Martin Kelly and James O'Neill met at St. Patrick's school in Coatbridge, Scotland, in 1997. 15 and 14 respectively, they were part of a bunch of friends who spent their time 'playing football, dodging school and underage drinking.' James remembers 'Martin and I were talking about Led Zeppelin and one of the guys said are you ever going to stop talking about music…to us that seemed like a good reason to go our own way”. Both of them were in separate bands, and one New Years Eve James left his band, The Unknown, and joined Martin's band, Indifference, as a singer. Martin laughs, 'considering the names, it's no surprise neither went anywhere'. Indifference, a punk band, over time morphed into another band called The Sleeping Prophets. In 1999, James was doing a sound engineering course, that eternal friend of kids wanting to make music, at North Glasgow College and undertook the recording of the first release either of the two would ever make. James says, 'that's not strictly true, calling it a release, as it didn't really get released. It was more a case of selling it to our mums and dads'. Martin agrees, 'we were like, why aren't we signed yet? In hindsight no one would have signed us, not because the songs were no good but because we were just too young and too naive'. The band did a lot of gigs around Scotland and took a trip to France on the local council's tab to play at Coatbridge's twin town, St. Dennis. James remembers ' we had to repeat one of the songs because it was the one everybody sang along to. It was good experience because we met loads of people from Spain, Israel, Africa and Europe. The festival was a project that aimed to bring music and sport together from all over the world to educate and unite them. We taught people from all over the world how to get pissed. We did it on the last night. That aside, it opened our eyes to the possibility that music could connect people and change things...like a universal language, an emotional language.'

Martin says that 'even in the Sleeping Prophets it was always me and James who were writing the songs, they were real band songs, not like the songs we write now, but during this time was when we learnt to write together, with some routine and discipline.' James agrees, ' it was kind of a life changing time for us then, most of our friends were deciding on careers and planning out their lives and we kind of made a conscious decision, within ourselves, and after talking about it together, that we were going to concentrate on writing songs. We had a kind of understanding. We would have been around 18 I suppose.'

After school Martin and James kept gigging with Sleeping Prophets, but as they both agree, 'we never really focused on it properly, never really developed the writing as much as we could have done, the only time we would ever write is when the band was all together and inevitably we'd be drinking, messing about and telling jokes. We were trying to make it fair for the band, seeing everyone as equal members but it didn't really work.' As Sleeping Prophets began gigging less and less, Martin and James wanted to record more but felt the stuff they were doing wasn't representative.

While all this was happening, James was developing a professional outlook by doing gigs with his dad Jimmie O'Neill's band The Silencers, who are quite well known in both Scotland and Europe. Through touring with this dad, James realized that to make music your life you had to have discipline. He remembers ' when I was growing up music was always there, in the background, dad was writing and gigging and it wasn't until I wanted to pursue music as a career that I had a kind of overnight realization that when people have paid money for a ticket, you have to give them quality. You have to think seriously about it, otherwise it's just a hobby. I can always remember my dad writing and you couldn't speak to him, he'd tell you to go away. The best advice he gave me was, try to write a song everyday. I realized that in order to get better at anything you need practice.'

While James was gigging with his dad, Martin had started to play in a number of bands around Scotland, making money from gigging and session work.

Martin remembers, 'through the guy we recorded with, I got work and met a lot of people on the circuit and around 2005, when James' dad broke his hand and the Silencers needed a guitarist, I started going out on the road with them. It was the first time I realized you could make a living from music.'

They recorded a four-track demo in 2005, after having changed the Sleeping Prophets into Bwana Devil, because they felt the old name was stale and going nowhere. They both felt they needed 'a breath of fresh air'. The tune All Over the News was one of these demos. 'We sent out a bunch of press packs to try and get interest... through myspace we got interest from A & R at Polydor. She came to a gig, but the night before the gig the bass player had hurt his hand and so we had to play the gig acoustically, just the two of us...it turns out she really liked it, she got her boss from London to come and check us out...they gave us some money and so we booked into the best studio we could and came out with a demo that wasn't really representative of what she'd seen, which was the two of us. We think that Polydor got a bit confused because they had reacted so well to the acoustic show and then got back a band demo. They said “what are you guys, are you a duo or a band?”  It was around this time that we realized, we were a bit confused to.'

Martin remembers, 'It was a stressful time, because we thought we could have a deal here but we didn't really know how to present ourselves because James and I had always been in bands and although we wrote together all the time we still didn't consider ourselves a duo. So basically the whole thing ran its course and the label knew we didn't have our direction clearly worked out.'

After this, the band stopped doing gigs because the drummer had left, so Martin and James started focusing on acoustic gigs, writing more songs to fit the nature of those gigs, Martin says, 'just basically writing more songs, we were living together and we started feeling like we should be recording songs and thinking about putting out an album or releasing something.'

The songs you are hearing now have been born over the course of the last six years and show a clear progression in their songwriting and performance abilities. Their decision to concentrate on their craft has begun to pay serious dividends in both the studio and on the stage. For a taste of how shows are supposed to be, how real harmony sounds and what integrity really feels like, keep your eyes and ears firmly fixed on Martin and James.

Watch this space.