FELLOW TRAVELLERS 1990 - 1995

Photo: Rainer Holz

Jeb's account of how it all came to be:

Fellow Travellers were pushed into being by Dan Dow, the head of Okra Records. He'd heard some old songs of mine and wanted to put them out, I convinced him to give my new band a go. He agreed and I set about trying to assemble a band. I had recently been playing in a country band called The Mighty Lights Of Paradise and I was looking for something new. The Mighty Lights were a good band, part Hank Williams, part Marxist agit-prop, and in our travels we'd played a few gigs with a folk band called Strangelove. The singer in Strangelove was Lorraine Morley and I was a huge fan. They were everything an English acoustic group should be; beautiful and scary, frail and perfect.

I had also, for many years, been part of a circle the orbited around Adrian Sherwood and On-U Sounds, a London based reggae sound system and label. Amoung this group was Martin Harrison, a talented mixer, engineer, guitarist and bassist. After my phone call from Dan Dow, I asked Lorraine and Martin if they wanted to get together and they both said sure. We didn't say 'let's do this - let's mix up a little reggae and some folk and some country and it'll sound great and it'll sell a million records and we'll all be rich'. It wasn't like that.

What we did was we all played the music we loved. We all did what we wanted to do and it sounded great. Immediately. From the get go. I had some songs and Lorraine had some songs and we met and played them and they sounded right then pretty much like they sound now. It was a mix of what it was to be in London then. An easy, natural, mix.