Paul Young's Los Pacaminos + The Standard Lamps

Paul Young's Los Pacaminos with support from The Standard Lamps.

On a bleak November day in London in 1993, Paul was pondering how to break the album/promotion/tour routine that to be honest, was becoming a little predictable after 10 years of being a solo performer. And anyways, he missed the camaraderie of just being a band member.... So he called around some of his friends and members of his previous line-ups through the years to find out who would be interested in forming a loose, relaxed Tex-Mex group for some impromptu gigs. This music, from the working class bars of West Texas, brought the atmosphere of the sun soaked expanse of the great state of Texas into a dingy rehearsal room seated beneath a massive flyover in West London. This meeting of friends became a regular fixture and the good feeling generated by these rehearsals drove the momentum of the music forward. Paul and the guys decided that it might be fun to play some local bars just for the hell of it. Soon the band had formed into a regular six piece playing cover tunes by the likes of the Texas Tornados and Ry Cooder, and a few R&B standards given the Tex-Mex treatment.

The following year brought a further development when a young Melvin Duffy brought his virtuoso steel guitar playing to the Los Pacaminos table and the band was complete. The band started to play gigs all around London at this time and became favourites on the circuit.

Now in their 23rd year this band of friends are still playing the music they love. Along the way, the songwriting developed to the point where the band's first studio album was full of self-penned songs that lovingly captured the feel of life down by the Mexican border... That carry the atmosphere of a Texan working man's bar on Friday night; payday for those field and oil workers who had emigrated to Texas from Scotland, Germany and Mexico and who brought their polkas and waltzes and love songs with them.