A Short History

The Urban Spacemen are...

Ron Bennett - drums
Andy House - keyboards
Mick Overy - guitar and vocals
John Starr - bass guitar - joined December 2006
David Weston - guitar and vocals

The band parted company with bass player Terry Wilson in early 2006. We would like to thank Terry for his enthusiasm and friendship.

Previous band member exploits include Chemical Alice, Slartibartfast, Osiris, Hard to Handle, MAMWF, Box of Rain, Cosmic Charlies, the Wacky Band and the Reptiles. For more information on some of these bands visit the Bathtub of Adventures

Various Spacemen have actually been playing music together for almost 20 years. In 1984 Ron moved from Cambridge where he had been playing with progressive rock band Deja Vu to join David in East London / Essex based band Chemical Alice. Alice's music fused free form jams influenced by the UK free festival and fayre scene of the late 1970's and early 1980's with elements of Gong, the Grateful Dead and more conventional progressive rock influences.

Alice called it a day in early 1985 and after a break David and Ron re-emerged with a wholly instrumental band in a slightly more jazz-rock vein and working under the unlikely title of Slartibartfast (the man who designed the Norwegian Fjords in Douglas Adams' Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy). The keyboard player in said combo was none other than Andy House. Slartibartfast lasted until 1987 around which time there was actually a gig performed a by a hybrid Slartibartfast / Osiris line up featuring David, Ron and Andy under the name Urban Spacemen.

Following Slartibartfast, Ron and David played in the much more jazz-rock Osiris and the acoustic / electric hybrid MAMWF with singer songwriter Tony Winn until around 1998. Sometime during this period Ron also played with Mick Overy in soul / R&B covers band Hard to Handle and as a result David learned that he was not in fact the only person in his local area with a taste for the Grateful Dead.

At the end of 1999 David was drafted in to cover for an ailing guitarist in the Cosmic Charlies, a Grateful Dead cover band that Mick had played in for a number of years and lo did re-discover that it is possible to turn an audience (the right audience anyway) on with improvisation.

Discovering that their guitar styles complemented each other, David and Mick set about forming Box of Rain with Ron on drums and Tony Winn on acoustic guitar and vocals, initially to cover all sorts of interesting stuff from the Allmans to Steely Dan but quickly including original material from David, Mick and Tony.

When bass player Bill Pritchard (also in Osiris, MAMWF and that one-off Spacemen line-up) left Box of Rain at the end of 2001 the band was put on hold, a situation which a few months later was to become permanent. The band had however been offered a booking in January 2002 and rather than decline the gig it seemed an opportune moment to reunite the early 1980's band Chemical Alice for one last time before bassist Jack Grigor emigrated permanently to the USA. The reunion gig featuring David, Jack and Ron also included Andy on keyboards.

Some months later, with the various musicians still wondering what to do next, a return gig was offered to the Chemical Alice reunion band to take place on May 30th 2002. Jack was to emigrate two weeks before this date and so, fortuitously as it turned out, Terry Willson, whom David had met via a common interest in the band Man, was enlisted at 10 days notice to play bass for the gig. Since Jack wouldn't be there the Chemical Alice name was dropped , Mick was invited on board, a name from the past was resurrected and lo a behold the Urban Spacemen were launched onto an unsuspecting universe. See the Mission Log for more...

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