Music Style Rock

Artist History The Urbane as a band, appeared in is first incarnation in late 1994 as a necessary vehicle for a studio project that John Mitchell was working at the time. John had written six songs andrecorded them with the aide of his old Montserrat partner, Gary Ford on drums. Whilst recording it became obvious that the project would greatly benefit from becoming a band and John decided that it would be a good idea to recruit his studio assistant Martin Raggett as full time bass player. The next step was to enlist the services of a friend of Martin’s called John Elmore, on second guitar. At the time it was felt that this was a necessity in order to allow John to concentrate on his singing as this was his first real outing as a vocalist. The four-piece quickly assembled a full set of material with John Mitchell continuing to assume the role as the band’s songwriter. An E.P. was recorded for promotional purposes under the banner of ‘Fake Smile’ and sported the much discussed, and rather amusing picture of a cow on it’s front cover. Two of the songs on the C.D., (Mary Jane and Staring at the sun) re-appear, although very much re-worked, on the Neon album. The band then proceeded to gig relentlessly around the south of England, gaining critical reviews and record company/ management interest alike. After a period of time however, it was felt that John Elmore was pulling in a different direction to the rest of the band and duely took his leave. The band continued to operate as a three-piece with John having gained in confidence as a singer/guitarist. New songs were written and the style of music shifted into a somewhat darker vein. It was around this time that John started working with Australian soap opera star Nick Friedman in a project called ‘Lurch’ that he had put together in England. Although short lived, the band attracted much media attention which led to a sizeable tour of the U.K. Unfortunately Nick was unsatisfied with the results and returned to Australia, folding the band in the process. ‘Fake Smile’ came off the back burner and progress resumed. Around this time Gary Ford was asked to leave due to the almost legendary phrase, ‘personal differences’. Gary and John had known each other for many years and worked together on many different projects but the relationship between both Gary and John and Gary and Martin had become strained to almost breaking point. Without wasting any time, John and Martin recruited the extremely amiable Paul Cooper, otherwise known as Scooby. Scooby came from the Reading based rock band ‘The Junk Serpents’ who had recently folded and he was looking to join a band that appealed to his not insubstantial sense of melody. John and Scooby found much musical common ground and whereas Gary had excelled in metronomic, technically precise drumming, Scooby greatly impressed his peers with his deep understanding of music and what a song requires plus his uncanny ability to come up with great melodic ideas. In Scooby, John and Martin had also found a great backing singer andfully exploited this by augmenting the live songs with all the harmonies that had previously only existed on recordings. The band, by now considerably stylistically different, elected to change their name to ‘The Urbane’, a word that Scooby had picked at random out of the Oxford English dictionary. The trio, with a new found enthusiasm, recorded ten drum tracks for what was initially only supposed to be a demo but eventually became to basis for Neon. At this point, the opportunity came up for John to join Arena which he jumped at and after nine months, Verglas Music expressed an interest in releasing what was slowly becoming an Urbane album. Three more tracks followed including a cover of ‘Time after Time’ by Cyndi Lauper (which sadly, due to time constraints couldn’t appear on the album) by which time mixing beckoned. For this, John enlisted the services of Simon Hanhart whose previous work John greatly admired. Mastering followed and was conducted at the legendary Abbey Road studios where the trio worked with veteran studio engineer, Nick Webb. The finished result is an album which has been effectively four years in the making and is an amalgamation of all the material written in that time. Despite the odd stylistic discrepancy the album has a common ground and a quality of songwriting that John and the rest of the trio are extremely proud of. The rest, as they say, is history.

Group Members John Mitchell - Vocals and Guitar Scooby - Drums Martin Raggett - Bass

Albums Neon

Location Reading, Berks - United Kingdom

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