About
Broken Watch are an alternative rock band who have been performing, writing and recording material since March 2003. The founding members of the band are Rick Armstrong on bass guitar and vocals, Gary Guiver on guitar, keyboard and vocals and Chris Napier on drums and vocals. In November 2010, the band was joined by Andrew Cartwright on keyboard, guitar, saxaphone and vocals.
In The Beginning
The Broken Watch story actually began back in 1998 when a young Chris Napier joined Brit-Pop inspired Clacton band, ‘The Elite’ who would travel to Romford each weekend to rehearse in a professional recording studio. Two doors away from Chris lived a shy 17-year-old would-be lead guitarist who, on more than one occasion, was invited to jam with The Elite, but with no amplifier and no confidence, the young Gary Guiver decided to stay at home.
Meanwhile, Colchester boy Rick Armstrong was proving a dab-hand at building flight-cases with former Dire Straits lighting engineer Rick Thompson, who used to hire a factory unit in Clacton. Having dabbled with the bass, Armstrong was introduced to a number of bands to whom Thompson would rent out the factory unit for evening rehearsals. One such band was ‘Rush Green’. Another emerging band was ‘Mother Pearl’, a Counting Crows-inspired grunge/rock band fronted by the charismatic Paul Rose. Rick dusted off his bass and joined the band in 2000 and a few months later Gary, who had mutual friends, was drafted in as lead guitarist.
Mother Pearl had potential but it just didn’t work out; Rick left the band in 2001 and it fell apart soon after that. Rick and Gary attempted to form a covers band called Paradise Shark with the Pete, the Mother Pearl drummer, but it wasn’t meant to be and the band split later that year.
While all that was going on, Chris was without a band and without a job and in a chance meeting in 2002, Chris and Gary got together to write a few songs; Gary providing tunes for Chris’ lyrics. Originally intending to take on a bass guitarist and a lead singer, Gary took on the singing on a temporary basis. Gary contacted his old friend Rick and, in 2003, the line-up was complete.
Going Live
Having scraped together just enough cash to purchase a small portable digital recording machine, the band set about recording some of the songs they had written with the rather ambitious aspiration of producing an album to release at their debut gig; something that none of the guy’s previous bands had ever achieved. During the summer of 2003, the band recorded “Killing Time” in Gary’s parent’s living room. Considering the rather primative means of recording, which involved capturing Chris’ drumming using just two microphones and sound-proofing the house using pillows, the quality of the album was suprising 
good and ready to be released.
The band’s first gig was at Clacton’s Colbayns High School in September 2003, where both Chris and Gary had both been pupils; it was nervous and sometimes rough performance but already they were demonstrating a natural rapport with both each other and the audience and proved beyond any doubt that they could manage as a 3-piece act.
By the end of 2003, the band had a few gigs under its belt, including a cheerful performance at the Devon in Harwich on the evening England won the Rugby World Cup.
The Holiday Camp Years
In the early days, whilst the band had recorded an album’s worth of original material, to get gigs Broken Watch played mostly cover versions of other peoples songs including the hits of The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Queen, The Police and even Tom Jones and Roy Orbison. In 2004, the band were very busy gigging in Essex and, thanks to Gary’s sister, got a gig at what, at that time, was considered to be one of the greatest live music venues in Essex, the Rocking Horse Bar in Clacton. With a sound that was distinctly pop as opposed to heavy rock (not the norm for the regular Rocking Horse crowd), they filled the venue one Thursday night in February ‘04 playing to 300 rather merry Clactonians and went on to play on another two occassions.
2004 also saw the band record their second album “Wake Up!”. They had refined their recording technique and released the album in May of that year. They also entered that year’s BBC Children In Need ‘Be The Band’ competition with a song recorded especially. “Let’s Sing This Song Together”, which would later feature on their third album, was shortlisted in the top five entries in the Essex heat and the boys were invited to appear on BBC Radio Essex; their first radio air-play. The song was voted third in the competition and finally Broken Watch had made their mark.
At the end of 2004, the band was invited to a showcase evening at Haven Holiday Camp in Dovrcourt where John Welham, Chris and Gary’s woodwork teacher at school, was acting as an agent. That night the band put on their jazziest shirts and smartest ties and put on a cabaret act that got them signed up by Stour Valley Entertainments.
2005 was a busy year for the band as they toured the holiday camps of Essex, most notably playing Kings Club on Canvey Island on New Years Eve. While the band were busy on the road however, they had stopped recording new original material. They boys were also finding their day jobs quite demanding and things came to a head in 2006.
In Limbo
The stress of having to learn and play so many songs whilst touring the clubs and holiday camps at the same time as doing tough day jobs, especially for Rick who would also do night shifts working as a Nurse at Colchester Hospital, was beginning to take its toll on the band. In 2006, Rick announced that he was leaving the band to concentrate on his job and producing a feature film that he had been working on for some time. On 20th February 2006, Broken Watch played Thai 1 in Colchester - a gig that could have easily been their last.
Despite Rick’s departure, Chris and Gary were determined to keep the band going. They joined Larry and Andy formerly of Rush Green (now “The Replays”) but never gigged. They also worked briefly with Mike Payne formerly of Morpheus but in both cases the music and the reputation that Broken Watch had built up over the previous 3 or so years would have been lost. Chris and Gary aslo joined Raw’s bassist Jamie for a one-off gig at a Scout Camp - little did they know they would be entertaining the children as well as the Scout leaders! Bitten to pieces by gnats, playing the hits of the 60s and 70s to kids mostly born in the 00s was a challenge too far!
Chris and Gary decided to give up live performance in 2007 to concentrate on writing new material beginning what would later become the band’s third album “Autumn Waves”. Chris and Gary were actually comissioned by careers service Connexions to write a song as background music to a promotional video and wrote the 6-minute progressive keyboard piece “Crossroads”. They called upon their old mate Rick to play bass on the album on the understanding that their touring days were over. The album was released in April 2007 and included some of the songs that were written before Rick’s departure including ”Let’s Sing This Song Together” and “Autumn Waves” but, as the band were no longer touring, it was difficult to promote. Then fate intervened.
Later in 2007, Sting announced that he would be reforming the Police for a one-off tour. Being big Police fans, the boys got tickets for their September concert in Twickenham and, at that concert, undoubtedly inspired by the Police’s performance, Rick agreed to rejoin the band on the condition that it concentrated on writing and performing original material. Broken Watch were back.
Later that year, Broken Watch would enjoy their second bout of radio airplay when the applied to appear on Dream 100FM’s unsigned slot hosted by DJ Adam Morris. They took with them “24 Hours From You” from their Autumn Waves album; a song that sounded pretty damn good on radio.
Reunited
On 7th December 2007, Broken Watch played their first gig in almost two years at the Cockney Pride on Clacton Pier to a packed crowd and it was as if they had never been away. 2008 saw the band hit the festival programme for the first time with performances at Dream 100’s ”Party on the Pitch”, St. Osyth’s “Music on the Meadow” and the Clacton Festival. They also recorded their fourth and arguably their best album to date, “Face In The Crowd” and finsihed the year with a flourish, playing the world’s most famous club where the Beatles began their career, the Cavern Club, Liverpool in November.
In 2009, the band decided to partake in competitions for unsigned bands in almost a last attempt to get noticed for their original material. In ‘Live and Unisigned’ they got through to the Regional Final playing to a packed 500+ crowd at Basildon’s Towngate Theatre. In the ‘Surface Unsigned Festival’ they made it into the top 100 bands from over 1,000 entries, playing their first gigs in London including Camden’s Purple Turtle.
The reality of holding down full-time jobs, mortgages and all the things that come with growing up, meant that the band had to seriously consider whether they could compete amongst the country’s fresh crop of new talent. In late 2009, it was decided that the band would go back to their routes as a covers band playing local gigs.
Enter Andrew
Throughout their first six years of gigging, the band always knew that being a 3-piece act was seriously limiting the range of numbers they could play live.