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please
feel free to leave peanuts…..
Brock and the Badgers were formed in the mid-seventies and consisted of
a five-piece blues, pop, and rock covers outfit headed vocally by Simon
Walters (now political editor of The Mail On Sunday). As well as providing
the main vocals for the band, Simon also played blues harp, keyboards
and the occasional acoustic guitar. Bass was supplied by Dave Dobson
on a Fender Jazz, and Chris Cornish’s Knopfleresque guitar riffs
were complemented by Mark Bond’s rockier/bluesier feel. The drummer
was Jess Lidyard (who was also playing in another band at the time,
Gary Numan’s Tubeway Army).
The band played
the pub circuit in and around South-West London for several years, (during
which time Tubeway Army had several major
hits on both sides
of the Atlantic) eventually splintering into several further bands – none
of which really
created any lasting impression. Bond left to join punky/New wave outfit Robert
and the Remoulds (renamed White Lines in 1980) but after
touring with the band on a 23-gig nationwide support to New Musik (“Living
By Numbers” reached no. 7 in the UK charts in 1981) finally called
it a day and hung up his guitar. Lidyard also had evidently had enough by
about 1982 and he too hung up his sticks and became a recluse at a Badger
sanctuary somewhere in Surrey. Neither Bond nor Lidyard were to hear or see
anything of one another again until the new millennium.
So
w
hat kick-started the new band in 2000? Simple – Bond’s 14-year-old
son, Bert, decided he’d like to learn to play bass and join a band!
This was enough to set Bond Senior scurrying to the loft to find that old
Gibson SG and get Charlie Chandler to paw (sic) over the neck and electrics
and get it back to a working instrument once again… Bert was an absolute
natural on the bass and very quickly father and son were knocking out some
groovy blues numbers. All dressed up – but nowhere to go! We needed
to recruit more musicians and form a proper band again and start getting
some live gigs. At this stage Jeremy Neal was brought in on keyboards and
contact was once again re-established with Lidyard (contacted through Gary
Numan’s website) who took a fair bit of persuading to come out of retirement.
The new-look Brock and the Badgers was thus reborn as a four-piece
band. From 2001 until 2006 the group brought out 3 x CDs (1 x further CD – Badger
Patrol – was also 
brought out in 2006 but this was a three-piece effort
which didn’t feature Neal). Initially concentrating on blues and rock
covers (Hendrix/Yardbirds/ZZ Top/Rory Gallagher/Peter Green) the band gradually
introduced their own material which ranged from the out-and-out blues of “Without
Your Love” to the pop-rock genre of “Yeh’lo” and “In
Your Time”. With family commitments making it increasingly difficult
for the keyboard player to continue with the band, it was eventually decided
in early 2007 that Brock and the Badgers would become a three-piece outfit,
and all efforts were focussed on launching the new-look band with an all-original
CD. The CD comes out on Thursday 11th October 2007…”Tales from
the Riverbank”.
The rest as they say, will be sett down in history….