Cassette Tape Trees Story

Endless Hawkwind covers and improvisation, ended in musical differences, never played a gig and that's probably a good thing.

Cassette tape Trees came about as a direct result of the break up of the legendary Crucified Brains. Cameron Campbell had been thrown out of the band by new bass player Chez Holmes an he wanted to get back into another band. In December 1984 Tom Reid who was also at the Tech with Cameron joined on bass. Ian Cargill who left the Crucified Brains at the same time as Cameron was initially reluctant, but joined as guitarist in January 1985. 

There, sadly the line up remained. Various attempts to find a drummer failed and the band limped through 1985, practicing and getting on each other's nerves. 

The high point of the whole experience was the two practices when the band were joined by the Crucified Brains drummer Mark Deas. Mark was by far the best drummer on the local scene (and if truth be told, probably the best musician out of all of us). It's from the first of these practices on the 19th of May 1985 that the "Instrumental" and "Masters of the Universe" MP3's are taken from. They were recorded in an English classroom at Balwearie High School on a Saturday. I could hardly believe that I was back at my old school playing in a band. The acoustics in the room were excellent too (not that we'd tried them out before). Also there that day was Stephen Simpson, who went on to be the singer of The Surgical Wars. He is on vocals on Master's of the Universe, not that you'd notice as we didn't have a vocal pa and the mic was plugged into Cameron's guitar amp. We had positioned the tape deck on the floor in order to get as little of Cameron on tape as possible! However, Mark's drumming and Ian's guitar playing made this one of the few good tapes we made (despite some dodgy bass playing).  

I am a little confused as to where the "Space" MP3 came from but I think it's from a practice at the St Clair Halls around Spring 1985. We had a guy from the college (sorry I have forgotten your name) guesting with us that day. He was supposed to be a whiz on the keyboards, but spent most of his time doing strange vocals. The recording was just made with him, Cameron on rhythm guitar and Ian on lead guitar. The family resemblance with early Crucified Brains is fairly obvious here.

Well it couldn't go on and it didn't. General boredom and lack of interest won and the band fell to bits late 1985. Cameron went on to form All Days Fade and The Amused. 

The only good thing that came out of this band (apart from the excellent Balwearie tape), was that it would be doubtful if the Surgical Wars would have ever formed, without Ian, Stephen and Tom learning what they didn't want to do anymore in this band.