Unfortunately, due to the fact spicygoat were around before the age of the smartphone, very little coherent video footage exists. To give you a flavour though, here is Dan and Rod playing in a similar vein at the Bull and Gate in Kentish Town.

history

halcyon days

In 1995 we were young thrusting idealists, full of creative chutzpah and an irrepressible passion for music. We formed a band, gave ourselves a ridiculous name and for the next six years we had the best fun ever. Fuelled by Ginster's pasties from dodgy service stations, we travelled the length and breadth of the country in what was essentially a condemned vehicle, met loads of amazing people and played some high-octane, totally slamming dance music.

In 2000, we secured a record and publishing deal with a Dutch record label and recorded what was to be our debut album, which for multifarious reasons ironically spelled the beginning of the end for spicygoat.
 

20 years on, just for the sheer nostalgic hell of it, we are happy to announce that we are finally going to get off our arses and release the album that never was. Panthology will be released on all streaming services on xxth October 2020.

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how it all began

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The story starts in 1991 in the music block of North Herts College in the relatively sleepy market town of Hitchin. This was where a youthful, quasi-adonis type called Roderic Burns met a marginally more youthful musical whirlwind called Helen Lord. For two years, they battled valiantly in the face of relentless music education, their days filled with Bach chorales, Neapolitan 6ths and dominant 7ths (and weather permitting, the occasional 99 Flake). 

In September 1993, there was a new arrival at the college, a softly spoken, mild mannered, tuft-haired young buck with a permanent roll-up in hand and a green corduroy jacket that looked like it had been made by Methuselah's mother. In hindsight, on first impressions, it would have been so easy to just write this this guy off as some kind of epicene navel-gazer with a penchant for Old Holborn and Guinness, but fate dictated otherwise and I'm happy to say we made the glorious aquaintance of the eye-wateringly talented musical wunderkind, Dan Holland.

So then two became three, and it soon became glaringly apparent that our newest arrival had been struck by the potent and electrifying spark of sexual love. As it turned out, Rod wasn't up for it and in the end Dan settled for Helen and they eventually fell in love.

A couple of weeks later, Dan and Rod were jamming some sick groove in a practice room (instead of discussing idée fixe in Berlioz, like the diligent students they never were), when they had a visitation from a resplendently hirsute stranger in particoloured trousers. Introductions were made and we soon discovered that this dreadlocked messiah was an epoch-making percussion monster with hands forged in the fires of Hephaestus. The fourth member of the quintet had arrived, the inestimable Paul Csordas.

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There was one missing piece of the jigsaw, although we didn't know it yet. We started jamming regularly in a room that was risibly called 'the studio', which was actually a musty old classroom which contained a broken DX7, a poster of Nick Rhodes from Duran Duran and a bin. It was outside this room that we noticed a laconic sort of geezer perusing his note pad in studied silence, clearly eavesdropping and nodding along to our deafening racket. We invited him in to enjoy some of the unavoidable permanent hearing loss we were no doubt inflicting on ourselves and were more than happy to welcome Jolyon Stephenson - our rapper and primary lyricist - into the fold.
 

how we got our name

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People have often asked - normally in a state of utter disbelief - how and why on Earth did we come up with the name spicygoat. People have assumed that we were pagans, satanists, or just Caribbean food enthusiasts, but the truth is a lot more prosaic. Like lots of bands, the naming conversation quickly descended into the absurd. Dan initially suggested Salty Dog, but that was already an album by Procul Harum, so we had to go back to the drawing board. Although the band name world was our oyster, for some reason known only to the gods, our collective imaginations didn't stray far from the 'adjective/animal' formula and we spent many happy hours going through a number of permutations (Aromatic Okapi, Piquant Pangolin, Zesty Echidna etc.) before we finally settled on spicygoat.
 

Having the goat as an emblem, we happily retro-fitted the goat-god Pan and other pagan paraphernalia to our fledgling brand just because we could - not because we were in any way affiliated with Wicca .
 

At the time that we were active in the mid to late 90s, it was unfortunate for us that another similarly named and rather more successful band were getting the oxygen of publicity. At a regular gig we had on Sunday evenings at The Racehorse in Northampton, it became something of a tradition for the clientele to welcome us with chants of 'OyOy!! Here come the Spice Girls!' as we carried our gear in.

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