(taken from their website – and written by guitarist Woody)
Change to the East was a strange old affair really. It lasted from 1982 til March 1987 when I think we’d all had enough. I certainly had hahaha. It started as “Plants from The East” which was a trio of me, Dave Newbold and Les Boyd. I was on a YTS called Liverpool Youth Music Project and met Dave there who introduced me to Les. Les introduced me to some weird stuff recorded in a pyramid, I was heavily influenced by Penetration and the 70′s wave of punk bands and Dave was into all sorts of Psychedelic stuff.
We smoked lots of dope and jammed for hours in the rehearsal room on Prescot Road. Hence the whole Eastern thing came about. I loved the “Moving Targets” album by Penetration and the track “Stone Heroes” had a real Eastern flavour to it. Images of Pyramids, Cleopatra queens of the deserts etc were whizzing around in my head. That went on for about 6 months I think, but we ended up remaining friends but parted company musically.
Les went on holiday to Czechoslovakia in 1983 and came home in a coffin after sniffing lighter fuel. Never knew what happened to Dave but I heard he got married and moved to Sweden.
Looking back, its amazing to see how many line up changes there were, but there was lots of conflict and control issues going on within the rehearsal place as well as the complete madness that ensued. We didn’t actually gig that much, but the infamous rehearsal parties, twice weekly, were packed with a right old assortment of people. Folk who had lived through the 1960′s often commented that it was very reminiscent of that time. Needless to say, lots of substances were taken and 60′s like behaviour went on.
A settled line up came about in summer 1985 with the Chesworth/Wood/Baker/Benson set up and we moved forward wearing the obligitary funny clothes and make up.
By this time, the bubble I was living in was pure 60′s. Donovan, Traffic, Soft Machine, Caravan, Hendrix etc. It made for an interesting influence on our music. My brother had played a lot of this stuff when I was a kid and it was like rediscovering something from your childhood.
It all fell apart when we got a record deal in the states in late 1986. We thought what the hell, signed the contract and nothing really came of it. It was all a bit late in the day really for what we were churning out and certainly the way we looked hahaha… I think something was telling us our time was up.
I turned to lighting, Ian turned into a DJ, Mark went back to uni and Paul became an Alexander technique teacher. Paul passed away peacfully in March 2006.
So, needless to say this site is under construction and bear in mind most of the recordings were done on a Portastudio or taken from live gigs. Mark has done a really good myspace relating to the last line up at www.myspace.com/changetotheeast.
