Ship Of Fools

Immersed in fantasy themes and the neo-prog currents of the early 1990s, Ship of Fools stood out among their peers for a deliberately eccentric and captivating approach. The group came together in 1992 with guitarist Andy Banks, bassist Sputnik, keyboardists Damien Clarke and Les Smith, and drummer Mick Reed rounding out the lineup. Close ties to the directors of Dreamtime—an imprint launched by the heavy-metal distributors Peaceville—led the band to sign with the label, where they emerged as its leading psychedelic oddities. Across just two releases, the 1993 album Close Your Eyes, Forget the World and the 1994 follow-up Out There Somewhere, they delivered a fiercely experimental brand of consciousness-altering sound before internal tensions and creative disagreements prompted their 1996 dissolution. Their concise yet striking body of work endured when Smith, by then a member of the resolutely non-psychedelic black-metal act Cradle of Filth, assembled the 2002 retrospective Let's Get This Mother Outta Here, a closing statement that encapsulated the band’s trajectory and honored its singular, off-kilter aesthetic.