The Tale of Harvey’s Rabbit.

Down the rock ‘n’ roll rabbit hole of what might have been for one of Manchester’s most beloved cult bands.

Friday 29 December 1995 was a very special night for five-piece Manchester band Harvey's Rabbit. From 10pm, venerable broadcaster John Peel was on BBC Radio 1, presenting the first half of his annual best-of 'Festive 50' - and in a list dominated by Pulp and (obviously) The Fall, Harvey's Rabbit were there too, perched at number 42 with their debut single, 'Is This What You Call Change?'. Things were seriously looking up.

Within three years, though, the band had gone their separate ways. On the occasion of their first public gig under their original name for nearly a decade, Cult Manchester's Andy Murray speaks to guitarist/founder Mick Pullan and singer Tim Lyons and hereby presents the curious and sometimes cautionary tale of Harvey's Rabbit. Photos courtesy of Mick Pullan.

Mick Pullan: Our first gigs were in '92, I think. I'd written some songs with a guy from Canada and we started the band together, but he was going back to Canada, so I advertised. Old music shops around at the time used to have cards all over the walls of bands looking for new members, and it was just a case of that. I think the shop was A1 on Oxford St. Through that, we got a bass player and drummer originally, and then Tim.

Tim Lyons: They wanted someone to do the vocals, so I joined up. They were saying they could do with a guitarist as well and I knew a guitarist called Dave Thom, so I asked him and he said yes. That's how we joined. I'd been in bands for years.

Tim already had a long-established pedigree as a Manchester music scenester, dating back to the Seventies when he was part of a gang of gig-going friends including Jonathan Ormrod, aka Jon the Postman. He swears they even attended the Sex Pistols' two legendary gigs at the Lesser Free Trade Hall during the summer of 1976.

Tim: Yeah, I was at both. A guy called Paul Welsh was a good friend of mine. He used to run a very early fanzine in Manchester called Penetration, from about '75. I used to contribute to it and we used to go and see lots of bands. It was ahead of its time in a way, because he covered Iggy Pop and several other bands before anybody else. So there was that connection.

We'd read about the Sex Pistols in the papers. Before they got all the sensationalism, before all that happened, they were just this band from London who were supposed to be pretty different and had this attitude which reminded us of bands that we liked - the Stooges and the American pre-punk sort of punk. So that's why we went.

In the company of Jon the Postman and Paul Welsh, then, Tim witnessed the first Sex Pistols gig in Manchester (which Welsh documented in a now-celebrated series of photographs).

Tim: It was exciting, and I thought 'yeah, this is great, it's good that bands are changing'. Then it just took off after that. But for the second gig, the Buzzcocks played, and they were better than the Sex Pistols. Just better, you know.

Tim went on to front several local bands, including The Things and Red Turns To, later followed by The Sandells and - most recently - Precogs (with Dave Thom). In 1992, though, he became the singer of Harvey's Rabbit.

Mick: Tim joined, and that worked fine, and he brought Dave, and that worked fine too. After a while, though, we got in a new drummer and bassist. Again, the bass player came from an advert that we put in a music shop, and the drummer was Pez [aka Peter Saunders] from New Fast Automatic Daffodils, who'd just split up.

The new band's distinctive name was a nod to the classic 1950 film starring James Stewart as a functioning alcoholic who happens to hallucinates a six-foot rabbit. The film itself, though, was called Harvey.

Mick: With it being before the days of the internet and being able to look things up easily, I'd just remembered the name of the film wrong, as Harvey's Rabbit rather than Harvey. When we used to be interviewed about it, and asked how the name came about, we'd make up all sorts of stuff about why it was, these elaborate stories that were just ridiculous. But it was actually just a mistake because I couldn't remember the film properly.

Once up and running, the band weren't necessarily inclined to jump on the bandwagon of any passing scene.

Tim: We just did the music we wanted to do, which you do anyway, I guess. If you look at that scene now, a lot of the Mancunian bands sounded fairly similar in the 90s. Quite a few of them knew one another. But we didn't really pick up on that Manchester sound. Well, we didn't think about it, we just didn't want to. We just did our own thing.

Attitude had a lot to do with it at the time, too, this Manc attitude. I think that became something that people related to.

Mick: But I think we saw some of that and thought, actually, a lot of this is put on.

Tim: Oh, yeah, it was. Yeah, obviously.

Mick: While we didn't sort of want to be part of anything - or necessarily separate ourselves from anything - I looked at that and thought, well, this is pretty dumb, looking at it from the outside. I did kind of think, well, why would you do that? Apart from money. And wealth. And fame...

Tim: Also, quite a few of these bands were a lot younger than us. I guess maybe they'd got into this kind of gang attitude. Other bands did the same thing and it became this movement, didn't it?

Mick: It wasn't really like we were trying to be part of a scene or consciously not trying.Tim: No, we just did what we did. We wanted to write good songs, and that was it.

Mick: I think we had a lot of different influences, from all over the place. And maybe our influences went a bit further back, but I think between us, we were into all sorts of different things, and we didn't consciously try to sound like any of it. We just kind of threw it all in, and then whatever came out came out. Some of it worked, some of it didn't. We just thought someone might like it at some point... which was perhaps a bit naïve!

As well as gigging in and around Manchester during the mid-90s, playing city centre venues like The Castle, Band on the Wall and The Roadhouse - plus the inevitable support slots for The Fall - Harvey's Rabbit were also busy recording demos. They even self-released a cassette-only album, A Place for Beginners.

The band's hard work started to pay off. They secured their first live dates in London, as well as recording Radio 1 sessions for John Peel and Johnnie Walker. They duly became the first signing for a new indie label, Oxford-based Rotator. In July 1995, their single 'Is This What You Call Change?' - a cover of a song by Robert Forster, formerly of The Go-Betweens - was the label's debut 7”.

Mick: It was played on the radio by people like Mark Radcliffe, Steve Lamacq, Jo Whiley... I mean, it did fantastically well, considering that it was our first single. It was the label's first single too, and no-one outside Manchester had heard of us. So, taking all that into account, it did amazingly well.

Tim: We got a full-page interview in the NME. They used to have 'Single of the Week’ at the NME, and this particular week they had a double 'Single of the Week'. It was us and one other band - The Wannadies, 'You and Me Song'. So I was thinking, 'hmm - things are going alright here'. Around the same time the NME reviewed a gig we did at The Dublin Castle in Camden, and it was quite a positive review.

Mick: I think that was the gig where we were told afterwards that Morrissey had walked into the pub, heard us and walked out.

With their first proper album in the offing, it looked as though Harvey's Rabbit were about to hit the big time.

Tim: It was really good. It was going well to a point.

Mick: Basically, that single did really well. It looked like things would then perhaps get bigger. Where I was living at that time, I was getting phone calls every night from people - either from the label saying, 'this is happening, so-and-so's been in touch', or all sorts of weird and strange people ringing up and saying, 'we've been listening to your band'. It was very busy, and it started taking over, and you started thinking, actually, this is pretty good, we might be onto something. But then it kind of... didn't happen.

For one debatable reason or another - ill-judged decisions, poor management, pure bad luck - the momentum that the band had built up started to dissipate.

Tim: I think there's all sorts of reasons why bands don't make it. We all made mistakes, but certain people made what I call big mistakes.

Mick: I guess one of the things that we didn't do, and which we perhaps maybe should have worked harder at, was getting a proper, decent manager.

Tim: It wasn't easy. We did try.

Mick: Oh, we did. And I think that might have made a difference. We had a number of people - friends and things - who were recommended to us by other people, but...

Later in 1995, Harvey's Rabbit released their second single, 'Window Dresser', written by Tim (with a song by Mick, 'Nothing Touches You', as the B-side), but it didn't receive much radio play. Two more singles followed, and much gigging, but suddenly the moment seemed to have passed. In June 1998, Rotator released The New Spiritual Vacuum, the first proper Harvey's Rabbit album - whereupon the band split.

Mick: We were always going to do the album, but it took longer than it should have done, for various reasons. Then we did a last gig at Night & Day, and then that was it. That felt to me like a natural end. I mean, we'd got the album out, which was kind of what we'd set out to do, but there wasn't a lot of interest in us by the time it came out.

Tim: It didn't go as far as it could have done, as far as I'm concerned. I think maybe Mick's point of view is different than mine, but it's not that different.

Mick: There was other stuff going on, though, wasn't there? I think how I view it now is probably different to how I viewed it back in 1998.

Fast forward ten years, though, and Harvey's Rabbit reunited - initially to play at a private birthday party for guitarist Dave Thom held at The King's Arms in Salford.

Mick: We quite enjoyed that, so then we started doing some gigs just for the fun of it.

Guitarist Dave Thom was too busy to commit fully, though, so after a while the band recruited new members and started operating under the name The Harveys. For their forthcoming gig in September - just as a one-off, at least in theory - they'll be reuniting with Thom as Harvey's Rabbit. Some of their unreleased mid-90s demos are set be made available via Bandcamp around the same time, too.

Mick: I've been going back and listening to that stuff and thinking, actually, I quite like that. It's alright, that. Some of it's... yeah, some of it's good. I still like it. As Dave was going to be available, we thought it would be nice to do this gig with him as Harvey's Rabbit, instead of The Harveys.

Tim: He's always been a very busy musician, Dave. He's always been doing lots of other things. He's very versatile.

Mick: But he was available for us, and we thought it would be good to do a lot of the old stuff.

In fact, Thom is also currently playing separately both with Tim - as the aforementioned Precogs - and Mick, playing mandolin in his loose new Americana-flavoured collective The Last Caboose (also known to feature Pez from Harvey's Rabbit on occasion).

Mick: You're talking about 30 years ago, and everyone from that line-up is still making music in different ways - sometimes together, sometimes separately.

Today, the band's motivation appears to be playing for the pure pleasure of it.

Mick: It hasn't been for the financial reasons, that's for sure!

Tim: That's true, I've been doing it for a long time and never made any bloody money out of it. I think as I've got older, I've thought, well, that's not the real reason.

So, is it better to achieve cult success - to be loved by a select group - than liked by the masses?

Mick (mulls on this for a moment): I'll take what I can get, really...

Mick Pullan's band The Last Caboose are playing Manchester Central Library on 3 September 2026. Tickets here.

Harvey's Rabbit will be supporting TV Smith and the Bored Teenagers at Gullivers in Manchester on 24 September 2026. Tickets here.

Precogs have gigs in Stockport and Manchester coming up. Details here.

Harvey's Rabbit John Peel Session, 1994.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rmXyDYcMPg