Play Dead (band)
English musical group
Play Dead were an English rock band from Oxford formed in 1980 by Rob Hickson, Pete Waddleton, Mark "Wiff" Smith and Re-Vox.
Career
The original line-up of Play Dead consisted of Rob Hickson (vocals), Pete Waddleton (bass guitar), Mark "Wiff" Smith (drums) and Re-Vox (guitar). In July 1981, Re-Vox was replaced by Steve Green. During their active years, Play Dead supported a number of acts, including the likes of Killing Joke, The Cult and The Sisters Of Mercy in the UK. They also appeared on Channel 4's music TV show, The Tube in late 1984.
The band made three studio albums and one-off singles for four different small labels such as Fresh Records, Jungle Records, Situation 2 and Clay Records. They formed their own label, Tanz, for their final album, Company of Justice, produced by Conny Plank, which they released in 1985.
A string of singles were released (many through Stoke-based Clay Records) from late 1983, throughout 1984 and early 1985. Play Dead toured frequently around the UK and Europe and by 1985, felt they had enough material to be able to put out their first ever live album, Into The Fire, which was released in May of that year. However, against the backdrop of similar artists such as Spear Of Destiny, The Cult, The Sisters Of Mercy and Fields Of The Nephilim, whose success was evident through having higher profiles in the music press, Play Dead struggled to compete.
In 1984, Rob and Pete created the project Mankind's Audio Development (nicknamed M.A.D.).
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3392098. VIAF identifies the subject as 168602644. None of the 3 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1980, 1981, 1984 and 1985.
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This entry incorporates text from “Play Dead (band)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.