Whatever you want - it’s nice to have the abbreviation but really it’s whatever you want.

Good question. I have no idea. It was one of those things where you wake up one morning and it was just there. It just seemed to bring it all into focus ‘cause the music is all about the human condition and the human spirit. I’ve always tried to write songs about the spirit and the name just seemed to fit. The phrase just appeared in one blinding moment, and after thinking about it and looking back over the music I’ve been doing, it just fits.

Oh the name.

I started getting this thing together back in New Orleans with what is now Time Travlin’. When things started to lighten up a bit around 97, I just decided it was time to move back into the mainstream, away from the ''folk rock thing''. At that point I knew I had to put a rock band together, as opposed to doing Dave Sharp songs with a back up band. It was time to have a band together - sort of like The Alarm where you have four or five cats, it’s not Dave with a back up band, it’s a band - a democratic organisation.

So I started writing songs with that in mind. As we built the studio, which took about a year, the songs started coming into focus. It’s a lot different writing songs for a band as opposed to writing Dave Sharp songs. There’s a number of ways of writing and when you are writing for a band, you have a vision of what the band’s going to sound like and what kind of music it’s going to be, so you’re writing with that in mind.

Yeah, The Spirits Unlimited.

I’d gone to do a show in New York, Charlie (McIntosh) was doing another one of his ‘Rock The City’ things. We’d just finished writing what we thought was going to be an album and this opportunity came up to play in New York and it was the same guys I’d played with over here, Dr Joe, Charlie & Billie. I thought these guys know me, so I sent them the music. I figured it would be a good time to try it all out, see if the material was any good, if the audience would respond to it.

So I was cruising through New Jersey with a friend of mine, talking about music and listening to the radio and I thought: we still haven’t got a name for the band. At the time it was still Dave Sharp & The Hard Travellers. So we’re on our way to rehearsals, trying to think about a name for the band and we saw a sign on this shop - ''The Spirits Unlimited''. It had that kind of etheral quality that went with the music and we thought ''That’s a band name''. It didn’t sound like a band, it sounded like an organisation, and as we were trying to go against the corporate grain it just seemed to fit. I asked a few people and they told me ''it sounds great''. The Spirits Unlimited just seemed to sum up what we were doing. So when I got back over here, we just naturally assumed that the band would be called The Spirits.

Then one day out of the blue, The Soul Company thing came down, that kind of really summed it all up a little better. It was unique, it was different. You don’t know how long we spent sat round a table to come up with The Alarm - that’s a story!

Well I tried to put the band together in the States, but I realised pretty quickly that in order to even try to get a band off the ground in the States, I would have to be incredibly financed. The place is just so huge that the only way you could get the band on the road would be to have serious investment.

So we though perhaps it’s about time we looked back to England. At the same time, the musicians I’d been rehearsing and playing with in America had that natural kind of American lean to it which is absolutely right, but it wasn’t quite sounding like I imagined in my head. I very much wanted a British sound, so we decided ''let’s get back to England and start a band over there''.

I started off working with some of the fellows who I’d toured with previously in the UK, but everybody was so committed to various other projects that it became just about impossible even to get into rehearsals. The chemistry wasn’t coming together, the songs weren’t taking shape and it was very difficult to get it going because we weren’t rehearsing as much as I wanted. So I started asking around.

I wanted guys who’d had the same kind of experience playing that I’d had. I grew up learning to play around the time of Woodstock and all of that. This was way before punk and back then, there was an intuitive way of playing music as a group of people. Twist and I had experienced that as we’d started playing together when we were six years old, and we’d grown up with this intuitive approach, almost to the level of telepathy.

The kind of music that was happening then had come out of the blues, which is an intuitive music. You know, you say ''the blues'' to somebody and they think ''oh b***dy hell that’s all old hat'', but it’s been around since around 1920 and it’s still going strong today. So whatever you think of the particular form of music, if you’ve ever played the blues, you’ll understand that there’s an almost telepathic approach to it and that is down to the form of the music. Most of the rock music which developed came out of the blues and that telepathic approach has grown with the music.

When we were learning how to play, and learning how to get together, that’s how we were learning. You didn’t just sit down, learn the song & play the song. You played instinctively, and you could stray off the map of the song without losing your way.
So when I was putting together the band I wanted to seek out people who had had that same kind of experience of music. It was really difficult for a while, because I met loads and loads of players and played with tons of people. It’s really difficult to explain that intuition to folks who hadn’t actually experienced it and grown up with it.

I happened by chance to be looking for an agent at one point and came across Billy Franks, who I’d completely lost contact with. He was able to direct me to some folks up in the North of England in the Lake District. So I phoned them out of the blue and got talking about all British rock and how it just wasn’t happening in the states. You know you’ve got your Coldplays and your Radioheads, but away from the chart scene down in blue collar America, British rock is just about finished.

So he says to me ''I know some great players, right up your scene, but my guys don’t rehearse''. You know he was dead proud of that.

As a result I ended up meeting Keith Ashcroft. I gave him a call and said ''I’m interested in putting a British rock band together, and they tell me you’ve got a whole bag of experience and know what I’m talking about''. It turned out Keith had played with some great folks and had loads of experience. He was recording at the time up in Chorley with a friend of his, a Hammond player called Paul Birchill, who he’s played with for a long time. We went along and Keith was laying a bass line down and Erin and I just stood there and said - ''that’s it''.

We sat down and had a chat and decided to meet up again in Penrith where they had some footage of Keith and Paul Birchill playing with Paul Burgess in a band they were all involved with. And again, Erin & I saw that footage and just said ''that’s it, that’s exactly it''.

After starting out in 97 constantly searching out musicians and trying to get it right - get the chemistry thing going on - just seeing these guys told us that they were what we were looking for. It was just intuitive playing, totally unscripted, totally off the cuff. We instantly knew and that’s the kind of intuition we’re talking about, you just instantly know if something is right or wrong. So we pretty much committed there and then ''this is the band''.

So I sent the music up to them and they listened to the music and got really excited: ''it is what you say it is, it’s British Rock and we’d love to play on it''. Only one slight problem, Paul Burgess is away in Australia with 10CC and he’s not going to be available until November - and this is like June. We we’re feeling we just couldn’t afford to hang around, so we started rehearsing. We had drummers coming in who Keith, or Birchill, or the guitar player at the time had worked with and they were all great drummers and it was all going OK.

Then one night Keith was doing a gig and he bumped into Mo, who he knew by name (as they’d both played with Chris Farlowe) but he’d never met. Keith rang me up one night about Midnight and just said ''I’ve just seen a guitar player for this band, he’s incredible, just perfect''. So I ended up going back up to Lancaster and meeting up with Keith and Mo, and instantly just talking to Mo, that intuition was there.

Everything went smoothly and Mo was in, signed up to the project. By this time it was coming up to October and we thought we might as well wait for Burgess to get back, we’ve waited three months, might as well wait three more weeks. Of course at this time I’d never met Paul. So he got back and we arranged to meet, Paul came round and we sat and talked for an hour or so. And again, as soon as I shook his hand, I knew, this guy was the right guy. By that time we knew we had the band and we had to set about rehearsing straight away.

The rehearsals came together really quick. If you know that everybody is on the same wavelength you don’t have all that ''err well how do you want this to sound'' stuff. Everybody just knew immediately what had to be done with the music. So we did two rehearsals and said, right, let’s book a gig. Paul arrived back in the middle of November. Overall we did three rehearsals then played our first gig in early December.

We’re all at a point now in our various musical journies. It’s the first time any of us have ever formed a band - we’ve all been in other bands, but we’ve never formed a band, a democratic band. Everybody is bringing in something different and it’s a bit like The Alarm in that respect.

Mo brings a massive amount of experience, not only in terms of his playing, but in terms of what he’s been through as a musician. I’ll get really excited about something, I’m naturally kind of excitable. Mo will bring a sense of calm and realism to it all so we’re not all getting carried away.

Keith brings a massive amount of playing ability, and a real understanding of the spirituality of what we’re trying to achieve with the band. He brings a great amount of enthusiasm to that. Keith has been like a sounding board for me, I will immediately go to him with an idea, and I’ll get great feedback from him which we can then put under the umbrella of the band. He’s The Soul Brother - he knows what we’re on about and knows what we’re trying to do.

Paul is relatively new. Keith and I have been working together since we decided to do this back in May / June last year. We’re still bringing Paul into the fold which is taking time as he’s just been away touring with another band, but Keith and Paul together are just such a massive force when they play. They’re very tightly locked, so no matter what happens up there you’ve got Keith and Paul just like a steamroller.

The whole band is tightly locked on a number of different levels - it’s locked musically, it’s locked in terms of chemistry & we’re just now beginning to get the politics of it all - I mean politics on all the different levels you can imagine.

Keith and Mo are both itching to write. When we decided to form the band, one of the basic things we decided upon was that it was going to be a democratic forum - anybody could bring anything to the band.

Obviously we have an album that we’re working on and the next step is that Keith and Mo are going to get ideas down. I’ve got a bunch of songs as well, and we’re going to throw everything into the pot. As we get more used to where each of us is going, we want the music to evolve from within the band. It’s not going to be about Mo’s songs, or Dave’s songs or Keith’s songs. All these songs are going to eventually become band songs, and that’s kind of where we’re headed.

I think that’s all going to kind of take shape after we’ve got this first album in the can and out there, we’ve got a couple of tours under our belts, and we’ve had a chance to play night after night. Up until now, we haven’t really let ourselves go too much, as we’ve only done like four gigs and they’ve been fairly high pressure gigs! What we want to do is get out on the road, play night after night and let the music go where it’s going to go. We’re not in any rush to get there. We’re keen to get there obviously, but we all understand that we’ve got a lot of jamming to do there in front of people and see where it goes.

None of us what to predetermine the direction. Keith’s got a big background in Jazz Fusion. Mo’s got more of a blues background, Paul’s background encompasses a lot of things. We could sit down and say ''OK, we’re going to make a Jazz Fusion album'', but I don’t think any of us want to do that. We want to let all those influences come in and see where it goes, but bearing in mind what we’re there to accomplish as a band. We’re not going to let ourselves become indulgent or look purely from within. The band is out there as an entity and it’s there to serve, if you like. Whatever the landscape is, the experience of the band is going to drive us towards that direction.

The last thing we want to do is predetermine anything, because we don’t know what sort of landscape we’re going to be facing in a years time. We don’t know where the world is going to be at, or where we need to be in that light. For example there’s going to be a presidential election in the US - who knows what’s going to happen there, and what the world’s going to be afterwards?

What we’re focussed on right now is developing the chemistry in the band. In order to do that, we need to get an album out there and get out on the road. I can’t say exactly what we’re going to be doing just yet, but I’m hoping that by this summer we’re going to be on the road in a meaningful way. Whether or not that comes to pass depends largely on whether people like the music. What we’d like to do as a band is to be in a position where we’re really exploring what we’re capable of doing. We know it’s capable of doing some amazing things and it’s taken so long to put it together specifically for that reason.

Our main concern right now, is getting in the studio and finding out what the band can do in the studio, then getting out on the road and getting in front of people, and allowing that to affect us. Perhaps at the end of this year we’ll have a clearer idea and we’ll have a few opportunities to pick from at that point. Instead of just dreaming of it, we’ll have practical experience of what the band is capable of doing.