Longshanks Biography

Longshanks was formed in 1987 as a studio band for a one-off project of recording one song (Cycles & Circles) on 16 tracks.
Spurred on by the success of that enterprise, the second line-up of Longshanks spent some 4 years recording 10 songs on a 4-track machine in a home-studio. The goal was to create a concept-demo tape, titled: "The Quest", which had a storyline like "The Lord of the Rings". The final song of this project proved to be a bridge too far: the project was never finished and the band 'dissolved'. Recently, some individual songs have been released digitally, on the Longhanks-website.
After 1993 Longshanks became a one-man-band (André Kamer), releasing several instrumental tracks over the years.
In December of 2006, former lead-vocalist Alex van de Graaf initiated a reunion. From December 2007 until April 2010 Longshanks no.5 recorded 11 tracks, which were released on their CD "The Return of Longshanks" on April 24th 2010.

The name Longshanks was of course derived from the nickname given to Aragorn by the inn-keeper of "The Prancing Pony" in Bree.
The reason to use this nickname and not "Aragorn" itself, was that André felt that there were too many bands out there already, that had names of Tolkien-characters (e.g.: Gandalf, Galadriel), but did not make music that conveyed the Tolkien atmosphere at all. So, instead of taking the name of a Tolkien character and risking people to feel disappointed by the actual music produced, he opted for this nickname.
On the demo The Quest there are several songs that contain Tolkien quotes, but only one that was entirely written by him: "The Travelling Song", part 1 and 2.
On the CD "The Return of Longshanks" again there are several songs with Tolkien quotes. There even is a "Travelling Song, part 3" and there is another song completely written by Tolkien: "The Bath Song".