archimedes rock music reviews

On this page you will find information relating to the various bands and musical projects that David Weston and various travelling companions have been a part of from 1980 to the present day.

Between 1980 and 1985 I played with Chemical Alice the full history of which can be found elsewhere on this site.

Following the end of Chemical Alice / Alice in January 1985 I took a break (although sometime in the middle there was a jam at a party in Suffolk including Twink, Rob and Dean from various incarnations of Here & Now) until the early Autumn of 1985 when I met up with bass played Pete Clark and subsequently formed Slartibartfast. Pete played the sort of driving, funky bass that I was looking for at the time to pretty much carry on where the jams as various festivals in previous years had left off. With the addition of Andy House on synthesisers and old friend Ron Bennett on drums, Slartibartfast became an entirely instrumental of jazz-rock / space rock hybrid.

Andy House	Pete Clark
Ron Bennett	David Weston

Slartibartfast proper called it a day sometime around mid 1987 (although somewhere around this time there was a Slartibartfast / Osiris hybrid - The Urban Spacemen, a name that would be reused in 2002) and another interlude followed in which various line ups were tested in an attempt to move in a much jazzier direction. To be honest without the festivals to go the festival influence was fading and I was listening to all sorts of different and often very jazzy music.

The core of Osiris formed around this time with Bill Pritchard on bass and Ron on drums although it was some time before we managed to find a keyboard player in the shape of Bill's then future brother in law Jerry Nicholson. Ron, Bill and I did a mid summer gig in 1989 at a party in Suffolk at which Jerry was present and he joined pretty much straight after.

David Weston guitar
Bill Pritchard bass
Ron Bennett drums
Jerry Nicholson keyboards

Osiris followed on from Slartibartfast by again being an instrumental band but somewhere along the space-rock got mostly lost leaving the band as pretty much straight jazz-rock. Jerry is a much more piano oriented player than Andy and this coupled with Bill melodic bass made for a much lighter feel although at certain times we certainly let rip. One memorable occasion was at the Cambridge Strawberry Fair in 1991 where we brewed up a real storm in the jazz tent to a delighted audience of several hundred. Here's the Organ review of that gig and of our 'Zen Breakfast' tape.

Osiris ground to a halt sometime in 1992 having played a lot of gigs and an immense amount of fun. It seems at this point I took a couple of years off before hooking up with Essex singer songwriter Tony Winn in 1993 for a duo gig and then to form what became MAMWF.

After ten years of instrumental music and having to playing just too many guitar solos I needed a change and was looking to do something that indulged one of the other areas of my musical interest namely folk-country-rock music focussing on songs. Tony writes contemporary songs (definitely not folk) covering a wide variety of subjects and emotions. The plan was to be something between I guess, The Band, Fairport, electric Dylan and Richard Thompson. As you can see some familiar names appear once again. Oh and the name? Well no matter what we may have said at the time it stands for Middle Aged Men with Families (which is what we were / are despite that fact that we subsequently added Alison on vocals). Cool eh?

So what's next? Well after the last MAMWF gig in June 1999 I pretty much just twiddled my thumbs until a late night call in October led to my appearance at the Cosmic Charlies Halloween gig at something like 24 hours notice. In case you don't know the Charlies are probably the UK's longest lived and most successful Grateful Dead cover band. Oh and they like to jam - a lot, and so it transpired that I was reminded how much I like to just let it all go and blow…. (my favourite band of the 90's is after all, Phish). A few more Charlies gigs followed, leading to the formation of Box of Rain. Chances are I'll be playing with this lot again at some time.

The concept of the band first sprang from a Cosmic Charlies gig in late 1999 where David depped for an ailing guitarist and Mick played bass. David realised that he really should be playing in a band after the demise of MAMWF and Mick was keen to play guitar again after several years on bass in the Charlies and also to play material other than that of the Grateful Dead.

By April 2000, Bill, Ron and Tony had joined (or possible re-joined given the various members shared histories) and the band played it's first gig in September that year. Following inception the idea behind the band gradually moved away from playing mostly covers to playing largely original material with songs written by Tony, Mick and David with contributions from Bill and Ron.

The original material and covers played by the band reflected the broad range of influences of the members, from Bob Dylan and Tom Waits to the Grateful Dead and Phish, Miles Davis and Gong to progressive rock, jazz rock and the blues, Elvis and the Beatles to Zappa, etc, etc, etc....

Box of Rain played it's last gig (for the time being at least) in December 2001 after which Bill left for domestic and professional reasons. The Chemical Alice reunion gig in January 2002 led me (David) to re-evaluate my musical ambitions and Box of Rain was put in ice to make way for the looser, spacier more jam oriented Urban Spacemen which pretty much encompasses something of everything above.

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