The Rose where one of the many bands that my mates and I used to go and see virtually every night of the week between 1985 and the early nineties. A lot of what was going on back then originated from the Leeds area, so we were following bands like the Mission, The Rose, Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, Ghostdance, etc

Times and tastes move on and the "Leeds scene" began to fall apart in the early 90's, and I picked up the American invasion of grunge going to see bands like Pearl Jam, Screaming Trees, Smashing Pumpkins and Alice In Chains.

The flame for my first love never went though. I then got a PC, the internet started to explode, so I thought I should throw together a web site and fulfil my suppressed journalistic ambitions! At the time there were loads of sites around covering the "bigger" bands of the day like the Mish so I thought "lets focus on the Rose boys", always totally under rated and largely ignored by the UK music press.

11 years on I'm amazingly still here!!

The site was little more than a creative vent so I expected no interest, but I was amazed when emails and guest book messages started arriving from literally all over the world. For a while I even had a Korean guy running a mirror of the site fully translated into Korean (Hi Jiwook if your still around). It was nice to know that other people remembered the band, and also people actually liked what I was producing.

I've met or spoken to most of the the ex members of the band over the years, only Phil so far managing to avoid me. Drop me a mail Phil, you know you want to ;-) Many fans have sent in photo's and contributions to keep the site fresh, and enhance it's status as the only source of Rose info on the internet.

So here we are into the site's 10th year, and 2006 seems to have begun with a mini revival of the Leeds related scene of the mid to late 80's. The Mission are releasing albums and DVD's, as are All About Eve. The Sisters are on tour again, even Skeletal Family have reformed. Hopefully this activity will generate some interest again, and who knows, may be the Rose boys will get the hint and start gigging again.

Enjoy the site, and please get in touch via email or the forum,

James Parton, March 2006

Thanks for support and material to (in no particular order): Paul James Berry, Glenn Shultz, Andy Porter, Lisa Gannon, Jiwook, Lyall I Anderson, Joern Kolbe, and everyone else that has been in touch.