I’ve sung in pop groups since I was eight. My first band was called The Marmites. My school band was called Ruby Crystal and The Diamonds.

At college in Wales I was in a band called The Repeaters. After college the band moved to Brighton, and we changed our name to The Airtight Garage. We were interested in sixties US psychedelia; we were clever, but we didn’t get it right. After five odd years, we never really learned to play together, I suspect.

A few of us moved to Manchester in 1981, to try to do some recording, but we just ended up punching one another. Then I was asked to join a band in Newhaven, my home town. So I went home. We were called The National Game, and we were pretty darned hot. Radio Caroline named us ‘The Best Unsigned Band in Britain, 1983’. We stayed unsigned. We split up due to musical differences in 1984, but in 2000 and again in 2001 we played  reunion gigs in Newhaven, to try to raise money for the campaign to stop a rubbish incinerator from being built on Newhaven’s North Quay. If you follow the link, you can see photographs of the first gig on The National Game website. You can also buy a recording of the gig, entitled ‘*nc*n*r*t*r’ We wrote a couple of new songs for the gigs, and I hope that one day, we can get together and record them in a studio.

But the band of my heart were called The Mood Index. I formed the band with a guy called Pete French in 1985. We wrote the songs together, and we had an insane ten piece hippie orchestra to play them. I left in 1987 to get my head together in the country, but the band carried on with a new singer called Katherine Wood. Then the band left the band, so that it was just Pete and Kath left. Peter and me started writing together again in 1991, and Kath left the band the following year. Now it was just me and Pete again, and in 1994 we thought we’d like to record some of our more dance-orientated songs as white labels for DJ’s. We tried to find a bit of money, and a hot girl to sing the songs. We found the money, but not the girl. This didn’t matter, as Pete was by now stark staring bonkers, and got it into his head that we should record an album of our non dance stuff, with me singing, and with a live band. I was powerless to stop him. It took us three years to record, recordings which sucked up all our money and all of our energy. We used a huge band, including, to my delight, Miss Katherine Wood on backing vocals, and our old pal, and original guitarist, Rikki Patten. At the end, we had just enough cash to make up a thousand copies of our CD, but no money or energy left to do anything with it. Copies sit in boxes under my desk and Pete’s Hammond, which is a shame. The album was called ‘Lino, Women and Song... the Many Moods of The Mood Index’, which was probably a shame too. I’m very proud of this album, and if you have the gear and inclination you can download an MP3 of the first track, ‘When She Comes’.

This lunatic project, and its aftermath, made it very difficult for Peter and me to work together. Our personal friendship was broken. We were both living in Lancaster at the time; Pete moved back to Brighton in 1997, and I started playing with an old geezer called Chas Ambler.

Chas is over two and a half thousand years old. The illegitimate son of a Babylonian temple slave and an itinerant Illyrian stonecutter, Chas is doomed to roam the Earth in a succession of dodgy old wagons, tumbrels and Maestro vans until he has a record in the Top Fifty. It looks like he still may have some time to wait. He is currently living somewhere in Morecambe. Our act together is called ‘Your Dad’, and if you haven’t seen us, why, then you’ve missed a real treat. We sing old songs, and get our flabby middle aged man tits out for the lasses. The highlight of the hundreds of gigs we have done together has been our three appearances in the Green Field at The Glastonbury Festival. We aren’t playing together much at the moment, but we can always be persuaded to do an interesting gig, and we are planning a European Tour for 2005/6, as long as Chas is still alive. Contact Your Dad via ian@ianmarchant.com

Pete and me licked our wounds, and started knocking songs around together again in 1999. I realised that I loved the guy, and that life is short. He is one of my closest and dearest friends; writing songs with someone is, for me, one of the most intimate acts it is possible to commit with your clothes on, and Peter and I have shared that intimacy for almost twenty years. Silly to throw something like that away.

So Pete and I still write and record together when we can, and one day we’ll do another album. We’re in no rush. We live a long way apart; I live in Devon now, and Pete has moved back to Lancaster, where he has a band of his own, called Flytipper. But every now and then, Pete drags someone into the studio to add another tiny piece to the Mood Index quilt. One day, when Pete has sewn together all the patches, I’ll go into the studio, and sing the songs, and the thing will be done. We have a title for the album. It’s to be called ‘The Blessed Silence.’