In partnership with his buddy, Jim Milne, Steve Clayton spent many hours diligently multi-tracking strange rock music in the late '60s and early '70s. The fruit of this activity was a series of albums under the band names of both Tractor and the Way We Live, and the enduring creative chemistry between the friends was easily demonstrated by a 2002 reunion gig at the British Limelight club. Their band activity began in 1966, when Milne, Clayton, bassist Mick Batsch, and vocalist Alan Burgess formed the Way We Live, a group which by the late '60s had suffered a population loss of 50 percent, leaving just the duo of Milne and Clayton. Not to be discouraged, they got local engineer John Brierly to help them create a demo that would sound like a full band was on tap, to be duplicated and flung off in the direction of major-label mailboxes. Each fellow covered a variety of different instruments, and quite well at that. British disc jockey John Peel, a longtime champion of independent music, received the demo in his capacity as label owner of the Dandelion firm. Neither Peel nor the label's manager, Clive Selwood, believed that this recording was the work of only two people. They signed what they thought was the "group," plopping the two friends in a London studio where they promptly set aflame a debut album, A Candle for Judith. When it was an artistic triumph but commercial flop, it was Peel who suggested changing the band's name to Tractor, which didn't result in that much more in sales for the forthcoming product. When the Dandelion label went the way of weeds in a well-kept garden, the band carried on with a 1975 single on the UK label but fell apart shortly thereafter. About a year later, Milne and Clayton jumped back into action, having recruited a bassist named Dave Addison and suddenly doing gigs with the determination of someone filling in every last blank space in the datebook. The engineer from the good old days, Brierly, now owned his own label called Cargo, resulting in a 1977 single release before the pair split up once more. The next regrouping was in 1980, the trio from before adding blind keyboard and guitar player Tony Crabtree and coming up with a single on Roach. Touring was seen as an impossible financial obstacle in this period and after 1982 any Tractor plowing on the music business farm had to wait for the inevitable and appreciated reissuing and new promotion this material received after the late '90s, when indie rock audiences became fixated on practically any material created in the '70s. Clayton relocated to the quaint British medieval town of Hepden Bridge. ~ Eugene Chadbourne