1990 - A return to gigging

This was the year that my passion for Hawkwind pretty much fizzled out altogether. Their 'Space Bandits' album release had 2 or 3 good tracks on it, but it was all starting to sound a bit samey, and with Huw Lloyd-Langton having departed the band, my interest completely fell away to the point where I didn't go to see them on their tour 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'. A name thought up by bass player and good friend, Jim Ward.

In the meantime, I did a training course in studio engineering in 1990, where each participant of the course got 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, my new band '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, on the 'Still Got the Blues' album.
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. In 'Dark Horse', Jim and I shared the vocal duties, some of which were overdubbed afterwards. Here are four of the six tracks from that demo: