James Dean Driving Experience

JAMES DEAN DRIVING EXPERIENCE

I was a member of the original Reserve line-up with Torquil McLeod when I first met Ian Gregg. Ian was lead guitarist and Torquil brought me in to play drums. I'd seen Ian about at several gigs that I'd attended. We were always at Bay63 in Ladbroke Grove and we also hung out at most of Dan Tracey's (Television Personalities) venues, most notably 'The Room At The Top' which was upstairs at The Enterprise Pub in Chalk Farm.

Ian also had another project that he'd started called James Dean Driving Experience along with two female friends called Elaine and Jane. The original JDDE played a few gigs as a three-piece with Ian on vocals and acoustic guitar, Elaine and Jane on lead guitar and bass respectively and they used a drum machine to keep the beat.

I really wanted to be part of that band. They were so much better than Reserve and musically, I loved them. So when Ian asked me to join, I jumped at the chance and we both left Reserve there and then to work on JDDE.

We recorded a three track demo with the girls at an eight track studio in West Kensington. 

The girls weren't into being in the band as much as we were so they left and that's when I asked Dave Hopkins to join us on lead guitar. We dug the old drum machine out and I went on to play bass during rehearsals. Nick joined soon after and just in time to be at the Islington recording session of the JDDE1 flexi disc recordings. I played bass on those tracks and Nick was drumming via a keyboard sampler.

'Dean's Eleventh Dream' was recorded at the beginning of May 1988, once again at the studio in Islington.

We played quite a lot of gigs, always with me on drums and Nick on bass. The biggest was at Dingwalls, Camden, supporting Raymonde who had just finished a support tour with The Smiths. We were very unprofessional live. Messy. This was partly down to me losing concentration midway through a song and missing a beat or two which threw us into disarray. The press didn’t seem to like us much at the time and basically said that John Peel filled us with fuel but it turned out to be the wrong kind. It seemed like they were sick of all the four piece bands recently forming even though bands like Seymour had just joined the scene. The option was there for me to continue as bassist and put Nick on drums permanently but I wasn't too keen on that idea and we had some issues regarding song writing acknowledgment so I left to work on my own band that I'd recently started, The Ruth Ellis Swing Band.

 

 

 

In the Melody Maker Indie charts 'Dean's Eleventh Dream' reached the dizzy heights of number 20.

We spent 7 weeks in the NME Indie chart, peaking at number 16.