Recorded at Purple Studios 1998 - 1999.
Engineered by Richard Hammerton and Nigel Harris.
Artwork by Nick Stone.
Originally released on Noisebox Records.
Megatron originally released as a 7" single on Love Train Records

Crest - A Personal Recollection

Crest were formed in 1996, following the dissolution of my previous band Mahogany. Well it was a partial dissolution anyway as Crest was three members of Mahogany, minus the other guitarist who we had tired of for a number of reasons (mostly personal).

Mahogany had recorded a demo at Noisebox Studios in Norwich of Dinosaur Jr-y indie-rock and managed to get the ears of Barry Newman who ran the Wilde Club gigs at the Norwich Arts Centre. He gave us a gig supporting Calvin Party which I remember virtually nothing about now (except Magoo were also on the bill).

Once the name had been changed (there was another Mahogany doing the rounds at the time) and extraneous members shed, Crest consisted of myself (guitar and vocals), Ben Whittaker (bass) and Tim Early (drums). Ben was a friend of mine I had made at college, on the very first occasion we met I inadvertently called his Dad a wanker and Tim we had met around the indie gigs and clubs in Norwich (he was also part of the infamous band The Des Lynam Allstars). The old Mahogany songs were discarded and Crest hunkered down in Noisebox rehearsal rooms (which were in an old fishmarket and had sloping floors which were presumably for the sluicing of bits of fish) on a clutch of new songs.

At some point in early 1997 (or maybe late 1996) Crest decided to enter a proper recording studio to put some of the new songs down to tape. The demo we had recorded at Noisebox with Mahogany was live to 8 track cassette and I don't think there were any overdubs at all. It was pretty rough and ready.

We went to Purple Studios in Trowse, which was in a converted church hall. This was, intimidatingly, a proper studio with a proper sound desk , a proper engineer and frequented by proper musicians. The guy who ran the studio was called Richard Hammerton and he was something of a local character who had some success in the early 90's with his band Stare and he and Nigel Harris produced everything that Crest recorded at Purple Studios (we loved the place and recorded everything we ever did there).

The demo we recorded at Purple Studios was sent out in to the world and, this is where the actual sequence of events becomes slightly cloudy, either the NME or John Peel picked up on it, but they both seemed to happen around the same time. Then we started to get our first record label interest.

The record label in question was two teenage girls who may or may not have been from Hull (apologies if you weren't!) who were releasing a cassette as a school project and they put the two songs we had recorded as our demo on the album they had compiled. One of those songs was Megatron which became a bit of a calling card for Crest and was the song that John Peel played first and which was mentioned in the NME (they mentioned it in their top 10 songs that they were listening to that week).

Getting played by John Peel on Radio one was ludicrously exciting and was a total surprise, I just happened to be listening to his program (as I would most times he was on) and heard the familiar intro to Megatron. I still find it exhilarating to hear any records I'm involved with on the radio (although they don't tend to be on Radio One as frequently these days).

The little flurry of interest that Crest had got some interest closer to home and Noisebox Records (obviously affiliated with the rehearsal studios we frequented) wanted to put out a single so we headed to Purple Studios again and recorded another couple of songs. The songs we recorded were then released by Noisebox as our first seven inch single, which was a split with English Electric.

The songs we recorded were a new song called Low Staff Morale and Patio Life Event, which dated back to the Mahogany days. Neither song is particularly great, and it was a bit of an underwhelming first vinyl release, although Low Staff Morale does have a very pleasingly massive guitar sound. It did, however, lead to some more press in the NME as they featured us in their "On" section that highlighted new bands to watch.

This was alongside fellow Norwich bands Velvia and Ovahead in a feature headlined "The New Wave Of New Norwich". This was a slightly tongue-in-cheek reference to the fact that the NME attempted to launch a new scene each week, most of which didn't really catch, and the New Wave Of New Norwich was certainly another example of that.

This attention did lead to more gig offers, we played supporting Mogwai and Norwich's premier post-rockers Navigator at the Norwich Arts Centre and then went to do our first gig in London at the Islington Red Eye (don't look for it, it's not there anymore). In order to flesh out the Crest live sound a bit we got my brother James to play keyboard. He didn't actually own a keyboard (or really know how to play one), but we got given some money by a magazine called The Band who had a regular feature where they'd give a band some money and then write about how they spent it. So with this cash we went to cash converters and bought a keyboard. We also bought Ben a bass distortion pedal, a super 8 projector and a white sheet to project onto (which we never used) and a picture of a dog we christened Eccles which used to hang on my mic stand.

A sidenote on the keyboard. I owned it for several years afterwards and had it in a shared flat where I was living in Brighton. My friend Craig, who was the bass player in the band Coin-op I was later in stayed in my flat on my sofa after we had been out on the town. He had a habit of sleepwalking and tried to get into bed with my housemate, who shooed him away, then he went downstairs into the hallway and urinated on the aforementioned keyboard. It didn't work again after that until, in a moment of guilt I suppose, he bought it off me and fixed it up and I believe he still owns it.

Another London gig we did at the Camden Falcon was notable as somebody whose van had been clamped near our (hired) van attempted to drive off and smash the clamp off by driving into the kerb. He did this, but then also drove into our van simultaneously. Crest gigs in London were usually notable, and mostly not for particularly good reasons.

In 1998 Noisebox wanted us to release another single so we headed back to Purple Studios and recorded another seven inch for them, which was '68 Comeback. This was our best single yet (arguably our best, full stop) and it was enthusiastically reviewed in the NME by Simon Williams. It was a cute indie-pop song with a lovely simple slide guitar line played by housemate Pete Baker and showcased a more delicate side to Crest. It also features the pre-urine-soaked keyboard (which I'm playing here).

The B side is a post-rock-y instrumental called I Have A Sister with a pummeling noise section that features a toy laser gun and a talking Star Wars pen (credits for those go to, respectively, Paul Fayers and Emily Barclay).

We released another two singles in 1998 (I forget what order this actually happened in) there was another Noisebox release called Summertime, another gentler more pastoral song which is a duet between myself and Katy Carr (whose vocal is just lovely). There was also a re-recorded version of Megatron that came out on Love Train records which we were very excited about as it was a label that we'd admired as they had put out singles by Mogwai, Quickspace Supersport, Urusei Yatsura and Prolapse who we liked a lot.

A piece in the Melody Maker equivalent of the "On" section coincided with the release of Summertime too. I remember seeing this as we were about to soundcheck for a gig in London and thinking, this is it, we're really doing it.

The more gigs we were playing, the more we were running up against a potential issue though, as both Ben and Tim (as well as our guest vocalist Katy) suffered from M.E./Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and they were struggling to play gigs (particularly any that involved any travel to attend). At one point whilst I was working washing up in the Pizza Hut restaurant where I worked at the time I received a phone call saying that there could be a potential support slot on a tour with Spiritualized that had opened up, the trouble was it was starting the next day. We turned it down, as Ben and Tim would have found it impossible. They suggested I got other people up to speed really quickly with the songs and went to do it, but I didn't feel confident enough in my own ability as a musician to do this with anyone except my friends.

Around this time we also played a disastrous London gig at the Camden Monarch (later The Barfly and then the Camden Assembly) which was one where several labels, agents and general industry bigwigs had come to check out the new talent and we had served up a barely rehearsed shambles. To be fair to us this was at the height of the M.E. era, to be less fair to us, we were frequently shambolic and under rehearsed. Somebody once said to me that in a band riddled with chronic fatigue that I was somehow the laziest, which was harsh, but probably fair at the time.

Towards the end of 1998 both James and Tim left the band. Tim was finding it too tiring to drum and James just got bored I think (he never liked to go to practice and I think my nagging him about this finally broke him). We had an interim drummer for a few gigs (whose name I can't remember, but maybe Dave?) and then we alighted on Dan Pritchard, who was someone we knew (this was Norwich after all, and everyone knows everyone), but hadn't realized could drum (he could drum very well it turned out).

We also got a new keyboard player in Jojo Heygate, who joined slightly after we had recorded what was to be our last single The Small Details (keyboard on which was played by our departing drummer Tim). We actually managed to do a small tour off the back of this release which led to another van destruction episode when our vehicle collided with a deer on the way back from a gig in Leicester. This tour also featured a gig in Cambridge where we played to 3 people, but played amazingly despite (or because of) consuming the bottle of sloe gin that we'd found in the boot of Dan's car (I say we, but I think in reality it was probably mostly me).

We didn't realize that this was going to be our last release at the time and we were back in Purple Studios later in 1999 to record further tracks for an album. We struggled to get the album together though, and I was increasingly distracted by the fact I was moving to Brighton later in the year to go and live with my girlfriend who lived there.

Unsurprisingly my moving away during the summer led to the end of the Norwich iteration of the band and Noisebox understandably got cold feet about releasing the album (which was still half finished when I left) when there wasn't a band playing any gigs to promote it at the time. A new version of Crest did emerge in Brighton with only myself remaining from the original lineup, Bob Brown (later of Shrag) who I had met in Norwich when he was playing with Polak (the later band of Adorable's Pete Fijalkowski), Luc Woods on drums (who at the time I thought was probably the world's most taciturn drummer until I later met one who made him look practically verbose) and Nick Hills on keyboards (who I would later join up with again in Coin-op).

In 2005 Crest reformed for a one off gig at the Norwich Arts Centre with Ben and Dan from the original Norwich line-up and Katy Carr singing on Summertime and finally released the album (which has since been made available for streaming on Bandcamp). There have been a few abortive attempts to get back into a rehearsal studio since the most recent of which was sidelined by the Covid pandemic.