The earliest hint of things to come occurred in 1982 when Stranglers obsessive Mathew and New Order fanatic Ed decided to pool their collective talents and create something truly original. Joined by Richard Haydn Morris, we adopted the name Beatrix and the Potters and spent one full day working on some fairly avant garde material before realising that originality was probably beyond us.

In November of the same year we took the inspired move of asking local god John Speed to join the band and concentrated on perfecting covers of Joy Division and the Cure. John's contacts and acquaintances included Nick Chapman (drums) and Richard "haggis" Austin (keyboards and guitar) who brought with them a love of Lou Reed and reggae. This five piece performed the fruits of their labours at the now legendary April 1983 Drama Studio gig as Johnny Pox and the FAB Four. Among other numbers, the concert was notable for the introduction (a version of the Trumpton theme tune) and a storming rendition of the Buzzcocks classic "Boredom" which became a byword for future performances!

John realised that Mathew's ego was too big to allow anyone else to share the limelight and departed leaving the FAB Four to concentrate on writing some songs. This was the era that gave us "Always the same," "The love between me and her," "Desecration situation," "Anna," and "Big after Christmas."

1984 was the start of our long, and expensive, love affair with recording studios. We recorded three tracks, (Always the same, Big after Christmas and Anna,) at RPM in Wrexham. Two of these were later broadcast on Radio Clwyd's Alternating Current show hosted by Rob Corbett. In between recording and mixing we had some debate about a name for the band, this resulted in the tracks being aired as Beatrix and the Potters just after we changed the name to Disciples of Spess!

About that name - being very young and fairly easily amused, we gave everyone nicknames based on the bands that they listened to so:
- Ed = Ed (New)Order
- Mathew = Mat Black (after themeninblack)
- Charlie = Chas (Bau)Haus
and so on. Andy Taylor was famously dubbed Andy Dooley as he had no discernable musical tastes whatsoever. Indeed, to this day it is believed that his record collection still only numbers 4 seven inch singles but I digress.. A key player amongst our small circle of friends was a character named Mike Tunney who was considerably older than the rest of us and assumed, (perhaps erroneously,) to be commensurately more experienced in the ways of the world. He was particularly fond of the latest batch of goth bands including Alien Sex Fiend, Southern Death Cult and The Specimen so we called him Mike Spess. The considerable respect Mike commanded led us to adopt the name Disciples of Spess in recognition of his status and with no clue that he would soon be a member of the band. We have subsequently had to invent many and varied explanations of the monicker in an effort to undermine Mike's assumed position within the group.