The Old Signs

The Old Signs are Justin Seth Brookman (vocals) and Neville Malcolm Mansfield (musical underpinnings/fridge technician/backing vocals). Myself and Nev are both drummers and have played in bands over the years. Nev kept nagging me to do some "weird" music for a laugh for a couple of years, I was resilient as I thought it would basically be rubbish! Ideas for The Old Signs were banded around between us over the winter of 2005. We decided to call ourselves "The Old Signs" as it seemed fitting what with me being a sign collector and having a love for nostalgia. In Feb 2006 we finally got together and created a song about sign collecting called "Street Jewellery". This opened up my creative floodgates and I couldn’t stop writing down ideas, often in the middle of the night. Nearly all the ideas were drawing on my colourful and bizarre past and my wild imagination. Nev would spur me on with each recording session and new things would come to light making the songs ever more potent. A lot of the recording sessions would spiral into hysterical laughing, especially when it came to laying down the vocals. When we had amassed enough material to warrant a short album the idea was to then just give a few copies to friends. This happened at the same time as we discovered myspace which became a great tool for communicating with "musician" friends who had moved to London etc. We initially put Hands Free Mic. on our site and the reaction was incredible. Soon people were asking us to send them copies of the album and a real buzz about us started happening. We hadn’t even thought about trying to gig the material live but with the strong reaction we were getting we thought why not give it a go. Things have gone from strength to strength for us gaining a loyal and commited fan base and a reputation as being a force to be reckoned with live. Justin. (We were awarded a gold disc in June 2006 for shifting more than 10,000 copies of our self titled album)