Alternative Alien Heat Biography

Alien Heat, named after a novel by Michael Moorcock, was a remarkable band. Remarkable for the characters that made it up, remarkable for the songs they wrote and remarkable for the energy they created when performing together. It really was a sound quite unlike any other.

It all began one day in October 1989 when Peter Greatorex mentioned to his son Mark that they really ought to play some music together. Pete had already sung and played harmonica with Fat Chance and Barefaced Robbery and was an accomplished lyricist. Mark had been playing bass for some years with bands such as Completely Triffid, The Ug Brothers, Laughing Sun, Wud and Cirrus Rising. Mark’s old mate Graham Barbe was raring to go on the drums after stints with Wud, Fat Chance, Laughing Sun, The Ug Brothers and The Subterraineans. And then there was Richard Holloway, programmer extraordinaire, who had been playing flute and keys with Wud, keys with Completely Triffid and made a lot of his own rather fine and somewhat quirky music on a fourtrack with a little occasional help from various other characters.

This left a vacancy in the guitar department and the boys were just wondering what they should do when George Davies appeared one evening to say hello. Eureka! George, Graham and Mark had not long since had a jam at Bandspace and it had been jolly good fun. All three were reminded just how good the others were to play with by the experience. Besides being a guitarist frustrated by having no-one to play with regularly since the demise of Rough Terrain, George also happened to have some time on his hands and access to rehearsal space at Bandspace, which he helped set up and run. [It is still going strong to this day at St Davids Hill Community Centre, Exeter. (-:] Thus the band was born, kicking and screaming like a pig covered in tar and set alight to frighten charging elephants. Indeed, Alien Heat were easily capable of creating a sound that would frighten any kind of elephant that ever lived.

The first bizarre incident came when the boyz were to have their initial meeting at Bandspace. There had been some sort of cock-up, a double booking or something. Graham, Mark and Richard were all walking across the Iron Bridge away from Bandspace towards the city centre when George drove by. He was so surprised to see them walking to town he immediately slammed his brakes on really hard to stop and say ‘hello’. The driver of the car behind was daydreaming and smashed straight into the back of George’s Talbot Sunbeam and totally failed to cause it any damage, which was amazing because the thing was such a wreck. The man who had driven into the back of George’s car was surprised, shocked, shaken and apologetic. Meanwhile, the rest of the band were most amused.

One of the first things the band had to face was the problem of equipment. Richard had sold his keyboards to cover some debts and Graham had sold his previous drumkit to Bandspace when he decided to try his hand at photography. Pete needed a mic and the band needed a PA and transport. Graham didn’t mind using the Bandspace kit – after all, it had been his previously – but poor Richard was reduced to using a truly horrid keyboard, one of those neo-toy things with tiny keys, horrible preset rhythms and 100 sounds that all sounded like they had been made by putting several different bees in several different types of biscuit tin.

Undaunted, they soldiered on and began to write some fiendishly fine tunes. The first one, ‘Alien Heat’, was very silly indeed and was soon dropped when other numbers came along. It went A, F, D, Ab, G if anyone is interested. Also came ‘Badass Boogie’, another song which Graham, Mark, Richard and Pete had already worked on. The first number that all five wrote together was a wonderful, beautiful, mystical two-chord song called ‘Abnormal’, which came to life one fine grey rainy November evening in Pete’s bedroom. Very soon after came the equally wonderful, beautiful and mystical ‘Ship to Shore’, which had a few more chords in it.

Richard was on the verge of acquiring some keyboards by now (‘Ship to Shore’ began with the cry: “Cue the noise!”) and Pete had bought a van, a big red Transit which was called Red Dwarf and which was destined to be repaired or modifed more often than any other vehicle in the entire history of the universe. George and Mark got together once or twice near the beginning and went through a few numbers. This was after George had lent Mark his fourtrack and drum machine and Mark had had some fun playing with them and some guitars. This led to the basis of several songs such as ‘Alpha Omega’, ‘Where Are You’, ‘The Winds of Heaven’ and ‘Odd’. Mark already had the basslines down to some extent and George’s guitarwork added strength and definition to the numbers.

Pete’s lyrics were absolutely fantastic, as good as any of the best writers anywhere in the world and in history. His allegorical style was fascinating and Pete himself often had very little idea what he had written about, it just came from that place on the far side where songs come from. The rest of the band put forward their own thoughts and theories as to the meanings of the songs. For instance, Richard reckoned that ‘Ship to Shore’ was about Pete himself, a misfit living in a strange world, and George recognised that ‘Abnormal’ had been written for him, the last person to join the band and a young man desperately in need of solace. Pete was truly prolific; by the time the band were able to play four numbers from start to finish there were another couple of dozen sets of lyrics sat in a folder, waiting to be unlocked by the twelve magik keys of their musik.

Graham the drummer sporting a snazy haircut!The band worked out some more tunes – ‘Dancing In The Dark’ was a particularly quirky number, being in Bm yet going to G and F and having a jazzy section around C#m7 and A9. It also had a drum solo that allowed Mark and George to roll fags while it was in progress – most essential. Next came ‘Asylum Child’, a tune that was written largely by Pete, Richard and Mark, with Graham and finally George joining in its creation. Around the same time, ‘Joe Right’ was written and promptly dropped due to Pete expecting it to sound like speed metal and the band coming up with something more like Latin jazz. ‘Odd’ was also completed and gave the whole band a chance to shout stuff into the mic. This was a particularly funky number and always raised a smile from Pete’s wife Rowena and daughter Sammi, who would turn up at the place toward the end of rehearsals.

Next came three tunes on George’s birthday in late January 1990. They were all composed in Pete’s garage in Topsham Road, which had been cleared to use as a rehearsal space – ‘Easy Street’ (hard metal), ‘Jigsaw’ (funky soul and rock) and ‘Wonderlust’ (hard metal again, and somewhat later, a soft jazz version). When Richard took his keys round to George’s new bedsit in Haldon Road, just round the corner from Bandspace, they came up with the basis for ‘Crash’. George and Pete spent an afternoon on the phone discussing the songs and the tarot, and how the songs could represent different tarot cards. That conversation was the start of something big: Pete drove Red Dwarf over to George’s and they worked on ‘Crash’ and one or two others, including ‘Mr Dream’, and they both thought a lot for some time to come. By the springtime, Gorilla Promotions had taken an interest in the band, the result being a stonking preview written up in the local magazine ‘Event South West’. A photoshoot was necessary, so the band headed for Exton and Lympstone beaches. Before meeting the photographers, they had to wait in a pub garden for them to turn up, dressed up in all their gear. All the other people at the pub were rich families out for their Sunday lunch, to whom the band were a very peculiar spectacle from another world and their children really ought not look at them too much in case – well, they’d just better not.

The poor boyz were still struggling away with second rate equipment until finally a plan was hatched to produce the gear they needed. Pete bought a big Peavey PA and a new mic, Graham sorted himself out some drums and a few bottles of Jack Daniels and Richard found some useful bits of gear, although a lot of what he wanted took time to track down. The band also wrote ‘Bodyfire’, ‘Traveller’ (a song inspired by the visit of George’s friend Michaela who was also a songsmith and agreed to also write a song called ‘Traveller’ [but she didn’t]) and a funky song called something like ‘Cosmic Dancer’ that was in Em and went on about “Moving up your body, moving up your spine”. This last song was also dropped – pity really, because it was actually quite good.

Also necessary was a decent demo tape. There was already one stage gig in the pipeline and more would be needed if the band were to achieve global domination. A good friend of Richard’s was running a studio in Torquay called Red Rug, so the band headed off there and recorded a demo tape over a couple of days. Interestingly, when recording the song ‘Jigsaw’ they played it twice and it was exactly the same length both times, much to the amazement of Jake the engineer. The demo was also the showcase for Graham’s new drumkit, and it sounded very fine indeed! A rush of events took place in the early summer. The song ‘Prisoner’ was written in the back room of where Graham and Mark were living and the first show was about to take place at the Dayspace Festival, Totnes. Alien Heat were to headline the show! The band unfortunately didn’t play to their potential and were a bit disappointed. Then came Richard’s new equipment, and suddenly there was loads of drums and bass coming from where there had previously only been keyboards. Mark especially found this hard to play to, although the song ‘Ullyses’ began to emerge from the chaos. The band split came after an unpleasant and violent altercation between two members. Left hanging in the air, it seemed unreal that it was all over and something simply had to be done…

Well, what actually happened was Richard and Pete formed Hot Machine and set up a recording studio, Graham and George moved to London for some adventures and Mark did his own thing for a while. However, Alien Heat was the solid foundation upon which Dark Star was based, a band that consisted mostly of Pete and George. Dark Star rekindled some of the Alien Heat material and collected it together in their third album which they titled ‘Alien Heat’, in memory of the power, strength and energy of the band that came before.