We’d talked about it for long enough… by we, I mean my brother Rob, brother-in-law Mike and myself, and by ‘it’, I mean forming a band.
Mike was a drummer in a Derby based band in the sixties (The Delfonts?), and even though I’d moved to London about this time, I’d go and see them play whenever I could. I didn’t play any instruments myself but in the mid-seventies, I built myself a synthesisor (see here). My brother Rob was a good bit younger than me, but he came to live with my wife and I in west London, and he started playing guitar, and eventually he and I would have mini-jams late in the evening.
Then my IT career took me to the USA, and Rob returned to Derby and about this time joined Mike in his current band, Crystal Image. In the mid-eighties, I’d (temporarily) returned from my travels and was living in Staffordshire about 20 miles from Derby, and the three of us started getting together musically. We were eventually joined by Gary Potts, the bass player from Crystal Image, and called ourselves Shuttered Room. We practiced in the evenings in Mike’s brother’s very dusty caravan workshop, then we moved our practicing to a room under a railway arch in Derby. At least this one had a log burning stove so we didn’t need to wear glove and scarves during the winter evenings!
We mostly played standards by the likes of The Beatles, U2, The Cars, Cream, Manfred Mann’s Earthband, etc., but as we gained proficiency, we started getting creative and segueing numbers like Lucy in the Sky, Dear Prudence and ELO’s 10538 Overture together, and even started adding our own numbers.
Then we started looking for gigs around Derby. Unfortunately about this time, my career took me to Aberdeen, and I acquired the epithet, ‘Jet-lag Jones’ as I would fly back on a Friday afternoon, for a Friday evening gig.
The first gig took us a little by surprise and it was before we’d decided on a name, so we performed as Johnny Cash’s Flexible Friends (see gig poster).
We had to rent a van for each gig, so I don’t recall making much profit from the gigs. But I do remember the late nights… we’d catch our breath after the gig and perhaps have a beer, then we’d dismantle the gear, load the van, drive home, and drop each band member off. Finally I would drive back to Staffordshire, and would probably need a glass of wine before bed, so hitting the sack at 4 and 5 am wasn’t unusual.
We had a few more gigs and then Rob left to join another band, and that was it for Shuttered Room. Looking back it seemed that we did an awful lot of practicing for very few gigs, but we did have some fun, and I’d just bought myself an eight-track tape recorder, so we ended up with some recordings.
