At least 480 Sheffield band names needed!

Cleo bassplayer was Steve Heywood. He and John were both from Hackenthorpe.

Steve loved John's old band Confusion Rains, who'd been doing a sort of Zeppelin/Free/psychedelic swamp blues thing.

He reckoned that John was a total Jimmy Page fanatic who'd been completely mortified and shamed when a Kerrang review of Cleopatra said that he was obviously a massive fan of White Lion!

Steve said that both he and John actively hated the kind of music they played in Cleopatra and were only doing it cos that was the sort of stuff that was being signed at the time.

He used to constantly joke that he and John were going to convert Cleopatra to a Rains style as soon as they got signed!

Not seen Steve since 1996 or heard anything of John since 1989!

Just wanted to say that I remember Confusion Rains and I loved em. They were so different to anything that was around at the time. John was a real Jimmy Page fan and had a real Page aura about him onstage from his long curly black hair to his Les Paul slung around his waist. Saw them at the Maze bar a couple of times and the old Underground pub. The original band was John, Mike Sherrard on bass, Chris (?) on drums and a singer called James, who really looked the part with his long black hair but was an awful singer. The quality of the songs carried them though until one day when John just sacked the rest of the band without warning!

He then got his friend Monk on drums, who he'd been in bands with previously and then someone called Brian on vocals and Steve somebody on bass. I saw them a couple of times and they were really good, much better musically than the first line up but they just didn't look or feel like a proper rock band. After a while, John just seemed to lose the plot and went off the rails. Steve tried to take control and push them into sounding like Genesis or Marillion but John had had enough and walked out to go and play american commercial rock, which was a big, big shame.

You are Nigel Choronzon of Doncaster and I claim my five pence!

Ok, then, let's sluice off the silage and spout about Confusion Rains -

first band was Sheffield's greatest guitar hero, John Baker, with Mike Sharrard on bass, Chris Butt on drums and James Buckle on vocals/fistf*cked chicken squawks.

They looked and sounded like they'd fallen through a gap in the fabric of time from 1970 - which, in 1984 terms, meant that they were actually the only genuine 'alternative' band in Sheffield!

Second Rains were John and Monk, with Steve Hulme on bass and Brian Beech on vocals.

As Cat of Worksop so rightly pointed out: John and Monk 'looked like Byron and Shelley', while Brian and Steve 'looked like windowcleaners on the end'!

That visual disparity was matched in every other way and, after a while, John no likey those nerkers!

John and Monk were misanthropic, moody <REMOVED> and the Rains basically worked or didn't according to how <REMOVED> off they were at any one time -

and the moodies eventually <REMOVED> the pot full and capsized the whole thing.

Bakes immediately morphed into a hair metal gunslinger and went off to ransack the Roxy and Rebels in a 24/7 grog and gash party.

His band, Cleopatra, came over like an amateur dramatics society pretending to be Bon Jovi, but they seemed a cert for a deal, yet it never happened.

Monk flushed himself down the pot along with the Rains and locked himself in his mam's cellar to stare at the wall for 10 years. Probably.

Steve and Brian? Probli having a circle jerk over The Enid, somewhere...

Even after 30 years, the Rains are Sheffield's greatest 'lost' band - such brilliant songs, so much genuine potential.

And all of it slopped down the u-bend of history with not even a skidmark for posterity.

<REMOVED> sake...

Bye, Nige!

Just wanted to say that I found an old Confusion Rains demo tape in the bottom of a box this week. Salad Days, Only One Thing and Scapegrace are the tracks on it. What a great band! Such a shame they didn't go on to better things.

On 18/01/2007 at 16:38, Sweetcheeks said:

The Harbourkings

Danse Society

Pretty sure Danse Society were from Barnsley

Vance Arnold and the Avengers.