James Duncan (Jim) and James Harvey (Harv) met in a primary school in rural West Sussex in the last millennium.

We have been friends ever since.

In our early teens we discovered a shared love of The Beatles, The Kinks, Guns n’ Roses, Nirvana and The Pumpkins…then Britpop happened.
Ear phone sharing bus journeys to school were never the same again and our CD collections exploded overnight. It was a good time to be 15 in our part of the world.

Young minds were then freshly blown again shortly afterwards by Deserters Songs, The Soft Bulletin, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, XO and The Sophtware Slump from the other side of the pond.

We eventually thought we should write some of our own songs and we’ve been trying to join some of the dots between the above ever since.

Our first band Winteria, with Owen Thomas (Speak Galactic, Japanese Sweets), lasted for a couple of years and NME said we sounded like ‘Pavement taking a walk in the park’. We played with the likes of Joy Zipper, Tilly and the Wall, Alaska and Turncoat around Brighton and had fun making all the noise and mistakes that come with the first time you put yourself out in the world.

When Winteria was no more we spent a week locked up in a Yorkshire farmhouse with Ray Davies hoping some of his songwriting magic would rub off on us and working out what to do next.

White Star liners were formed shortly afterwards with Simon Parker (Villarreal, Lightning Dept.) on bass, Dan Sinclair on drums and we were regularly helped out by super producer / multi talented instrumentalist Ali Gavan (Sparrow, Hector and Gavan) and one man scouse symphony Paul Cullen (Pristeen/Paul iwan).

We released 2 albums (The Rural Electrification, The Years That Slid) and 2 eps (You Can Do It We Can Help, Occams Razor) at the start of the century with The Years That Slid coming out on Brighton’s Numbskull Records.

WSL toured the UK and supported, amongst others, Chris Difford (Squeeze) and Grandaddy. Jason Lytle offered us a support slot after we forced a copy of our first album into his hands at a show in Brighton. He also provided some backing vocals on our second album, which was really cool.

That period finished with us contributing music to a Sparklehorse tribute album, which sadly never saw the light of the day but remains one of our proudest recording moments.

Our new 3rd album, The Chronometer Method, is due out this summer. As we figured we may as well come back with a bang It’s a double album and our first to come out on vinyl. It’s been a LONG time coming and we hope it has been worth the wait and the time sunk into it.

A launch show and new internet shizzle will be on the cards and updates on all of this will be coming soon. Summer 2026 should be a good one for WSL.

Hopefully we’ll see some of you out in the world soon and there are enough songs in the can sitting on a battered TASCAM for the 4th album to be just on the other side of the horizon too.

It is good to be back.

See you around.

Much love,

Jim and Harv (WSL)

XO