Demon Groove Lizards

Demon Groove Lizards were an awesome heavy funk and hard rock band formed in Devon in the south west uk in 1993. Demon Groove Lizards continued to perform and record throughout the nineties. Their musicianship and stagecraft lit up venues and wowed many an audience. Demon Groove Lizards were well known for their individual virtuosity.

There were several changes of line-up during the band’s lifetime. The hardcore of the band was Ian Lee on bass and Brent Cassidy on rhythm guitar.

We first came across Demon Groove Lizards in their early days back in 1993. Wud Records was a thing that existed in the background at that time. We were associated with Silent Running Studios, which in those days was a high end eight-track commercial recording studio.

George engineered the band’s first demo, which was a lot of fun and filled with great music. He remembers being blown away by the Demon Groove Lizards’ musicality. Their visit was a real highlight of the entire Silent Running Studios odyssey.

He also remembers it was tremendously hot in the studio in July 1993. The Demon Groove Lizards sessions were punctuated with breaks for air, as several sweaty men poured out of the door and cooled off in the garden in only their underpants. It must have looked mighty strange to the neighbours.

A week or two after the demo was finished, George also did front of house for the Demon Groove Lizards at the King’s Arms in Cowick Street, Exeter. There is even a poster in the gallery!

Support on the day came from two bands. Plastic Fantasy were a thrash metal trio. Their guitarist wanted more bass on his guitar than the rig, and probably the universe was able to provide and he felt a bit disappointed by his sound.

The other support band were the Frantic Spiders. They were a late addition to the bill so were not mentioned on the poster. They had a guest vocalist for one song who was incredibly shouty. With her first utterance she suddenly screamed and blew all the meters into the top end of the red zone for the first second of her performance. George was able to hastily control her gain and avoid any permanent damage to hearing or equipment.

The performance from Demon Groove Lizards was suitably splendid. It was characterised by some rather quirky stage antics by Ben, their singer, who was replaced fairly soon after. He spent most of the second half of the show singing whilst laying flat on his back (perhaps to illustrate the title of one of their songs, Horizontal Hilarious) or kneeling into a corner at the back of the stage. It looked quite odd but his vocal performance was fine. Rock n roll eh.

Lead guitarist James Shipway left the group fairly early in the course of their odyssey. We came upon James again a decade or so later when he was one of the guitar teachers at the Academy of Music and Sound in Exeter, where George also taught a few of the courses. His virtuosity had increased even further in the intervening period.

The band went on to make two further recordings.

Demon Groove Lizards remain one of our favourite bands of the 90s. We hope you will love hearing them as much as we have. It’s been a real highlight of 2021 to able to enjoy their wonderful funktastic songs again.

If you would like to download some Demon Groove Lizards music to add to your collection, you can visit their Bandcamp pages by clicking here.