Return of the Son of The Fragile Skies Official WebSite

(for all the Sarahs in the audience)

Part 1: It was a long time ago...mid 80s, Cambridge...being in a band was the thing to do, really. Especially if you didn't have a girl/boy friend and wished to rectify the situation. So we were. Simon came up with the name, from a Leonard Cohen song I believe. So along with Catherine and Wayne, we recorded the inevitable demo tape. It featured one song that I still think was pretty good. The result of two people spending too long in pubs with "Brothers in Arms" on a distant jukebox. Fortunately we couldn't play our instruments well enough to be Dire Straits (by a long chalk). So we sounded like this instead.
The legendary Simon Kingsley (guitar and attitude). Where is he now ?
Part 2: It was all downhill from there. The first incarnation of the band recorded one final set of demos, a couple of them quite promising, but sadly Simon ran away to Manchester. With my master tape. Bastard. Catherine helped hold things together for a while, but the godawful bunch of "songs" I came up with for the second tape were unredeemable, even if I had been able to sing... However, this period did see me meet drummer, percussionist and longtime partner in crime Paul Gallant. So it wasn't all bad. And we did record "southern land", a little instrumental which showed that we could sound ok, in a pale and insipid sort of way, when I shut up. But did I learn ? 'Course not!
Part 3: However, first of all we had to really lose touch with reality. Re-armed with a new (relatively) stable (if you discount Martyn) line-up, a pile of Peter Hammill records, the awesome (Dr) Andrew Christy and a slightly less awful batch of songs, incarnation Mark 5.7b set off down the road to oblivion (aka Chelmsford). Looking back on it, if only we'd taken the time to listen, we might have pulled it off. However with psychedelia, angst-rock, Essex jazz-funk and a touch of sub-Goth/Celticism thrown in, it is probably just as well we didn't. Whilst the studio stuff was relatively competent (I said relatively), for example this little ditty, the live everything-louder-than-everything-else and can we have some more reverb approach was possibly a little ill-advised. Judge for yourselves.
From right to left: me, Dr Andy Christy (yes, it is a clarinette), Mark Stickelles (drums), Martyn "Come In Planet Earth" Smith (guitar) and Mr Bill Pritchard (bass. Rather good actually). Thanks chaps

Of course it was only my band 'cos I wrote the songs (after Simon vanished). And I was only allowed to write the songs because I had wheels, slightly more money than the rest, and was a domineering moody sod. But is wasn't all my fault. This minor byway on the info-super-bahn is dedicated to: Simon Kingsley, Catherine Carr, Chris Wilderspin, Myron Maslanyi, Paul Gallant, Maria Wishart, Duncan "so cool" Stafford, Andrew Christy, Martyn "Sarah" Smith, Mark Stickelles, Bill Pritchard & Matt Kelland.

And especially in fond memory of Wayne Masterson.
After a rapturously received tour of, well Cambridge basically, I decided a winter in Antarctica was a far better bet and that was that. Andrew and I did write some stuff later - away from the pressure of rehearsals and hassling for gigs we probably did a bit better. But apart from a very low key one-off two man performance some years later, that was the end of Fragile Skies. Sob.