Grand Drive

The Wilson brothers—Danny on lead vocals and guitar, Julian on keyboards—hailed originally from Australia yet spent their formative years in the stony southwest London suburb of Sutton during the 1970s. There they encountered bassist Ed Balch at school and launched their earliest band, Soul Green, backed by a succession of short-term drummers. Only in 1992 did they secure a steady percussionist, Paul Wigens, prompting both a name change to Grand Drive—drawn from a winding South London thoroughfare linking Raynes Park, home to one Wilson, and Sutton—and a more stable lineup. Their debut single, “Tell It Like It Is,” had been tracked as early as October 1995 but finally appeared in November 1997 as a 7-inch on Vinyl Junkie before later surfacing on an EP via the Vaclav imprint. The track, emblematic of the band’s fusion of uptempo country-rock and richly soulful arrangements, earned NME Single of the Week honors, with the paper hailing it as “one of the most luscious, soul-tugging singles of the year.” Julian meanwhile stepped away briefly to contribute Hammond organ to Gene and to the album Drawn to the Deep End. In May 1998 Vaclav put out the limited-edition On a Good Day EP on both CD and 7-inch. The band soon attracted the notice of Tom Bridgewater and Mark Rogers, whose London imprint Loose Recordings had debuted that same year with the influential New Sounds of the Old West alt-country compilations; Loose subsequently released the Wrong Notes EP in December 1998 and, the following April, assembled the first full-length Road Music from the three prior EPs and two singles. Returning to the studio, the group delivered the eleven-song True Love and High Adventure, issued by Loose in September 2000. Co-produced by the Wilsons alongside Pete Hoffman and enriched by ornate string and brass charts, the record raised the standard for orchestral country-rock. Once it appeared, Julian relocated to Paris to join his girlfriend, placing further activity on pause until RCA Victor secured the act with a substantial contract. The label reissued both True Love and High Adventure and Road Music in April 2001 and followed with the Wheels EP in June. Buoyed by a strong showing at the spring 2003 SXSW conference, Grand Drive readied its American debut that May, a thirteen-track anthology drawn from the three earlier albums previously issued only in the U.K.