I was in this band see, called ' A Tribe of Toffs ', with my school and church mates, Andrew Stephenson, Philip Rogers and Michael Haggerton. We wrote this song called 'John Kettley Is A Weatherman' and sent it to the BBC, who called one day and got us down to London to make a video with John Kettley himself.

Then of course we got signed by Neat Records and released it as a single in December 1988. We got to number 21 in the charts and went on 'Wogan' and loads of other TV shows and had a fab time for a few weeks. We earned about £4000 each from it and then split up. Best time of my life though really.

My mum's back yard

We formed in 1986 and set about recording stupid songs on my four track cassette recorder. We made two 'albums' packed full of potential hits, one of which was the Kettley thing. The albums were on cassette with photocopied covers and we made about 200 of 'For Fruitbats Pleasures Only' and 500 of 'Live From The Deathburger Shed'. We did pretty good business when we played at the MAYC (Methodist Association of Youth Clubs) London Weekend event in May 1989 at Brixton Academy. It was after we'd been in the charts and we sold out of cassettes in a matter of minutes. We didn't do many live gigs, but those we did do were, strangely, to thousands of people.......oh apart from the one in Wolverhampton with 'Doppler Effect', which was in the basement of this church hall and could only fit about 200 in.

We did quite a bit of TV during our 4 weeks or so of stardom.

August 1988 - Look North (BBC1 regional)
August 1988 - But First This (BBC1 national presented by the yorkshire girl who now drives
the ambulance on Casualty and some bloke who went on to be in a band called 'Yell' who had one or two hits)
December 1988 - Wogan (BBC1 national with Terry Wogan)
December 1988 - Look North (BBC1 regional)
December 1988 - Childrens BBC interview and video (BBC1 national with Simon Parkin)
December 1988 - Childrens BBC video only (BBC1 national with Andy Crane)
January 1989 - Daytime Live (BBC1 national with Alan Titchmarch)

Keith Nichol Studio Manager at Impulse and engineer of Toffs music

If you want to read a massive full history of the band or if you would like to look at photos of the Toffs or even, God forbid, hear some music (loose term) by the band, then feel free to go to the official A Tribe of Toffs website at www.monocle.org/toffs .

Copyright © by Debbie and Stephen All Right Reserved.

Published on: 2003-02-27 (9559 reads)