Random Bruce were:
Ian McIntosh: Vocals, guitars
Chris Marshall Edmondson: Vocals, guitars
Jeff Phillips: Vocals, bass

Ok, before we go any further, there is likely a large percentage of this site's total readership who are family and friends and who are simply here because they have either misplaced their copy of The Doggy Song, or are keen to get their hands on that disgusting song they heard round a campfire somewhere. This is fine. I fully encourage you to listen to it and consider fondly the song's place in the history of bestiality love songs. If you are new to the Doggy Song, please keep in mind that (a) it is perhaps not completely representative of the tone or subject matter of the rest of my songs, and (b) no animals were harmed during the writing of the song. You'll find it over there to the right in the 1997 album.

So...Random Bruce. Well, this was just Jeff and I and our mate Chris who had grown up with Jeff in Esperance, and who we'd played with when we were with the Gnomes and Chris was with local band Ochre.

We all just wanted a casual acoustic vehicle that would be suitable for recording Chris' songs and my songs and would also provide us with a regular opportunity to pay out on Jeff. Chris has been playing his great country-based songs up and down WA, over east and in the US for years, and is still hard at it. You can hear some of his extensive body of work here.

The name Random Bruce really just came from the obsession held mainly by Chris and myself with Bruce Springsteen. Rehearsal sessions would often be interrupted by - or completely dissolve into - us playing random songs from the Springsteen catalogue, so "Random Bruce" just seemed fitting. In retrospect, we may have garnered more attention had we simply called ourselves "Bruce Springsteen". There may be something in that.

We didn't gig in this current form. Chris and I did a few gigs here and there between the two Random Bruce recordings, under the name BobDog, but Random Bruce itself didn't, mainly due to Chris touring his solo shows in the US for a while after the 1997 recording, and me moving to London pretty soon after the 2001 stuff.

Although neither of these recordings were released, somehow the songs as they've sat on my hard drives over the years have always had this strange image of tortoises attached as the album cover art. I think from memory I needed to put some cover art when I put the songs up on the now defunct iuma.com in the early 2000s. So given that my iTunes library has the tortoises as the cover art for both the 1997 album and the 2001 album, so can yours. I think I liked it because if you look closely there are actually three tortoises in the picture, and I saw the two at the front as being Chris and I foraging for food for the collective good and Jeff is like away over to the side already feasting. I don't want to give you the wrong impression; he actually plays bass quite a bit better than a tortoise could. It's been proven in a lab.