The All Seeing I: 'There wasn’t a plan, it was just messing around'

Barrett – aka DJ Parrott of Sweet Exorcist fame – admits to being “slightly bemused” when they were approached by Because Music UK five years ago about pressing their album Pickled Eggs and Sherbert on vinyl for the first time.

“It’s been a slow process,” says Honer, who is also a member of the Sheffield groups I Monster and The Moonlandingz, explaining that the label had at one stage tried to get The All Seeing I to work with a “young kid” who had turned Beat Goes On into a viral hit on TikTok by adding his own rhythm track, but Campbell’s track ended up being “rush released” separately.

“That’s the modern way,” sighs Barrett. “If all the analytics line up and the right amount of people are clicking on something on social media, that’s how labels sign things these days. You’ve got to have all your followers already there and accounted for and then they might put your record out for you.”

Things were very different when Barrett, Honer and Buckle first got together to cut the single I Walk in 1997. A unifying factor back then had been Sheffield’s Warp Records. “Parrott had released records on Warp, but he and I first got together when he was looking for a studio to produce the band Add N to (X),” says Honer. “Jason and I were big fans of all those early Warp releases.”

They released a couple of 12in singles on Barrett’s label Earth Records – “Warp had moved on and were doing more album-based music by then...I got fed up of taking stuff into the Warp office and them not being interested in it,” the producer explains. But their reworking of Buddy and Cathy Rich’s cover of the Sonny Bono song The Beat Goes On drew the attention of Pete Tong’s FFRR Records. In 1998 it reached number 11 in the UK charts but Honer says: “There wasn’t a plan with The All Seeing I...it was just messing around and experimenting, really.”

Nevertheless they went one better a few months later with Walk Like a Panther, which brought Tony Christie out of retirement. “We hadn’t realised he lived in Spain, we naively thought he lived in Woodseats or somewhere,” Barrett confesses. “Either the Sheffield Telegraph or the Star put a little thing in saying we were trying to find him and one of his relatives saw it and sent it out to him in Spain and we got in touch that way.”

Christie “wasn’t super keen” when he first heard the demo that Honer had worked on with Pulp singer Jarvis Cocker after they met at the Top of the Pops studio, but was eventually persuaded to record a vocal part. With a video shot at Castle Market, it became a top ten hit.

Cocker stood in for Christie on one of their appearances on Top of the Pops. “That was a bit embarrassing,” says Barrett, explaining that the record had actually gone down the charts that week, but such was the TOTP’s producers desire to get Cocker onto the show, there was “a massive bending of the rules” to let them on anyway. “I think we might actually be record breakers as the only people that ever got on Top of the Pops having seen their record go down,” he says.

“That’s a pub quiz question, that,” chuckles Honer.

The album Pickled Eggs and Sherbert came out in September 1999 but failed to make the top 40. The group did, however, play a smattering of live dates before calling it a day.

“It was never really a band,” Honer says. Barrett agrees. “If Jason was here, he’d say that we should’ve just been a singles band and I think that’s probably right. We should have just carried on maybe doing a single every year. We kind of got boxed into a corner with the idea that we had to do an album and we were scratching our heads because there wasn’t a group as such. There wasn’t an overarching reason to be.

“It was three blokes making daft noises in Dean’s bedroom and that was when it was fun. It was less fun when people expected us to sell records. When there were no expectations, it was great.”

Pickled Eggs and Sherbert remastered and expanded is out now on London Records.