th 1987 with the blessing of the other four members of the band, I told him to his face that his services were no longer required and he left the group that he had tried to form, and Phil joined instead. The band was complete.

As Phil had been to a couple of practice sessions already he soon picked up all that Steven had done but improved it no end and so from January till June 1987 we practiced and planned for our future as a band that would really work well.

A company was formed around the band name (which incidentally comes from a poster in a house window I saw on my way home from work one night), the company bought a P.A. system and began hiring it out to other bands as well as offering other musical services such as art work, promotion, management etc. The entire operation was from the very start intended to be as professional as possible.

Then a gig was planned, but it was to be more than just a gig it was a party as well with balloons and hats and free food, a disco all the trimmings and all at our own expense as well. That was July 18th 1987, and it was a huge success the highlight of the night being Geoff’s ten-minute drum solo which drove the crowd apeshit!

So now you know, and all there was left was the future ahead of us - and it looked good.