Litterley

DAVE THOMPSON WRITES: During the summer of 1982 Kevin Driskel got in touch. He was in a new band with Mike Barlow (ex Subterfuge) and bassist Andy Sykes. They needed a singer/lyricist and I was really impressed with the bits of tunes they gave me on tapes to work with. We quickly became an intuitive collaborative writing team which was a brand new experience for me. In the past I'd either written songs on my own or wrote lyrics to someone else's tune which is essentially a compromise, whereas this was definitely a joint effort. I still took care of the words but everything felt like we'd contributed equally. We tried several guitarists but none of them fitted in. We stopped looking eventually .With Andy's fluid melodic fretless bass and Mike's keyboards augmented by my synthesizer when required we had a full enough sound,and we'd started experimenting with drum machines triggering synthesizers, although we never ruled out the possibility of a guitarist . Late in 1982 Kevin left and was replaced by Neil MacDiarmid. Band names are always a frustration and we hadn't given it much thought until events got the better of us when we secured a gig at RAFTERS,Manchester in March 1983. I was sharing a big house in Chorlton at the time and my strangest housemate had developed a peculiar obsession for a cat belonging to one of the other housemates. For reasons which nobody will ever understand(along with just about everything else this guy did) he christened the cat Litterley and used to sing to it while he caressed(!?) it.He taped himself doing this c/w with the poor cat 'purring' on a portable cassette recorder. His strange behaviour became legendary around Chorlton in the early '80s and I nicked the tape which was played over the PA at the gig heralding the band's arrival on stage - hence the name LITTERLEY. That was our only gig and we just drifted apart shortly after. Another wasted great opportunity, and one that I still regret to this day. All that's left are 2 recordings from rehearsals done on a portable cassette recorder which is the source of the audio on the videos posted here.