About…
Who are Spellt Ronge?
Spellt Ronge are a music duo made up of Andrew Devis and Rev Simo (Simon).
Andrew and Simon first met in 1995 while studying theology at Moorlands college in Dorset and being placed in the same church. The soon discovered a common love for music and both had done some song writing in the past. Before long we were writing together and playing a few small gigs plus some church services and school assemblies.
Unfortunately the whole experience was quite short lived as after the first year the academic demands meant needing to step back.
After college both Andrew and Simon went separate ways and into different ministries. Over the last 20 years or so we have had times of almost losing touch (not deliberately!) and on one or two occasions thinking about projects together.
Since those days of the mid 90’s a lot has changed, both for us as individuals and in terms of technology, which means we are able to revisit some of those old songs and some new ones too! As we begin this project partly inspired by others who are producing material from home due to lockdown because of Coronavirus and the tech means we can do so despite living miles away and not being able to travel – hence ‘Back together, Miles apart’
As we record we will update this site and add it in other places, you can also find out more about what Andrew and Simon are up to and also the story behind the name ‘Spellt Ronge’ from the links below:
About Andrew
Somehow the Lord led me into media after my time at Moorlands and I
ended up working in radio for a while and then moved into video, motion
graphics and visual effects. Today, my main work is that of teaching
people how to do video editing, audio editing, motion graphics,
animation, visual effects and colour grading. However, I still love to
create media myself and so am working on some podcasts, both an out and
out creative fiction podcast called ‘Horatio and the Story of the Manor’
( https://horatio.one ) and ‘The Bible Story Podcast’ ( http://biblestory.org.uk ) which has the aim of helping to bring the stories of the Bible alive
for today’s audience. Not that I think the Bible stories aren’t alive in
and of themselves, I just wanted to help people interact with them a
little more and hope this podcast will help.
As for music, while I do still write some music and compose songs, I have done very little in terms of music since our days at Moorlands and jumped at the chance to start doing music again when Simon asked. The exciting thing is that when you work together, the end result is usually much better than when you ‘go it alone’ and I have some embryonic songs and ideas that I am looking forward to developing with Simon and which you will find here in due course.
Oh, and if you’re interested in that whole video, motion graphics and visual effects thing, you can find lots of tutorials here ( http://tale2tell.com ).
About Rev Simo
Rev Simo’s real name is Simon Faulks, but there is already one of them in the UK world of Music (we happen to know each other, share a faith in God and he is a jolly good musician as well, you can find his music at Guano.me.)
Upon leaving Moorlands Simon headed into youth ministry for 10 years and then felt God call him to something new. Back to Theological College
and this time training for Anglican ordination. Simon now serves as
Rector of 5 Parishes in the Oxford Diocese.
As well as his main job as Rector Simon is also a storyteller and uses
his interests in circus and illusion to help tell stories of the bible
and explore faith. This is used as part of his school work in the
benefice also. Not just telling the stories he offers training workshops
to churches, church leaders and schools on how we can get more out of
the stories from the bible and helping others to learn how to retell
those stories.
Simon is married and has three teenage Children together they have seven chickens and one cat.
You can visit Simon’s others sites below:
Why Spellt Ronge?
Back in 1995 when we first started writing together we found we had a
number of things in common, obviously there was our faith and our call
to study theology at Moorlands and our love of music. Then there was a
poor academic history and the fact that neither of us could spell (or
understood much about how grammar works) all helpful aspects to
beginning to study a literary based subject.
Andrew had recently been diagnosed as dyslexic (and due to conversations
about their common struggles) Simon was also to be diagnosed dyslexic
in 1996. It seemed to us slightly amusing that two people who struggled
with spelling and writing should try and write stuff together and
inevitably our first drafts of songs were often full of spelling
mistakes – hence Spellt Ronge.
Just as an example of how little faith we had in our spelling ability we got the name checked to make sure it was indeed spelt wrong (or should that be Spellt Ronge?)