Dead Captain's songs often begin somewhere recognisable before wandering off into the unexpected. A Saturday afternoon in Piccadilly Gardens, a hospital car park or an old photograph found in a forgotten box can all become the starting point for stories where reality and imagination intermingle.

The Tameside three-piece was brought to life by multi-instrumentalist Dan Adams, singer Dunstan Carter, and John Havelock on synths and ‘atmospherics’. Since their first release in 2016, Dead Captain have built a catalogue of singles EPs that move between psychedelic pop, folk, garage rock, glam and alt-country. Self-confessed ‘creative fidgets’ they seem at their happiest flitting between styles and genres.

Despite being around for ten years on and off, Dead Captain have only ever played one live show, supporting The Chameleons at Holmfirth Picturedrome, just a week before Covid popped up and brought everything to a halt, but promise they’ll rectify that later this year.

Dead Captain’s influences come from far and wide. The unsettling oddity of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, the eerie atmosphere of John Carpenter's The Fog, the tragic absurdity of Milos Forman’s Man on the Moon, and the burly Black Widows biker gang in Every Which Way But Loose, all feed into the band's imagination. So do the streets of Manchester, the cobbled corners of Tameside, the eerie quiet of Saddleworth Moors, childhood memories and moments of everyday chaos.

Musically, the band’s shared touchstones include David Bowie, Pink Floyd, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and R.E.M., alongside the more playful experimentation of Grandaddy, Super Furry Animals and The Flaming Lips. Those influences are not treated as a checklist or worn as badges of credibility. They are simply part of the same creative mindset, songs where a heartfelt melody can sit alongside dream-like imagery, and where a little weirdness can make something feel more human rather than less.

The band's own mythology began with an object that sounds like it could have come straight from one of their songs. A few years ago, Dan and Dunstan discovered a brightly coloured shoebox outside a pub in Ashton-under-Lyne. Inside were handwritten notes, old photographs, drawings and grainy VHS recordings, along with a blue Post-it note carrying four simple words, "Do something with this."

Nobody has ever discovered the true origins of the box. Some believe it belonged to a mysterious local character known as Old Scotty, while others think it was the work of someone who wanted to leave behind a strange little legacy. For Dead Captain, the unanswered questions were always more interesting than the truth.

After a three-year gap between releases, Dead Captain returned in May of this year, with Watertight, a cosmic glam-rock song about trying to stay level headed in an increasingly bizarre world. Inspired partly by the strange theatre of Manchester's Piccadilly Gardens, it finds beauty in disorder and turns a familiar urban scene into something cinematic.

A long-delayed album is promised at some point soon, and the possibility of returning to the stage remains alive. But Dead Captain have never been in a hurry. Their appeal comes from following ideas wherever they lead, and a desire to embrace both the ordinary and extraordinary.

Nearly ten years after discovering that mysterious shoebox, they are still doing exactly what it asked of them: taking something unexpected and making something with it.

Written by Tim Sullivan - guest writer at The Tone