Jump to navigation

My slightly embarrassing musical past

While I wait for iTunes to import the tracks I’ve chosen for my latest podcast, it seems an opportune moment to write a little something about my musical history. I’ve also finally got round to ripping all my old demo tapes to MP3 format, so there are some choice tracks linked at the end of this post.

Youth and young manhood

When I was seven we moved home and I was enrolled at the local primary school. During the introductory tour for new parents, my teacher mentioned that the school provided music lessons, and would I be interested in learning the violin. No, not really, I thought; “Yes” said my parents, and so it came to pass that I learned to play the violin.

This was A Good Thing as it turned out. I wasn’t bad at music; ten years later I had a Music A-level, I was leading the school and city orchestra, and won the city equivalent of young musician of the year. I could easily have gone on to bigger and better things… but by then, rock and roll had taken over my life.

Well, I say ‘rock and roll’; of course by that I mean ‘cheesy heavy metal and poodle-haired hard rock’ – it was the late ‘80s, and I thought Poison and Bon Jovi were pretty damn cool. I know. Luckily my tastes matured (a bit) and diversified (a lot), but at the age of 16 I knew what I wanted to be.

I wanted to be in a band.

Garage days

After a few unproductive and occasionally embarrassing auditions with local bands (apparently a crappy 10-watt amp doesn’t make you sound as impressive in a rehearsal hall as it does in your bedroom), I answered an ad in the local music shop from a lyricist looking for a songwriting guitarist, and just like that we had a band. We recruited a drummer, lead guitar and singer, booked a rehearsal space in the middle of nowhere (coincidentally, Gizz Butt – future guitarist for The Prodigy – had the next-door rehearsal room) and started thinking about booking some gigs.

We were very bad.

Our singer couldn’t remember any lyrics, the bass player couldn’t play bass, and my songwriting skills were shall we say just a little too influenced by whatever I was listening to at the time. Still, we had one gig before the band broke up; as I remember, we were so loud we knocked all the glasses off the shelves at the back of the bar in the pub we were playing. And in Killjoanlee we had possibly the worst name in rock history (sadly my fault as well).

London

Fast-forward a couple of years, and the drummer and I have been writing together constantly, recorded a demo (see below), and eventually moved to London and formed a slightly better band. This time we managed a good half-a-dozen gigs before it all fell apart, and even knocked out another 5-track demo (see below). The drummer has since undergone a Dave Grohl-style conversion and now plays guitar in my brother’s band, while our singer went on to play bass with the mildly successful Hull-based alt.rock Fonda 500.

Don’t ask me what happened to any of the bass players we went through; we had a Spinal Tap-esque relationship with our bass players, and could never seem to find the right fit for the band.

Present day

So fast-forward to the here-and-now, and I haven’t picked up my guitar for months, but the increase in space afforded by our imminent house move has got me thinking about perhaps buying a second-hand piano and knocking out some new tunes. That train of thought also prompted me to dig out our old demo tapes, convert them to MP3 and stick them on Odeo for posterity…

Caveat auditor

I’ve done the best I could to equalise the volume and get rid of the hiss and click from the ten-year-old tapes, but don’t be surprised if they are of variable quality.

First up is the demo I made with the drummer, recorded at a studio in Wisbech in about 1994/5. I’m playing everything except drums, and singing on all the tracks except #3 (and what a terrible pseudo-American accent I had affected!):

• Casual was about a girl I knew; it sounds very naive now
• Slacker was supposed to be a Pearl Jam style meditation on Gen X
• I can’t remember the name of this one, but it was a Nirvana-inspired riff that I’d been playing with for a while before it came together; it also includes the solo I’m most proud of
• Wish It Was Me has more cheesy lyrics, and was supposed to sound like early Green Day; it was a tribute to local rock club The Fiddler’s Elbow which is still going strong, albeit under different management and a new name
• The last track, King of Rock and Roll, is probably the angstiest of the lot, with references to Richey James and Kurt Cobain in there – I was so tortured… ;)

Next is the band demo from around 1996, recorded at Mill Hill studios; the vocals have got a little lost in the mix and the whole thing is a bit treble-y, but never mind. I’m just on guitar for these, but contributed most of the writing:

• Nowhere Boy – cheesy name, cheesy rock song; the first one we wrote together, if I remember correctly
• The King’s Skin (at least I think that was what it was called) had a Skunk Anansie feel to it
• Life For Sale didn’t really sound like anything else
• Stolen just sort of happened one rehearsal, and doesn’t sound like anything else we ever wrote
• Finally another track I can’t remember the name of, but was almost certainly due to listening to too much Lemonheads at the time

Filed under: Music, Personal.

Digg this article

Bookmark this article with del.icio.us

Previously: Got to get me one of those

Next: Finding HTML elements using Javascript nextSibling and previousSibling

Comments

All content © 2007 The Watchmaker Project unless otherwise indicated. Comments are the property of their individual authors.

Hosted by MediaTemple. Powered by Textpattern (although soon to be ExpressionEngine - sorry TxP!). Valid XHTML and CSS (probably).

Technorati Profile