How Long Have You Been Together? How did Vibrasonic come about?

The first single was recorded in the Summer of 1991 and released one year later on Target ("Don't Leave Me Tired"/"The Unloved Insane"). I had been experimenting, writing and recording on a portastudio with Vic (Fitch) since 1991. We were friends and started making music together after Vic's old group called "The Sound Asleep" broke up. Vibrasonic was never a band as such, more a project. We could not find the right musicians for a full-time band. We stopped in Winter 1996.

What Infulenced your music?

Simon Jones - 13th Floor Elevators, The Seeds, The Electric Prunes, Fuzz, The Everly Brothers, The Ventures, Tremelo, Reverb, Dick Dale, Instrumental Groups of the 60s, Japanese and Indian classical and film music, Vibrato, 50s Rock and Roll, Horror and Sci-fi B-Movies, Echo, Film Soundtracks and Cartoons, Japanese G.S groups, Marijuana and LSD.

Vic Fitch - 13th floor Elevators, Echo, The Electric Prunes, The Soft Boys, Film Soundtracks, Tremelo, Reverb, Vibrato, 70s Punk, Indian Music, David Bowie, Small Faces, The Rolling Stones, Syd Barrett, The Beatles, Vaudeville, Marijuana, LSD and Beer.

Your Debut LP Was Often Passed Off As Sub Standard 'Barrett' esque Floyd? Did this Floyd tag upset you?

The only track we recorded that I would consider to be like early The Pink Floyd is Kingsley J. All tags bother me. We always tried to make every song sound different. Very rarely did we use the same sounds together. I think our influences were totally obvious, we never tried to hide them, we used to mix them together. We thought this would be entertaining to the listener as well as us. But I think it might have confused some people. We never 'tagged' ourselves as anything because it would have been limiting what we did and we liked to play and listen to lots of stuff.

You have quite a quintessential English sound. Do you draw more from English Psyche, rather than the quite exuberant American counterpart?

The vocals Vic did were not with a fake American accent because he is English and didnít pretend not to be. We both love English and American stuff. To us there is only great music and shit music, it dosnít matter where or when or by whom it was made. A good song or tune has no sell by date on it.

Do you strive to produce an as authentic 60s sound and style as you can? How important is authenticity to you?

We just prefer older sounds.We always used very primitive equipment to record, mainly due to us having no money. We just wanted sounds that we heard in our record collections and the equipment needed to make them was always stuff that other groups at the time or shopkeepers thought was just old shit. So we used to find things we would have paid a lot of money for, but the shopkeepers would think they were no use to anyone anymore and let us have them for next to nothing. They would laugh at us thinking we were mad for wanting old equipment. Now we laugh at them when we see how expensive and sought after this 'old shit' is now. Luckily we have almost every piece of equipment we ever wanted now so we donít have to pay the silly prices being asked for the stuff we use today. I Wouldn't say old equipment is better than new, it's just my own personal taste

Who designs your wonderfully psychedelic sleeves?

Simon Jones and Victor Fitch

It must have been a great honour to support Dick Dale?

It most definitely was an honour to support Dick Dale. Does a bear shit in the woods, etc. If circumstances had been different and we were playing live songs, I do not think we would have been asked. We also played with Link Ray in March 1996.

Do you consider yourselves 60s purists?

Just Purists. I donít want to change how I play just to be on 'Top of the Pops'. I want to make music I love.

Why did you choose to put out an instrumental LP?

We recorded the instrumental LP to be released 6 months after the 1st LP came out, to try and keep the ball rolling, The record label promised to release it as soon as it was finished, but as soon as we gave them the master tapes they made us wait two years for it to come out and would not let us record anything else while we were waiting. So most people think the 2nd LP took us two years to do it, but really it was recording in 1995. We were not very happy with this, but could not force them to do anything so this was the beginning of the end for Vibrasonic. We considered the instrumental LP half finished, we were only allowed 5 days to do it and we had no band so we were not happy when we were told it had to go out as it was. Only eight tracks on the LP and one was done years before. We recorded about 15 tracks for our 2nd LP but the record label wouldnít pay for us to finish them. This is why the sound on this record is inferior. We like to do things properly or not at all, so I wish it never came out. Hopefully there will be no more problems like this in the future for our next groups that we do. I think we both learned a lot about dealing with record labels from our time in Vibrasonic.

Is future Vibrasonic material going to be a return to the style of the 1st LP, or are you going to continue with the instrumental theme?

We originally planned to make a third LP in 1995 after the 2nd one came out, but we said we wouldnít make a third until we had been paid for the other two and we were guaranteed it would be released. The third LP Would have been more songs instead of all instrumental. We played live about 25 times as an instrumental group but still planned to make records with vocals. We never played live as a vocal group because we did not have a complete band to do it. So instead of doing nothing at all we played as an instrumental band. On most of the records Simon and Vic were playing most of instruments themselves, with guest drummers.

What have you both been up to since the band fell apart?

I have recently joined forces with my friend Sean Thomas, formerly of The Mystreated and The Reaction. I am playing the drums, Sean is playing guitar and singing, Michelle Thomas is playing organ and bass is played by Chris Maes. The music is a mixture of the things I listed as my influences.

Vic Fitch is not playing in a band but still writes songs, so maybe youíll here something from him in the near future. I hope he sticks at it, heís a talented guy.

Are there any plans for you and Vic to get back together?

There are no plans for any music by Vibrasonic. This does not mean there never will be. Vibrasonic is not 'Simon and not Vic', it is 'Simon and Vic'. We need a break from each other to both forget about the troubles and the bad times. I wish weíd have made more records than we did, it was not because of a lack of material or ideas. It just ceased to be fun anymore, a lot of this was down to lack of support from the record label and the frustration of waiting two years for records to come out. We wanted to release a record every three months and spent too much time doing nothing. We did have a lot of fun also and shared some incredible musical experiences. No one ever heard any of the best times we played together because sometimes there was no recording gear around and sometimes we were so mesmerised in what we were doing that we couldnít stop playing to turn on a tape machine if one was there. I think in time we will have some happy memories of it and forget about the bad times. Five years together was a long time for a group who were never really a group, things might have been different if we were.