BURIED TREASURE
Jung Hearts
Andwellas Dream Love And Poetry
Sleeper agents: Andwellas Dream (from left) Nigel Smith, Gordon Barton, David Lewis.
CBS, 1969
“I REMEMBER when we played the Marquee, looking out and seeing all these interesting people looking in,” recalls David Lewis of gigging at the famed Wardour Street club in the high ’60s. “I was thinking, This is it. I don’t want to go back to Belfast. There was something special about London then, and that energy carried you along with it.”
Lyrical, artfully sculpted and starry-eyed, Lewis’s band Andwellas Dream’s first and only album was Love And Poetry. It remains charged with resonances from the end of that galvanic decade, yet, remarkably, it was written and played by a young man not long turned 18.
Captivated by Roy Orbison before he was 10, Lewis was further inflamed aged 15 when he saw Stevie Winwood jamming at Belfast music shop Crymble’s. The same year he joined R&B outfit The Method on guitar. Soon the group evolved into a Marshall stack-blasting, Cream-style power trio of Lewis, drummer Wilgar Campbell and Nottingham-born bassist Nigel Smith. As well as playing in Dublin, the group began making monthly forays to London, where connections were made.