Born in Birmingham somewhere in the 1950's, Dave is the elder statesman of the band and has been hitting and banging things for a long time, he's a vegetarian and yoga practitioner but drinks real ale like it's going out of fashion so its not for health reasons. Dave played in a band called Sweet Revenge with Colin Rose and Julian Dawson (who is a highly respected harmonica player and performer) in the sixties when he was studying art at Exeter College of Art.

He met Colin Wilson at the time of Oddfolk (Wilson and Beer) in the local folk club scene and introduced Olly Dowlen to him,(another up and coming artist) who played Double Bass beautifully and wore firemans clothing most of the time. Colin, Dave and Olly formed The Collection and toured the South West for a couple of years until Olly disappeared for very secret reasons and Dave went to the USA and got himself married . And then he came back on his own !!!! and we started all over again..............ah well.

Below are a few interestiong bits about Dave as he is one of Britains leading contempory artists (but you have to call him David if you want to buy a picture off him)

He now lives in Melbourne Street in Exeter where the band rehearses every Monday

After studying at Sutton Coldfield School of Art, Exeter College of Art and Leicester Polytechnic, David spent two years in the USA working as a muralist. Although firmly rooted in the best figurative painting traditions he found he was always able to produce images which seemed to emanate from halfway between his conscious and subconscious. Stanley Spencer is one obvious influence along with Otto Dix, de Chirico and Atkinson Grimshaw.

To speed up the process of putting his ideas down onto canvas, he uses acrylic first to work out and change his composition. Acrylic dries very quickly, allowing instant alterations to be made.

Once David is happy with the layout, he over paints in oil, using brushes, palette knife and kitchen scourers, giving a soft finish to painted strokes. As a result his paintings are quite theatrical. They are also the most amusing conversation pieces, being full of illusory references and minute details.

One of David’s greatest assets is his incredible sense of humour; this, together with his amazingly unique imagination, gives an air of total fantasy to many of his paintings.
Music is the other magical ingredient - for he is the percussionist in the Band. And boy has he played in a lot of bands Junkyard Angels, Shakin Gound, sessioned on loads of artist recordings and finally ended up with Colin and Keith..............More about young David later