If you like my music I suggest you buy my SUBURBAN PASTORAL cd. It has 14 tracks featuring guest appearances from BJ Cole, Lester Square, the Horns, and more!Order from Rough Trade Mail order, www.roughtrade.com for £10.99
Or buy for £10.00 inc p & p to anywhere in the world, right here and right now:
The next one, 'Poetry and Rhyme' will be out in September and features contributions from Martin Stephenson, Paul Davey, Gina Birch, Count Dubulah, Elle Osborn and Allan Bradbury.
Who am I? I was bass player for Joby and the Hooligans, the worst punk band in Brighton (but we had the best songs), then in short-lived band The Smartees, before forming The Chefs with Carl Evans and Rod Bloor. We did loads of gigs, James McCallum joined on second guitar, and we did a few Peel sessions (none of us can remember how many). Soon, we are going to bring out a compilation of Chefs songs. The I started Helen and the Horns, playing guitar, after a brief musical interlude with Lester Square, and we did even more Peel sessions and played a lot in Scotland, where we had really great audiences. Disastrously, we signed to RCA, who shelved us until I put on my scary glasses, marched down there and got us released from the deal. The kindly Horns used their savings to record an album (Rough Trade have some of the original vinyl albums too) and we spilt up.
I fell asleep for twenty years, and woke up with a head full of songs and a heart full of energy to sing them with.
I like playing unusual venues and sometimes promote gigs too mostly because of drawing the flyers (!) and I am a compulsive doodler. I used to publish my own comics and still contribute to comics when people ask me to.
Previous bands were The Chefs (see www.myspace.com/thechefs) and Helen and the Horns (see www.myspace.com/helenandthehorns)
'The Lost Women of Rock' is a book I wrote two years ago about female instrumentalists in punk bands in the late 1970s/early 1980s, featuring interviews with the Slits, Gina Birch, the Mo-Dettes, Enid Williams (Girlschool), the Dollymixture, Gaye Black (Adverts), Vi Subversa (Poison Girls), Rhoda Dakar, Lucy O'Brien, Attila the Stockbroker, Caroline Coon, Geoff Travis and the late John Peel amongst others. It is published by Ashgate Press, an academic publisher, and is very expensive but you can get your library to buy a copy for you!!! It is written under the name of Helen Reddington, which is an identity I passed through earlier in my life.
For more about the early bands I played in see www.punkbrighton.com
For up to date gig info and my regularly-updated Blog, see www.mccookerybook.com or this site!
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