Thanks for visiting H&F's site.

I must admit that before embarking on this venture, I was never that interested in looking back. This website has changed all that. The more I looked into H&F's antics between 1963 and 1979, the more I was struck by the sheer scale of it all. Also, it became clear why so many people have such an interest in music from this period. There is a raw and creative feel to it, because it was done just for the love of doing it; no record deals, nobody breathing down our neck, forcing our hand. Of course, the other side of this freedom, is a rather variable performance quality. Compared to the things I got up to afterwards in the professional arena, these are occasionally poor performances, but because of the honest way that they were put together, they still retain the enthusiasm and ambience of those years before it all got so serious.

As well as the five albums already in the public domain, there are another fifty tracks of music that have not been heard outside a small number of people on the south coast of England. These range from early instrumental pieces recorded in the pioneering days of track bouncing techniques, and very much inspired by guitar instrumentals (thank you the Shads!) to stage musical material featuring a host of singers previously not heard on the five H&F albums.

In putting the site together, we decided that the tracks from the five albums should be easily accessible for download and at a reasonable price (£0.70), whereas the rarer material should be contained in a different area of the site and priced at £1.50 per track. This other area became known as the H&F Archive, and as the site developed, started to take on a character of its own. So much so that, with the aid of some 3D design and other tricks, it has evolved into a unique environment in which you stumble across tracks from the archive as you make your way around. For the less adventurous (and more impatient!) the text based links on the top of each page make navigating a lot simpler. They also take you to pages without background sound or music, so that you are not bombarded with the same track time and again. There is also a catalogue page in the albums section, and another in the Archive. Here you can see all the tracks currently available and go straight to them. You will need to register with us to access the H&F Archive, but registration is absolutely free, and will allow you to be informed whenever we update the site. Before you register, you have a chance to view a short slide show, giving you a quick overview of the archive. Registration also allows us to gauge the amount of interest in the site, which in turn will encourage us to update it more frequently. I like to think that the H&F Archive has been put together with some of the same naive enthusiasm that characterised the music, so I hope you enjoy it!

Each track of music has a playable excerpt of about 25 secs. When you hear a track which you would like to add to your collection, you can click on the 'Add to Basket' button alongside. This will take you to the Paypal page, where you can accumulate any number of tracks before making your final purchase. Please note that you do not have to be signed up to Paypal to use this service, but if you wish to, it is very quick.

A word about 'Media Write Ltd. This is a company with one director (me!), and has been set up to cover several different projects, this being one. Your credit card entries will mention Media Write, but rest assured that this is not some mega conglomerate but just H&F's business name.

So, time to see what you think of the site. All comments and suggestions are welcome at:

hnfcontact@googlemail.com

Thanks.

 

Peter Howell

 

PS. By the way, we have used more recent versions of the Alice and Friends LP sleeves for graphic reasons, because both those original sleeves were so white. So thanks to those of you who have put them together.