Press kit

Everything you need for a story

Everything below is free to use. If you want a quote, a specific angle, or a track early, get in touch — [press@smithandhazzard.com].

Short bio

Smith & Hazzard are Ricky Smith and Simon Hazzard, finishing a catalogue of songs they wrote and gigged as Volume One in Hampshire twenty years ago — now completed with fully disclosed, human-directed AI production.

Long bio

A band that once played an all-night gig aboard a brand-new Royal Navy destroyer to raise money for injured servicemen is finally finishing the songs it never got round to - two decades, three house moves, two marriages, five kids and one very unusual gig later. Sam Hazzard (Simon Hazzard officially), 54 and Ricky Smith...older, played Southampton pubs including The Obelisk and The Malvern as Volume One throughout the mid-to-late 2000s, writing and recording all their own material in Ricky's dining room on his 8-track Roland recorder. The band is believed to have become the first - quite possibly the only - act to play a gig aboard HMS Daring, then the only brand-new Type 45 destroyer in the fleet, in an all-night show at Portsmouth Dockyard in 2010 that raised £8,500 for Help for Heroes.
"We're best mates with a couple of great undiscovered and unheard albums worth of music out there. At our ages and being so far apart has made us realise just how important it is to do this now," said Hazzard, who moved back to Lincolnshire this year after 35 years away.
Much of what the pair wrote together was never properly finished. Gigging became harder, life got busier, and - aside from a brief return in 2016 with two singles, "How Many Reasons" and "St George's Pride" - the songs sat unreleased.
Now, 200 miles apart, they've decided to finish what they started, releasing the whole catalogue under a new name, Smith & Hazzard, rather than Volume One, which today is swamped by unrelated search results. They're using AI tools to help finish production, but with a strict, publicly logged rule: every lyric is 100% human-written, and every release states exactly what a human did and what AI contributed.
"We're putting every track we ever produced back in the day through AI to act as a new performer. The music and composition all stays the same, the lyrics don't change, but the quality is way beyond what we're capable of now," Hazzard said.
"We're even writing new music again, creating brand new songs using the new tools - but we want to be very clear about what belongs to us and what the new tools give to us. There's too many charlatans out there passing off AI-generated music as their own, and it's bad for the industry," he added.
Full back-story: https://www.smithandhazzard.com.

The angle, if you want one

Two men, finishing songs they wrote and gigged as unknowns two decades ago — using AI carefully, and disclosing exactly what it did and didn't do on every single track, credit by credit, in a public log. Most coverage of AI in music right now is about people hiding it. We're doing the opposite.

Photos

Smith and Hazzard 2010

Facts & links