Richard Strange and old mate TV Smith team up in Shoreham

The dates on tour are their first on stage together since the late 70s when TV Smith stage-bombed Richard’s Doctors of Madness and sang a couple of songs with them.

As Richard says, he and Tim Smith go back a long way.

“Tim used to come to watch Doctors of Madness when we played down in the West Country which was where he was based. We were one of the few bands that went that far away from London. We used to go and play Plymouth and Penzance and Bristol and Bath. And Tim would come along and he just got what we were doing. We just got to know each other.

“He had put together a band called The Adverts and he telephoned me and said that they were playing up in London, and I just think he was a great, great songwriter and a wonderful, charismatic performer. He was also great fun.

“When our bands both started to detonate or imploded in early 1978, both The Adverts and Doctors Of Madness were hitting the buffers, we started writing songs together not really having any record company support or any management behind us. He used to come across to my house, and I think it really worked because we both respected each other’s work. We both love lyrics. We both got into music through the lyrics rather than melody, and we just started writing together. Nothing came of it, but then this year someone said ‘I have heard about those tracks that you wrote with TV Smith in 1978. Would you be interested in releasing them?’”

And that’s precisely what has now happened, with the album now out under the title 1978.

“They are not punk rock and they are not glam rock. They were just songs that we were writing together, and they are good. And on the back of that, they started saying to us ‘How do you fancy doing some live gigs?’