About

In the late 70s, on their first day at university, Jim’s ears pricked up as Vic snarled, “Gimme, gimme shock treatment”. It became apparent that they had been assigned neighbouring rooms, and that Vic had brought his electric guitar: hours would be spent playing along to Ramones songs.

Their friendship group widened, alongside their access to instruments, to include Dominic and Brian, with whom they became The Dumb Waiters, a loosely structured collective of musicians and non-musicians. Jim and Vic’s burgeoning song writing partnership was a key feature of the group’s substantial home-produced cassette output.

In the mid-80s, The Dumb Waiters evolved into a London-based acoustic four piece, conceived as a lean, mobile performing unit. After some initial success, this turned out to be a short-lived project, as the individuals’ priorities shifted to focus upon careers and families.

After decades of silence, Jim and Vic were contacted by Brian, who had terrible news – he had only months to live. He had a last request, which was to unearth and dust off the band’s old recordings. In his memory, three volumes of collected recordings – The Keele Tapes – were compiled and shared on Soundcloud.

The songs available for Vol. 3 were somewhat unfinished. Jim and Vic spent months enhancing, overdubbing and, in some cases, completely rewriting and recording the material. This process, undertaken entirely online, was extremely rewarding.

Having established a successful working relationship, Jim and Vic decided to embark upon a fresh project: prompted by a list of random song titles, they would write and record twelve new songs, in order to discover their ‘sound’. The project would be titled StummWaiters.

Things did not go entirely to plan. About a third of the way through, word of Dominic’s untimely death arrived. This news upended the ongoing light-hearted nature of the project. As the duo processed their grief, the material took on a darker mood.