I wrote already about The Doris Days a couple of months ago. Since then I’ve been looking and searching everywhere for more information about them as well as trying to find at least mp3s from their demos. Just recently, thanks to Phil Suggars from The Candie Maids, I got the chance to get in touch with Hayley Morton from The Doris Days! She has been super kind and nice to share some interesting facts about one of the best bands you have never heard about. I thought sharing with the couple of readers of the blog.

Hayley:
I met Vanessa Norwood (lead singer) 25 years ago when we were 17, she was doing an art foundation course at Lewes College and I under duress was doing a secretarial course. I play classical piano and wrote songs which Vanessa would write words to. We both met Dennis when we were about 19 – I think he was a DJ and helped put on Magical Mystery Tours where you could go off to see bands in London mostly – we saw a lot of the June Bride gigs and the Shop Assistants who Dennis had links with.

Dennis was at Brighton Art college doing an expressive arts course with Nick the trumpet player and Simon, who played cello with us for a while. He was also friends with Ed the bass player who I think was an engineer with the army if my memory serves me right. Rachel the other guitarist was Vanessa’s younger sister.

Dennis started going out with Vanessa – he was always writing music and asked me to write some piano bits for him. We then formed the band with his other friends. Dennis wrote the songs and we contributed with our instrumental parts. We would go into the art college and record the tracks – unfortunately I only have old tapes of this music and I’m not even sure I got copies of any of the good stuff. (I hope these get digitised one day!! – CCP)

The basement gig was our last one – I won’t go into details but we argued after the gig and that was that – I think Dennis carried on for a bit under the same name. I met up with them both a few years later and he was doing other stuff by then.

I went on to play in a band with Phil Suggars called CC Baxter (well worth a listen). Unfortunately I’m not doing anything now apart from finally trying to do my Piano Diploma – still writing songs though.

Thanks so much Hayley!

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Listen
The Doris Days – Another Day