Crewe, England back in the mid 1980s The Train Set emerged from this Northern industrial railway town, a place that you pass through on the way to somewhere else! Fired up and influenced by the fast disappearing punk/new wave era the nucleus of the band, Clive (Camel) Jones on vocals, Andy (Booty) Boote on guitars and Mark (Shiggy) Shaw on Bass met at school in Crewe. Becoming friends
and going to gigs together the nucleus of The Train Set was formed. They realised they were fans of the same type of music and heavily influenced by the likes of Joy Division, Echo and the Bunnymen
and The Smiths.
After recruiting two other like minded musicians – Adam Halford (drums) and Dave Hassall (keyboards) they spent evenings and weekends at Farmer G’s farm in the Cheshire countryside honing their musicianship and song writing skills. They soon became an ultra tight unit and armed with some freshly written tunes they were ready to hit the Manchester/Liverpool Indie scene. The
hours of rehearsing and writing paid off when after a demo tape was sent to ‘Debris’ magazine’s
editor Dave Haslam the band were signed by the Manchester ‘Playhard’ record label, set up by Nathan McGough (son of Roger McGough the poet) and Dave Haslam (renowned Manchester DJ).
Relocating to Manchester The Train Set rehearsed underneath The Boardwalk club on Little St Peters St along with The Happy Mondays, A Certain Ratio and others, before performing a platform gig at this 400 capacity nerve centre of the mid eighties Manchester music scene. The band entered the recording studio in the summer of ’88 to record their first 12” EP. ‘She’s Gone’ was joined by two other tracks ‘Untouchable’ and ‘Sink or Swim’. This was recognised as a stunning debut by the press and James Brown in the NME commented in July 1988…. “The Train Set have done their growing up in private and will now have no trouble copping off with the entire teenage nation of orphaned Smiths fans. Anyone who can rhyme ‘Avignon’ with ‘Warrington’ deserves the last of the
Blue Peter badges. Puts every other debut single release this week in the shade.”
This first release by the band on the Playhard label featured as single of the week in the NME and the Manchester Evening News in August 1988. Stuart Maconie writing in the NME….”The Train Set
will be huge when the world sees sense, you just watch…..’She’s Gone’ is sleek and shiny, fizzy and witty. Its earnest charm makes it a sitting duck for the hard-hearted cynics, but ignore them”..
They were described at the time as ‘rather wonderful’ by the Record Mirror and they were seen as a band that could capture the essence of The Smiths within a melting pot of influences from The
Doors to Iggy Pop.