On January 12th 1980 ‘And also the trees’ played live for the first time. We think of this as the beginning, the day ‘And also the trees’ became a real band.

After that first gig all we wanted was to play live again. We thought that maybe if we made a vocal PA we could be self sufficient, hire out places and put gigs on ourselves or play in the back rooms of pubs.

Our second live performance was at a Young Farmers Pig roast and Disco. As it was just the other side of Inkberrow, about 2 miles away, we decided not to hire a van but to drive all our equipment there in my mini clubman.

We worked on new songs in Justin’s bedroom and spent many hours renovating ‘the dairy’ - replacing the old floor boards, bricking up the windows and fireplace and doing our best to soundproof it - we even made a new heavy duty door.

I was in the Old Bull Inn one night with Graham standing at the bar when a friend came in and said there had been an announcement on Ann Nightingale’s BBC Radio 1 show that Fiction records wanted to urgently get in touch with a band called ‘And also the trees’.

We consider the birth of ‘And also the trees’ to be our first live performance which was on January 12th 1980, our first year, was drawing to a close.

As 1981 progressed we finished renovating and soundproofing our rehearsal room ‘The Dairy’. We also called it ‘The void’ as the peaceful old room with its boxes of wrinkled apples and sleeping cats was now a totally characterless whitewashed box... an obvious outcome we hadn’t considered until it was too late.

Towards the end of November 1981 we took our equipment down to London and dropped it off for transportation with The Cure’s road crew who didn’t know wether to laugh or cry as we unloaded what looked like a van load of stuff that had come straight off the film set of ‘Out of Africa’…