Secret Films

What’s in a name? A lot. Names are important. They are the first point of contact most people have with a band or artist. They carry a lot of weight and getting them right feels important.

The first live band I ever saw – acting as support for the fantastic Echo & The Bunnymen – laboured under the title of Now Is The Time To Forget The Whimpering, Child Become The Warrior. That’s an extreme example, but really, what were they thinking? (What were they smoking?) You could say that unlike 99% of all the support acts I either saw or avoided, they are one of the few I remember. Not their music obviously, but that name. It must’ve meant something. It’s probably a quote from somewhere. I’ve never felt the need to check.

(On a side note of awful equalling memorable, a friend on mine in Bristol was in a band called Shelbyville. I saw them play live once in a pub just outside the city centre near Stokes Croft – a pub once the haunt of Nick Cave when he was briefly living in the south west, infatuated with P J Harvey. Anyway, my friend Jon played bass for Shelbyville. They were decent for a local band and I enjoyed them that night. Their support act was of a much lesser quality and this band had a banal song that referenced kid’s TV show Rod, Jane & Freddie in its chorus. A quarter century later, while I have no recollection of what Shelbyville sounded like, I can still sing that awful chorus of the support act's song. I’ll probably take it with me to my grave - and from there hopefully release it to haunt some other unfortunate bugger).

I’ve referenced elsewhere the topic of naming bands and how I sought to take control of the process. Of the bands I had some connection to in my early years, The 82 Downers had a functional, of its time feel. Monoshock was a throwaway name for a one off band. Dancing From The Neck Down was cumbersome and required explanation - a double negative for me.

When I first started recording music of my own I chose the name 91 Vibrations. This was a reference to a track on the debut album of the reggae collective Singers & Players. On my vinyl copy, the track was listed as 91 Vibirations – I always wondered if this was a simple typo or if ‘vibirations’ was some cool piece of Jamaican argot. Interestingly on the Bandcamp reissue of the album the track is now listed as 91 Vibration.

Either way, the dub stylings of this instrumental track and the fact that it made for an interesting sounding band name were the chief reasons I selected it. It served me well across two separate eras of music making. When the original phase of the band ended, me and my brother briefly reunited to record as C.O.M.A. As discussed elsewhere, C.O.M.A. didn’t really stand for anything. I just thought it looked cool as a name, written down in this style. Good or not, the name adorned only one 7” ep. The era of C.O.M.A. was a brief one.

My first truly solo project, this time all electronic music, came under the guise of Ghostword. I don’t honestly remember where this name came from, but I like it and although I last released music under this title around 2010 it has now been associated with a personal web domain and email address for close on 25 years.

The record label I ran between 1986 and 1992 was resurrected for the digital age in 2017 as the pared down LR2 (or LR2 Recordings). No longer working with external bands, this venture was purely to release music that either I or my brother (or the two of us collectively) had recorded and gather it into one easily accessible space on Bandcamp.

By this point we had revived 91 Vibrations and released one fresh ep. I’d also bought my first guitar and had harnessed my primitive playing to fuel an interest in songwriting. (Ghostword were purely instrumental, 91 Vibrations pretty much the same). These songs, assisted by female vocals, were released under the band name The Goodbye Look. This is the title of a novel by US writer Ross MacDonald, a writer of crime fiction in the mold of Raymond Chandler. While not his best book, the title seemed perfect to me for a project featuring literate and slightly wistful indie pop songs.

Counterpointing these bright and often simple tunes, came Tomorrow’s World. Male vocals this time, denser music, a nod in places to the likes of The Velvet Underground. Tomorrow’s World was another collaboration with my brother (among others). The band name was taken from a popular TV show of my youth that reported on contemporary developments in science and technology.

As if I didn’t have enough projects on the go, Covid times saw the emergence of two more. A solo spin off from The Goodbye Look were called Autumn Country. Initially I toyed with October Country – this is the title of a Ray Bradbury story, and October is the month of my birth. But research on Bandcamp showed multiple artists already using this name. I broadened it to Autumn Country and in retrospect I think I prefer it this way.

While Ghostword had been retired (or at least mothballed) around 2010, I did start a side project that blended electronics with guitars and a mix of machine rhythms and real drums. Purely instrumental across their initial four eps, these tracks were credited to North Loop.

North Loop is the title of a track on the debut Clock DVA album Thirst – a record that is dark and haunting and for which I retain a love for to this day, more than forty years since its original release.

At this point even I lose track of how many different bands I have had a hand in or recorded music for. To come full circle, turning 60 I created the self-referential Project 60, designed to collate some previously unreleased recordings from past years. More Project 60 releases are now in the pipeline to follow up the debut album Lost Pop Songs, released on Christmas Day, 2025. Whether I will record any new music, at this stage I cannot say. If I do, I promise to do my best not to invent even more band names. I think I have more than enough to choose from.

(A side note at this point – my brother sensibly stuck with the name Statski for all the music he recorded, outside of other bands he was involved in. No confusing array of different project names for him.) 

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And to end this round up, let’s briefly tell the story of Secret Films.  It’s a Friday. March. 2019. We’re in Falmouth. Me, my brother and our soon to become brother-in-law Doug. We didn’t have any specific plans for the day. At one point we had contemplated trying to film a video for a Tomorrow’s World track called Sister Siesta that was at the centre of an about to be released 4 track ep. In the end that felt like too much hard work for the time we had available and the idea was abandoned. Instead Tim and Doug decided to try jamming together using a suite of synth modules on a pair  of connected iPads.

I was happy to be an interested onlooker – jamming is not my scene, I’m too unmusical to be creative on the fly. The only intervention I made was to suggest they find a way to record what they played. I’m glad I did because after a brief time working out how to do this and what key they wanted to play in, the session produced some memorable pieces of music. Five tracks were improvised in a single afternoon and aside from some post-production edits the session was released in full and soon became the most successful release for the LR2 label.

I hadn’t played a note, but I did come up with a name for the project. Secret Films. The concept was simple – these pieces should be considered as a soundtrack to a film that had yet to be made.

A second volume of Secret Films appeared a year later, Tim this time in collaboration with his friend Steve Hutchinson. A third and final volume is due for release sometime this year. Meanwhile, here is what in my view is my favourite track from that original session, recorded down in the far west of Cornwall in March, 2019.