Introduction

Crispy Ambulance Biography

Alan Hempsall and Robert Davenport formed Crispy Ambulance in Manchester in 1977, originally as a two-man outfit, adding two further members, Keith Darbyshire and Gary Madeley, to the line-up the following year. With original influences acknowledged to be Magazine and Hawkwind, they co-wrote nearly all of their material and developed a distinctive style that has attracted a modest but international following.

During their original five years together, the band recorded sessions for local and national radio and released several records on the Aural Assault, Factory and Factory Benelux record labels. They played numerous gigs throughout the UK, both as headline act and as support to better-known bands, such as Joy Division and Killing Joke, culminating in a two-week tour of Holland, Belgium and Germany with fellow Factory band Section 25 in January, 1982. They disbanded Crispy Ambulance at the end of the same year and went on to pursue other projects, having established a catalogue of three singles and an album, "The Plateau Phase". A fourth single was released in 1984, recorded two years' earlier in a Belgian studio during the European tour, and the following year an album of live recordings from the European tour was released, entitled "Fin".

In 1999, after an absence of almost seventeen years, they reformed for a "one-off" gig in Manchester to promote the re-release of the two earlier album titles on the LTM record label. Since then, they have brought out a live recording of the 1999 reunion gig, "Accessory After the Fact", a further retrospective album, "Frozen Blood", and a brand-new studio album of all-new material. Recorded in January 2002 and released on the Darla record label, "Scissorgun" was promoted by a four-show mini-tour of the USA east coast in November of the same year, marking the band's first ever visit to the States.

In February 2003, Crispy Ambulance returned to the rehearsal room once again to prepare for a return visit to the ICA in London in May - they were last there in 1981 - and a second studio album for Darla. Recorded in June, 2003, "The Powder Blind Dream" was released in April, 2004, and is arguably the best work the band have produced so far.

The band released two further albums over the course of the following years, "Compulsion" (2015) and "Random Textures" (2016), and, in 2017, had started work on further studio album but the project was never finished. Instead, Alan teamed up with David Clarkson to form a new band, Scissorgun, named after an earlier Crispy Ambulance album, while Robert, Keith and Gary teamed up with Tim Walsham to form DNR. Keith and Gary also now play in roomthirteen. Meanwhile, the band's inaugural album, "The Plateau Phase", has been re-released several times and continues to generate interest.

For more history and background information on the band, please see the links page.