 Dream Factory - No.5
Musical Genre/Type: Pop / Soul
Formed: 1986 Split: 1986
Tim Goode - Lead Vocals (Gillway)
Dave Stevenson - Lead Guitar/Backing Vocals (Polesworth)
Lloyd Barnett - Rhythm Guitar/Backing Vocals (Polesworth)
Mark Mortimer - Bass Guitar (Gillway)
Andy "Batman" Holt – Drums (Amington Heath)
Greg Stevenson – Keyboards/Backing Vocals (Dosthill)
Paul Scragg : Tenor saxophone (Bolehall); Paul Stansfield : Tenor trombone (Gillway); Neil Gledhill : Alto and baritone saxophones (Hurley).
Sun And Smiles - Mark Mortimer
Uncle Albert - Mark Mortimer
Stop That Dragon! - Mark Mortimer
Wasted Time - Dave Stevenson
Feel Your Touch - Lloyd Barnett / Tim Goode / Mark Mortimer
Last Gig: The Rathole, Tamworth - December 1986
Title: Stop That Dragon!
Track List: Stop That Dragon! / Feel Your Touch
Format: Demo
Title: Uncle Albert
Track List: Sun And Smiles / Uncle Albert / Wasted Time
Format: Demo
Title: Live Recording
Track List: Sun And Smiles / Uncle Albert / Feel Your Touch / Memory Lane / Love 15 / Wine And Roses / Mousetrap! / Fashion Toys / Stop That Dragon! / Wasted Time / Cold Turkey /
Format: Demo
Following a disagreement with both Steve Quilton and Lloyd Barnett, they were duly sacked from the band at the start of 1986 and replaced by young teenage guitar whizz kid Dave Stevenson (ironically also from Polesworth) and former Terroah drummer Andy Holt (better known locally as "Batman"). This was quite a major line up change and the result was a jazzier direction as the band started to move away from their Jam and Dexys-like sound to a more Style Council type of feel, something that I personally was never keen on. Nevertheless, by the time this line up got together the Dream Factory was a very tight, well-organised and well rehearsed band with a far superior sound than the line up that had recorded the two singles.
New brass section members came in the form of Paul "Scraggy" Scragg who along with Hurley's Neil Gledhill brought an element of jestering during journeys to gigs (i.e. they were the clowns who always made us laugh). Indeed, I remember both Gledhill and Scragg often wearing rubber gloves (Marigolds) on stage for no apparent reason. We also brought in a young teenage trumpeter from Birmingham whose name I have sadly forgotten. Greg Stevenson lasted another few months and then decided to quit but not before we recorded a really strong demo tape at the Expresso Bongo early in 1986.
After Stevenson left we had a change of heart about Lloyd Barnett who we were very much missing and he was invited back to rejoin the group, taking a more rhythm guitar and backing vocals role alongside Dave Stevenson. This line up was unquestionably the best and most talented the Dream Factory had and there was terrific creativity flowing from all directions with songs being written by almost everyone in the band. It was also a very happy and fun time to be in the band as we travelled up and down the country gigging at universities, scooter rallies and the like.
Following the recording of a live gig inside the Expresso Bongo Studios it looked like we would get a major deal with a top label and everything seemed rosy in the garden on the surface. But the arguments over the band's direction were never far from the surface. It looked as though we were closing in on a major deal but in the background we were still suffering from that age-old cliched problem of "musical differences"; I was dragging the Dream Factory to a harder edged 60s sound whereas Lloyd and Tim wanted it to be softer and jazzier. Sadly, the major deal never materialised as the dudes who came to see us at the Expresso Bongo decided to nurture and develop a then-unknown band from up north called The Stone Roses!! And the rest, as they say, is history!!
Because I was not winning my battle to take the Dream Factory into harder territory I formed a sideline band called The Great Express with former Private Property singer/guitarist Brian Lacey with the idea being I could express my noisier creative side through that channel. I originally felt sure I could operate in two bands at full pelt but it never worked out that way and eventually I decided I was going to quit the Dream Factory. Disheartened by us missing out on the BIG BREAK that we came so close to securing and totally fed up with trying to take the band into a tougher sound, I had basically had enough. At our last gig at the Rathole it was a great feeling and the night went swimmingly well despite the event being tinged with some heavy sadness. On the last song that sadness boiled over into full-on aggression as Tim Goode, my best friend since I was 5 years old, turned round and threw a superb punch straight in my face. It was his way of "grieving" at the band's collapse and because it had been me that had halted the Dream Factory Tim felt I deserved the black eye that he gave me and, in all honesty, I probably did.
Apart from a real FUN reunion gig - again at The Rathole - in December 1990 (sadly played in front of a handful of people due to the Arctic conditions) that was the end of the Dream Factory, a band who I remain very, very proud of to this day. We were never the greatest musicians in the town but we worked so incredibly hard and put so much energy, effort, time, blood, sweat, tears and money into it that we really did deserve the national recognition we received and maybe Wolfsbane took things on even further for Tamworth in terms of widespread success but we did, I strongly believe, ACHIEVE and we did - up to a point - put Tamworth back on the national music map again.
Reaching the charts was a kick and getting Radio One airplay was wonderful blah, blah, blah but for me the best part of the whole Dream Factory trip were the AMAZING rapport and relationship we enjoyed with our highly loyal and crazy band of followers who supported us all over the country, sometimes to quite bizarre levels of dedication. From the local scooter boys and mods in the Tamworth and Polesworth area through to the various scoter clubs in Birmingham and the various other people up and down the country who followed our every move, it was a pleasure and an honour to be part of that magical time and I have very fond memories of it with, as Scott Walker would croon...no regrets.
It was sociologically a real time of change. "Thatcher's Britain" - as it was back then - was a horribly polarised society where everything was teetering on the brink of the abyss; there was always a sensation of tension and the smell of aggression and rebellion in the air through the mid 80s and I think a lot of that vibe that afflicted society back then came into play during the Dream Factory career. We saw our fair share of violence at gigs and loads of social unrest and, in typical "angry young men" style we tried to write about it in some of our songs. But there were moments of non-violent beauty too and with loads of genuine, lovely emotion attached to it.
I remember CLEARLY when one of our most diehard fans had been involved in a road accident on his scooter and had died from his injuries in Birmingham - we got to hear about it a few minutes before we went on stage in front of a staggering 500 people at Kingsbury WMC (now called Kingsbury Country Club) and even though they were the noisiest, rowdiest, manic bunch of motherf***ers, when I announced it on stage the place went strangely silent so you could literally hear a pin drop.
There were great moments of bonding that went on between band and audience throughout the Dream Factory's time and I was always moved when people you'd never seen or met before in your life would come up to you and tell you how "important" your band was to them. Even if we felt a bit like charlatans (because we never actually had a very high opinion of ourselves at all!) - particularly at winning the Musicbox Band Of The Year award three or four times - we all felt honoured and proud of MEANING something to some people which, I guess, is really what you'd call proper success.
To this day at DC Fontana gigs I still have people coming up to me asking for us to play "Wine & Roses" or people reminding me of a certain gig or a certain song we played (i.e. The Dream Factory) that had a special meaning for them during their youth in the mid 80s. That's got to be cool!
I remember we played a big air force base in Lincolnshire (think it was RAF and not US Air Force) and they asked us to play for three hours which was a bit of a shock to the system!! We also played down south in Salisbury if I remember....
The "Stop That Dragon!" recording had more of a "crunch" to the sound than previous recordings and was definitely "harder" which was, in part, due to the fact I was increasingly getting into more 60s garage stuff and started really enjoying the emergence of more guitary bands (indie bands??!?!) in 1986 such as The Mighty Lemon Drops, the Weather Prophets and so forth. "Stop That Dragon!" itself had nothing to do with heroin etc - it was just a silly, semi-joking psychedelic nonsense title for what was a powerful northern soul-sounding instrumental dominated by the big brass sound and also the dirtier guitars of Dave and Lloyd.
"Feel Your Touch" was a very commercial radio-friendly song that sounded a little bit like The Tams' "Be Young, Be Foolish, Be Happy" but also had a real jazzy verse with Dave Stevenson playing some clever little jazz guitar licks. As the charts were, at this time, infested with lots of pseudo "new jazz" with people like Sade and the Style Council being very successful, it kind of fitted in with what was happening but I was much more interested in the brasher, more harder-edged guitar stuff that was poking thru and, having hung around Julian Cope and Donald a lot and listening to loads of amphetamine-fired 60s garage and freakbeat that was much more where my heart and head were.
This inevitably led to some clashes of opinion on where the group should be heading. On the one side you had Tim Goode and Lloyd Barnett really into the more mellow jazz-pop side and on the other you had me desperate to crank the sound up and make it more aggressive. Dave Stevenson kind of sat on the fence as he loved both notions but on his own composition "Wasted Time" which appeared on the next demo we recorded, it was very much the cranked-up guitar sound that peered through and there was an aggression to the sound that was almost late 70s new wave in its feel. There were no horns and it was just a simple crash! bang! wallop! tune which I entirely related to.
"Sun & Smiles" was a catchy little minute-long instrumental based on a horns riff that I wrote and couldn't get out of my head and that was worked into "Uncle Albert" via a segue involving "Batman" playing this military drum roll. That gave way to some delay-heavy guitar from the inventive Dave Stevenson as I tried to push the Dream Factory BACK to a harder edged psychedelic sound (back towards the original blueprint of the group in fact from back in 1982). The song was about a fictitious guy in his late 40s who was an ageing hippy from the 60s and who was wreaking havoc with his mind on a cocktail of lysergic drugs while at the same time being prone to getting involved in all kinds of unsavoury sexual trysts - quite a departure really for a Dream Factory lyric and it marked a definite change in direction with my own personal song writing at that time.
During this period, Neil Rushton was very pro-active in hawking us around the music industry because he felt we needed a bigger and more dramatic platform to work from than his own small indie label, Inferno so his role changed from being record company guy to manager and guiding influence. And he did rather well to be honest - our own national reputation and also our tireless commitment to gigging meant we were ALWAYS in the press everywhere and although we hadn't taken advantage of the "breaks" we'd achieved with "Wine & Roses" we were still very much a force to be reckoned with.
We still commanded a fairly huge following wherever we played and reactions at gigs were almost always loud, rapturous and rockin'!! In fact, looking back, it was a real crash back down to earth when I started gigging with The Great Express once the Dream Factory folded a year or so later because the more "indie" type people we played to then were far less excitable and nowhere near as noisy as the scooter/mod crowd who religiously followed the Dream Factory around the UK.
Anyway, there were various management companies, music publishers and big-time record labels showing a great amount of interest in the Dream Factory and later on in 1986 Neil Rushton arranged for us to play a "live gig" inside the Expresso Bongo Recording Studios (we were crammed in like sardines into the live room - it was very uncomfortable!!) for an audience that consisted of some pretty sharp music industry types including various people from Manchester. After we did a half hour show in the studio (which, by the way, was one of the best live performances we ever gave and the band was truly cooking by now!!) the audience, such as it was, loved every second of it.
Thanks to: Mark Mortimer |
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