Biography

BbyB started singing with an Edinburgh Scottish jazz funk band called High Street. Then worked with some members of futurist ska rockers V-Disk. Then spent a year busking pop, reggae, & ska in the London Underground.

With the raw experience of playing these styles in an acoustic form in the London Tubes for a living, BbyB then moved to Cambridge with Neil Harris (guitarist) to join a particularly tight and passionate rhythm section (Richie Dickson & Mark Russell drumming, Sagar Ngom percussing, Chris Hopkins bassing,) all specialists in various of the ska, funk & reggae aspects. Loz Speyer on trumpet and Stuart Atkins' sax brought intimations of jazz and classical minimalism. This became the band 'Your Dinner'.

They added a smattering of hard driving early garage punk, and the recipe confounded those who then said such a mixing of styles was a mistake and unworkable. The extent of this short - sightedness has been borne out (by the now widely varied tastes of the music buying public) - but then this was the early eighties.

Throughout this same time, BbyB was mining the coalface of wilful bastardisation with an obnoxious sex obsessed unit (RVB (aka DJ Harvey), Titch English, BbyB) called 'Felcher Club'. Their choice of assault was a heavily beat and collage driven, improvisational, industrial, soundscape - cheap, sacreligious, ugly, and moving...............Say no more. Needless to say the exploration of all sound textures, (and any technique to produce them) was high on the agenda.

Following with this, BbyB took a strange challenge in minimalism by working solely with a bodhrain player, Andy Ross (who also played pipes, flutes and sang) as a regular live playing, writing team. In it's small way this speck rolled on and snowballed until they could no longer resist the urge to expand and became.......................

 'Pluck This!' combined drumkit minus the snare (to avoid the bracketing as 'Folk rock') with Celtic and Afro-Latin percussions. This rhythm section (Paul Darking, Andy Ross and Davy Graham playing Drums & Guitar simultaneously (!)) underpinned Clive Lawson's furious, beautiful fiddle (playing Celtic, Cajun, Bluegrass, French and 'Pluck This!' penned tunes) while BbyB brought pointed melodic social commentary, wild wailing tales from the underbelly, rap, and human-beatbox to the blend.

To those who found them, they were a priceless precursor to many of the further blendings, which dragged folk from the purists, kicking and screaming, into the arena of globally aware dance music.

Throughout this, from the mid eighties BbyB DJ'd often with 'Pluck This!' percussionist, Paul Darking. From the early stirrings of hip-hop, through the growth of house music via the exploding acid scene he continued to introduce the knowledge from his broad musical savourings into the increasingly molten pot that dance culture was to become.

'Your Dinner had meanwhile evolved into grind and thrash funkers 'ApeSinControl' (Stuart Atkins, Titch English, Chris Hopkins, Mark Russell, which later became simply 'Apes'.

BbyB continued to provide vocal session work for various 12" projects, and to develop more as a magpie collaborator than a fixed band member. He recorded over the following years until the BbyB project emerged from the morass as an irrepressible, force for development with experimentation......
.......a determined inventive, with a love for the dancefloor.

No longer able to resist the pressure to return from purely recording to performance, BbyB finally found a solid base from which to launch a shit-blistering catalogue of throwdowns, homages, beautiful collaborations, enraged acidic urban nightmares, jazzes hauled spiral through unique BbyBeatscapes, and deceptively simple renditions of underplayed classics. Which brings us to here.
 
BbyB has continued to collaborate with a still wider array of talent. Keeping an eye out for the the players with the same unruly disregard for genre confinement, has led BbyB to embark on a variety of projects. Shining out from among these ventures, his work with harmonica luminary, Steve Lockwood has produced some joyously baffling reinterpretations of the harmonica's role in music of the cutting edge.

With a culture to kill for, a wilful disregard for the rulebook, the finesse to succeed where most fear to tread, the swine is irrepressible Containment is no longer possible.
The unstoppable force of BbyB is unleashing!