Grimsby · 1995 → 2026
Lost songs.
Found again.
Hovercraft lasted barely long enough to leave a trail. Thirty years later, the trail led back to the songs.
Grimsby / 1995–96
A band that disappeared.
Hovercraft formed in Grimsby in 1995. Songs were written, rehearsed, recorded onto tape and played while there was still a band around to play them. Then, in 1996, Hovercraft stopped.
The first rhythms came from a drum machine, Dr Rhythm, before teenage drummer “Dave” took over in October 1995. “Dave” played on Mr Tooting Brown, recorded that month at Pete’s Pad in Cleethorpes. When his parents put an end to his involvement, jazz drummer Vince Weaver stepped in at very short notice for the first Ropewalk gig on 9 February 1996. Daniel “Mr Shimble” Downing joined in March.
Sean Belvoir-Hunter, alias Shaun K. Stokes, was the band’s manager. His surviving handwritten proposed contract assigned him the gigs, record deals and merchandising, for 20% of band earnings excluding royalties — with a majority-vote dismissal clause. The surviving copy has no signatures.
See the handwritten management agreement ↗
The County appearances in March and April were part of a Battle of the Bands competition. The band recalls reaching about the semi-final, where a sound engineer ruled out acoustic guitars for New Pine Overcoat. Piers was unimpressed. In May, Hovercraft recorded the six-song From The Cradle demo live, in one take without overdubs, at Chris McRae’s Sounds Good studio in Grimsby. Take It Or Leave It may have been omitted from some circulated copies.
Explore the original press cuttings and release →
The last gig was Spanish Steps in Cleethorpes on 22 June 1996. Later dates appeared on the June press release, but the band did not play them.
The recordings survived. So did the songs — in different versions, on different tapes, and in the memories of the people who had made them.
Explore the original songs →The long gap
Nearly thirty years of absolutely nothing.
No masterplan. No carefully managed hiatus. Life happened, the band didn't, and the old Hovercraft material became archaeology.
What remained was unusually stubborn: songs that kept resurfacing in other recordings, other projects and eventually in a new set of experiments with the old material.
2025 / Return signal
Then somebody pressed transmit.
In 2025 the songs began escaping again — not as museum pieces, but as radically different new recordings. Singles became albums. Music blogs started writing about them. Hovercraft, inconveniently, existed again.
The original posts and outside reactions survive in sequence in the Transmission Archive.
See the return as it happened →2026 / Finish the songs
Doomed To Live.
Oh Yeah.
Three decades after the first recordings, Hovercraft returned to the source: the old songs, the demos, the unfinished business and the stories attached to them.
The result is two records built from a past that refused to stay put.
Hear what happened next →