The end of 1994 saw the end of my playing career for personal reasons, until a reunion with an old friend whom I'd lost contact with for five years. The friend, George Frew (editor with the Advertiser Group before moving to the Oxford Mail and then on to the Western Daily Press in Bristol), had been a collaborator on a couple of songs from my previous two albums. He also had lyrics to eight songs for a recording project entitled 'The Rose Dies, The Thorn Survives' which he planned to get musician friends from the Gorleston, Great Yarmouth area to record, but alas this never happened. One song, 'Days Of Love & Thunder' was included on the GODKNOWS album, 'Luxury Of Life', in 1993. At a later date George had asked me to write the music for this project but we lost contact with each other and I had decided to stop playing until our renuion in March 2003. Unfortunately, George died of cancer in mid 2003, but had asked me to play again and finish his project.
Shortly after being reunited with George he died. This led to some deep soul searching within myself, listening to George's last words to me, three days before he passed away, ''Bernie, you have too much to give (musically) to just give up, get off your backside and play again'', I called up Andy (Fizzy) and asked him to join me in completing George's project. Following a couple of months of writing and arranging with Andy we decided to ask Paul (Scoggie) to join us. Six months later we had 'got the bug', so to speak and had almost completed the writing etc, but we needed a singer as my voice couldn't do George's songs justice. But as luck would have it I spotted a young man in a band called 'Not The Cowbell' bearing an uncanny resemblance to Paul Rogers of 'Free' & 'Bad Company' (both in his appearance and vocally). Being highly impressed with his vocals, I approached him with our ideas. Within a month Frank Morrow had joined us, completing the line-up. In May 2005 we were joined by Bob Cushing on backing vocals and acoustic guitars.