Brrrr, bloody freezing session , in a barn, in the dead of winter. I photographed hofman recording their debut single, a proper 7” piece of shellac, that Steve Lemacq and John Peel had to fight over to play on their shows on Radio 1. None of that digital file sharing melarkey back then!

I jumped in my time machine recently to revisit these photographs after a chat with Chad Young who played bass. He asked about this session so I scanned some of the negs and was lost in time and space for a few hours, back to a freezing session in a barn with a bar heater and grub from The Portland Arms bar to keep us warm.

Hofman were quite simply a fantastic modern rock and roll band with a crashing beautiful blast of sound full of cascading words and music swooping at you from all directions. They had breakbeats and sparky inventive riffs laced with passive aggressive melancholy and lashings of their american indie influences were sprinkled all over a fine racket of guitar bass and drums. Steve Adams wrote lyrics that made you chuckle and puzzle. Often at the same time never less than cheeky and never about colours. Emo this wasn’t. They produced a few classic singles and an album Keep your receipts and deny everything before splitting up over map reading differences.

Adams and Jason Williams, on guitar, went on to form The Broken Family Band and release a string of critically acclaimed albums and no small following in fact I remember their first gig as the BFB very well, it was supporting The Frames in The Portland Arms on their small stage downstairs. That was around 2001, (I must look that up!) You can find Adams now after a variety of Adams monikers going naked as Steven James Adams and Williams as i strip for couples. Both are releasing new records in 2014. Chad Yound is playing Bass in Akuso as well as i strip for couples and some new tracks on Adams forthcoming opus so it seems like they are all still bed hopping though not necessarily attending the same pyjama party at the same time.