Bands: Voon

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Apart from The Validators Voon are the band with whom I had most adventures and fun. We formed in 1989 when Neil Brown and I shared a house in Leicester. We recorded one tape, split up, reformed during the holidays, and got a keyboard player, David Gowing, and a clarinetist, Jane Lalljee, in. This line-up lasted for one gig, so we played as a duo for a while and recorded another tape. We then recruited Simon Wilkinson to play keyboards, played loads of gigs around Leicester, got Jamieson Sutcliffe and a drummer called Aiden in for a bit, lost them, then recorded another tape. Neil left, so our friend Chris Lawson joined. We did loads more gigs, recorded another tape, and finished up with a monumentally drunk gig at a battle of the bands, where we came very very last. It was brilliant.

A couple of years later I wrote a booklet about our life and times, and we reformed the classic me/Neil/Simon lineup in order to "launch" it. Nobody came and nobody cared but we had such a lot of fun that we decided to reform and this time do it just for larks, so we spent nine months just playing in Leicester and having a GRATE time. We recorded another tape, a live tape, and put a song out on a compilation single. As agree we split up at The Abbey Park Festival - Simon went off to become an actor, Neil joined John Sims, and I started my thrilling solo career.

We got together one more time for Sorted Supremo Dave Dixey's 40th birthday. We had a fantastic practice and all got very excited to be playing together again, but the gig itself wasn't quite as much fun. We did talk, around 2003, of reforming as Ultimate Voon, with Chris coming back and Tim from The Validators drumming, but we didn't really get around to doing it.

If this all seems a bit breathless and brief, it's because it's all covered in much greater detail in The Curse Of Voon, which is well worth a read!

Releases:

Yoghurt Flange
Modern and Vivid
Interesting
A Taste Of Tea
How Voon Is Now
The Legend Of Voon
Live At The Durham Ox
We Are Voon
Brain Cakes EP
Havock Junction
I Preferred Their Earlier Stuff
Tarotplane Kandy Korn: The Sorted Records Anthology, Vol. 1
Cardboard Cutout Sundown: The Sorted Records Anthology, Vol. 2

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