Band Members

For the first time on this site, I've now decided to try and piece together information about each of the band members that were in The Cygnet Ring. If you know any further information, please send me some feedback, particularly if you were in the band as I'd like to interview you for the site.

Rus Harrison (vocals, guitar)
The founding member of The Cygnet Ring, Rus had previously been in a local indie band called Playing At Trains, who gained a cult following around the late 1980s. He was also into letting property, mainly around the Chorlton-cum-Hardy area of Manchester, where I first met him and discussed music (see the recollections bit for more on that). For a fair few years, the Cygnet Ring was his outlet for his music, with excellent lyrics and good guitar playing, and excellent live.

These days he's still doing property letting as far as I know, often commuting between Guildford and Manchester. He also formed another project called Shaker which played around 1996-ish.

Stephen Broomhead (vocals, electric guitar)
Stephen was a long term member of Playing At Trains as well as The Cygnet Ring, and has recently been locating old footage of the band and uploading it to Youtube. The videos on the pages for "Higher" and the re-release of "Love Crime" are the ones that he very kindly uploaded, hurrah!

David Wells (bass, 1989-91)
David was the original bassist. He also had a hand in picking Alessio (Alex) D'Alessandro on drums, but left just before the release of Pale Guru, hence the appearance of Geoff Ralph on the bass.

Geoff Ralph (bass, 1991-92)
Geoff replaced David on the bass and as far as I can tell was the bassist for the duration of the Hopeful Monsters album. Sadly he passed away in June 2009.

Mark Brown (Martha) (bass, 1992 onwards)
Mark became the bassist in 1992, according to Steve Broomhead above.

Alessio (Alex) D'Alessandro (drums, -1992)
Alex has played drums since way back in 1976, and has also been an Italian model in Tokyo since 1996. He's been based in Japan since then and his fusion project "Alessio" plays all over Japan. He now has a Myspace page and an official site - do check them out.

Read our interview with Alex D'Alessandro!

Alessio now has his own Youtube page where he regularly uploads videos of him on drums. Check out the Sony Handycam advert that he starred in.

Geoff Donkin (drums, 1992 onwards)
Geoff became the drummer in 1992. He actually appears with Rus and Steve on the video they filmed doing a live acoustic version of "Tell Me What Your Girlfriend Said" as well as in some of their live shows. He used to be their tour manager as well. Geoff plays drums on most of the "Hopeful Monsters" album.