Home Service - A Brief History
Home Service was originally formed in 1981 from the creative nucleus of the Albion Band line-up that produced the classic Rise Up Like the Sun album, singer/songwriter John Tams, guitarist Graeme Taylor and drummer Michael Gregory sharing a desire to explore more contemporary themes in the songs and musical interpretation. Songs like Walk my Way, Alright Jack and Sorrow were anthemic observations on the unfairness of Thatcherite Britain and its social inequalities. The crushing irony is that they sound as potent now as they did then, thereby making this band’s work as relevant as ever.
Home Service was also born out of a desire to work with brass, an idea which emerged when trumpet player Howard Evans joined the Albion Band to work on Bill Bryden’s original production of Lark Rise to Candleford at the National Theatre. There were also the strong influences from Robbie Robertson and The Band, with their American traditional-style material, often featuring a brass section.
During its relatively short life in the mid-eighties, Home Service produced three albums (two of which are still available from Fledg’ling Records), and headlined at major festivals including Cambridge, Cropredy and Dranouter. They toured extensively, although were probably seen and heard by the greatest number of people when they provided music for Bill Bryden’s ground-breaking production of The Mysteries. This epic trilogy adapted by poet Tony Harrison, ran from 1977-1985 at the National Theatre and the Lyceum and was filmed for TV and later revived on the South Bank for the Millennium Celebrations. The second of the band’s three albums is derived entirely from the music for this production.
Their third album, Alright Jack, as well as featuring some of John Tams’ most socially aware songs, also boasts one of the band’s finest achievements, their reworking of composer Percy Grainger’s orchestral suite, A Lincolnshire Posie. Here, the band reinterpret the work, imagining how Grainger may have presented it decades later, using the instruments, technology and rock rhythm section of a new musical era.
After a period of dormancy, the band made a dramatic return to prominence in 2011, with the best-selling Live 86 album and a string of major festival appearances, followed swiftly in 2012 by winning Radio 2’s Best Live Act Award.
A few years later, Tams and Taylor were responsible for the music in the highly successful West End production of War Horse, and Tams had become widely known as an actor for his role as Daniel Hagman in the TV drama Sharpe. Owing to Tams’ TV and theatrical commitments, in 2015 he temporarily stood down from his leading role in Home Service, giving way to the highly talented and much-loved John Kirkpatrick, with whom the band recorded their first album of original material for 30 years, A New Ground, produced at Graeme’s own Morden Shoals studio.
Tams’ return to the band four years later culminated in a triumphant performance at Fairport’s Cropredy Festival in 2022, stunning an audience of 20,000 with their powerful and emotional performance featuring Tams’ passionate, soulful vocals and the fiery lead guitar of Graeme Taylor, alongside their stirring brass and rock-solid rhythm section.
The Cropredy show proved to be Tams’ final outing with the band, and this time it really did look like the end of the line, had it not been for the brilliant suggestion by Simon Nicol and Debs Earl that the venerable Bob Fox might be the perfect man to push Home Service into a new lease of life. This new union has indeed proved to be a match made in heaven and the regenerated band has already produced a fabulous new live album to prove the point.
With their new manager Michael Barnes also on board, the gig calendar for 2025 is rapidly swelling. Don’t miss them when they come your way!
“The brass play like the Devil’s own pit-band, the rhythm section lay down an immovable foundation and Graeme Taylor’s guitar can strip paint” – R2 Magazine
