Dave Cobley, tenor sax player extraordinaire, back in the year dot  suggested we should combine his R&B strengths with my more traditional Cajun roots and put a Zydeco band together, And so we did.

We ran through a few bass players, finishing up with John Duffy, and who could ask for more? We wore out a couple of drummers - starting with an old friend of mine, John Harrison (now one of the world's most lethal tram drivers) and finishing up with Matt Duffy, who lowered the average age of the band by about twenty years.  Kevin Wilson played great guitar,   Jane Leffman rattled the washboard, leaving a trail of wrecked spoons behind her, and I , once again, was reduced to playing the accordion and singing.

We played material from everywhere - some traditional Cajun because I liked it , some rock-solid blues because the rest of the band did the same, and a lot of Zydeco standards from everyone from Clifton Chenier to Queen Ida.

The band went down a storm everywhere we played, but unfortunately mostly in pubs where the money just about paid for a beer each and the petrol home. So, sadly, the band gently disintegrated and half of it went off to play R&B, a bit of it went back to playing in Irish pub bands and barn dances, and Matt went to college to become an even better drummer than he'd started out. 

And there it would have ended except Matt always wanted to put the band back together for one final fling, and it looks as though now it's going to happen.  Somewhere on the Wirral, sometime this year, in an upstairs room in a friendly pub, there will be an unholy racket of saxophones, guitars and accordions and a certain amount of somewhat unlikely French and even more peculiar English.

Keep an eye on this page - as soon as I know more, so will you...

PS, we don't look quite like we do in the photo any more...