Memoirs Of A Musical Nobody

[Foxbat]

As somebody who has never even used a diary never mind written a blog, I’m sitting here wondering: what on earth can I do with this part of the forum?
So I sat down and played around with my bouzouki and it came to me: the one constant in my life. So here it is. My life from a musical perspective in five volumes.


Memoirs Of A Musical Nobody

Volume One
Now, let’s be clear. I’m a musical illiterate, which, in a way makes things kind of interesting. Let me explain.

I come from a fairly poor working class family. My brother and I were always well fed, clean and generally well looked after. It was a fairly happy childhood but luxuries were few and far between. So, when I decided at the age of fifteen, I wanted to play guitar, I got myself a part time job at a fish farm (I was still at school), ordered a particularly cheap-n-nasty guitar from a catalogue and set about teaching myself how to play.

A few years later, my brother became hooked on jazz (I know….) and decided to learn saxophone. He was lucky enough to find a teacher that not only taught sax but also gave him a good education in music theory.

I view our origin stories like that of two brothers in a classic good versus evil fantasy tale – one brother that takes the right hand path towards righteousness and musical theory. Then there’s me: the left hand (but right handed) player of darkness. I live in a world of musical chaos where anything and everything can be used to suit my own ends. I don’t care if you can’t find a symbol to mark on the staves that represents the racket I make. I’ll make that racket come what may.

The first band I ever joined was a Punk outfit called Some Action. I was about 17 but I wasn’t a punk. I just happened to go to school with the singer and, despite our musical differences, we got along pretty well. So, when their guitarist left due to ‘musical differences’ (you’re going to see a lot of that phrase), I stepped into the breach. It was fun for a while. There I was, long hair and cowboy boots, Flying V copy, thrashing it up with a group of pogo-ing punks. The band lasted two gigs.

Gig number one was my first ever public performance and I could hardly stand never mind play a guitar. Unfortunately, this was to become a crippling disability all my life. Stage fright, my friends, is a terrible thing. I got through it and we did okay. It was just a half hour slot at some disco or other. We were a little bit different so probably that helped. I remember the singer had written the lyrics to a song called ‘Diary Of A Mad Housewife’ so I strung a few chords together and we played around with it. It needed an eerier sound, I thought, and eventually cottoned on to rubbing the teeth of a metal comb against the strings (Jimmy Page had his violin bow, I had my comb).

I enjoyed my time in Some Action because we were always looking for different ways to approach the music. We didn’t have the skill but we could embellish it with some imagination. It was an important lesson to me: be aware of your limitations but don’t be scared of them. If you can’t find a way to improve upon them, find a way to circumvent them. Skill limitations don’t necessarily need to hold you back. Of course, that’s a lot of bullcrap if, for example, you’re piloting a plane. The last thing you’d want then is a lack of skill. Still, there are some places in life where what I say is true. Recognising those places (ironically) is a skill of its own.

Gig number two was a big deal. We were part of a multi-band line up and word had spread we were a little bit different so expectations were high. There I was standing on stage with the bass player and no sign of the singer or drummer. Eventually they appeared. Pissed as farts. The drummer wasn’t very good at the best of times. This night, he might as well have stayed in the pub. The singer spent most of his time challenging hecklers to a fight. It was embarrassing.

I’ve always believed (and still do) that any musician should treat his or her audience with respect and the simplest way of doing that is to be there on time and capable of playing. Any band I’ve gone to see that thinks it’s okay to swan in a couple of hours late has never had my money again.

After the gig, I told the singer that was it. I was out. He immediately threatened to take me outside and give me a right good kicking. I was crapping myself and did my best to look nonchalant. ‘I’m still out,’ I said with a shrug of my shoulders. I walked away, never looking back, praying that he wasn’t going to jump me from behind.

A couple of weeks later, I bumped into him. The band, he told me, had split. That was it. The end of Some Action. To his credit, he apologised for his behaviour and we’ve been friends ever since. A few years after that, I had a drink with him as he celebrated gaining his degree. He’s now a university lecturer in philosophy. There’s probably an irony in there somewhere but I’m too thick to see it.

*

Of course, there are pros and cons to how you learn a musical instrument. Sometimes no amount of innovation or imagination can protect you from the reality that you don’t know ***t.

Following the path of formal learning gives a fabulous grounding and great discipline. Doing it all yourself can be incredibly frustrating and time consuming. It’s not as if I had Youtube to turn to. I once spent months trying to figure out why an octave spanned 12 frets on a guitar. Oct….eight. But twelve? It didn’t make any sense. Of course, I didn’t know about the four semitones. Then it clicked. Eight plus four….

The simplest grounding in music theory would have meant I would already have known this.

On the other hand, there’s something truly liberating about teaching yourself and ignorance definitely can be bliss. The rules just don’t apply when you are none the wiser.

I once played in a band called Poison Whiskey as rhythm guitar player and we had a keyboard player obsessed with music theory. We were jamming away and I played a couple of chords. The keyboard player immediately brought the session to a halt.

‘You can’t do that!’ he yelled.
‘**** off!’ came my reply. I’d obviously brought my Some Action attitude with me to this new band.
I repeated the sequence. ‘See,’ I sneered, ‘I just did it again.’

After much arguing (which translates to him demanding that I stop breaking the rules of musical theory and me with my intelligent and witty retorts of **** off), we agreed to disagree.

At the next practice he came and spoke with me. It seems that I was perfectly fine playing what I did (I can’t even remember what it was) and it was just that his musical knowledge wasn’t good enough to know how it all fitted together. Still, it was big of him to admit it. What is it they say about a little knowledge?

Knowledge of theory can be a fantastic aid but music is all about sound and, if it sounds good, then that’s good enough as far as I’m concerned.

Funny story about that band. It was a bit cliquey. There were the four amigos (drums, bass, keyboard, other guitar) and then there was me and the singer. She told me one day that she’d decided to call it a day. Then the three amigos told me that one of their pals was taking over on vocals. I’d heard this guy sing and he was awful. He wouldn’t know a tune if you hit him in the face with a packet of them.

So, says I: ‘It’s him or me.’
‘It’s you,’ they replied without hesitation.

And that was it. I was gone. Tail between my legs. Musical differences yet again.

Never make a threat unless you’re prepared to carry it out.

But there was a happy ending. I teamed up with an incredibly talented multi-instrumentalist and drummer in a partnership that eventually evolved into a new full band and that lasted a few years. We played many gigs before eventually going our separate ways. I’m still on good terms with all these guys although I rarely see them now.

Stay tuned for episode two.

 

[Foxbat]

Volume Two

This new band was called Speakeasy and I found it quite another liberating experience. I’d gone from Punk via Some Action to the heavy rock of Poison Whiskey. Speakeasy was an opportunity to play around with styles. We were starting to explore in our own little musical way. We were big on writing our own material and had songs that were almost heavy metal at one end of the spectrum and kind of mellow reggae at the other. We were very much a democracy where everybody got the chance to contribute and it worked very well. We still played some covers but now they were interspersed with or own material. Even playing covers, we tried to be a little different both in the choice and interpretation of the material. This was to become something of a blessing at one particular gig….

Speakeasy was a four piece band and although my playing probably one or two steps above rudimentary, I could get by….just…with a lot of help from my friends (a range of effects pedals I’d invested in). By now I was playing a Westbury. It’s a half-decent British make. Nowhere near a Stratocaster or Les Paul but at least I was no longer playing cheap copies. I also bought myself a 12 string acoustic around this time. I still have it and, despite a lot of wear and tear, it still plays pretty well.

I played a lot of gigs in this band and most I can’t even remember but there are one or two that stick out in the old memory banks.

Somehow (and I can’t remember why) we landed one of our first gigs in Edinburgh (oooh! The big smoke!). We coerced a friend to borrow his painter dad’s van to drive us there. It was somewhere near Haymarket I think and it turned out to be a bowling club if I recall correctly. We were booked in with another band much older thanourselves. We were about 18 or 19, these guys were in their late fifties and veterans of the pub gig circuit. They kind of took us under their wing and helped us sort out a few technical problems as we set up. We were on for about half an hour and then they would take over for the rest of the night.

Then the audience started to arrive. Only, it wasn’t an audience per se. It was some kind of function and all the guys were in suits and the women, their best dresses. It might have been a wedding reception but something in the back of my mind says it was an engagement party. There I was, sitting with the rest of the band nervously watching our ‘audience’ arrive when this particularly aggressive guy comes up to us.

‘I hope youse b******s aren’t a bunch of heavy metal f******s!’

‘No,’ I replied, vigorously shaking my head. I had long hair, wearing a Motorhead T shirt and torn jeans held up by a bullet belt, and there I was denying before the cock crowed.

When he stormed off, I turned to the rest of the band and said ‘drop all the heavy songs.’

Luckily, as a band, we spent a lot of our practice time mucking about and just playing stuff we thought was really stupid. This was now to save our skins.

I can’t remember everything we played but I do remember we started off with the Bonanza theme tune and the kicked it straight into King Creole. We went down a storm and the band of older guys congratulated us on our performance. We sat drinking with these old codgers until the early hours of what turned out to be a great night for us. It really gave us a shot in the arm confidence-wise.

*

Ask any musician what’s the best part about Spinal Tap and they’ll probably tell you ‘the truth’. And that’s the thing. It’s funny because it is so true.

There were a number of young bands in Dunbar (my hometown) at this time and we decided to cooperate rather than compete with each other. We came up with the idea of putting on a mega-gig in a place called The Victoria Ballroom (long since demolished). It had hosted bands from the past ranging from the Bay City Rollers to Johnny Kidd and the Pirates. This was big time, baby!

We pooled all our money and hired a P.A. system from a place in Edinburgh. It came with its own road crew and mixing engineer. It looked awesome.

Speakeasy, despite, the spirit of cooperation were determined to stand out, so we went a little further and bought a block of dry ice and hired the heating bath and fan to utilise it. Unfortunately the fan didn’t work so a pal of mine used my jacket to waft the icy mist across the stage. Before that, we had planned a spectacular opening. It consisted of a large smoke pellet we’d set on fire inside a plastic cup just before the curtains opened. Again, fate intervened and the curtains jammed. By the time they finally opened. We were staggering about the stage blindly, coughing and spluttering from all the smoke (both from the pellet and melting plastic cup). Not the dramatic entrance we’d envisaged. A good job they didn’t have smoke detectors then.

The end of Speakeasy didn’t come with a bang or even a whimper. It just sort of faded. I can’t even remember why we called it a day but at least there was no acrimony and we parted friends. Let’s just say musical differences (again).

There had been a couple of line up changes before that happened. Our original bass player left when he got married and our drummer (the very talented multi-instrumentalist) went off to do his own thing. Both the replacement drummer and bassist fit in very well until the end of the road.

There is, however, a sad postscript to this. The second (very good) drummer died circa 2005. In the years after the band he had developed a drink problem and died in a house fire. It’s thought that he slept through the fire (perhaps caused by his inebriation) and died from smoke inhalation.

It was sometime in the late eighties when Speakeasy was wound down and in the next few years I’d hop from project to project but none of those ever morphed into another fully fledged gigging band.

Volume 3 coming soon...

 

[Foxbat]

Volume Three

1992 was the year I bought my first ever brand spanking new USA-made Fender Stratocaster. I say USA-made because they also made slightly cheaper versions in Mexico. For me, it had to come from the good ol’ US of A for it to be the real thing (I was very immature back then….some would say I haven’t changed all that much).

Today, I know better and American doesn’t necessarily equate to ‘the best’ (although sometimes it does). South Korea and even Indonesia are churning out quality axes nowadays (axe is s what those who are uber-cool, like me, call guitars ).

But here’s the trouble with buying a new guitar. I went to Edinburgh, tried it out, fell in love with it and bought it. When I got home, I immediately plugged it in and started playing. I was bitterly disappointed. Here’s the problem: I used a Carlsboro Stingray amplifier through an H&H 2by12 cabinet. In the shop, I’d tried the strat through a Fender Deluxe 112 so I did the only logical thing. I went back to Edinburgh and bought the amp. Now I was happy. Eventually, my gigging gear consisted of using a pair of Deluxe 112s. Now that my gigging days are over, I play through a Vox VT30 but kept one of my Fender amps just because of how good an amp it is. It still sounds stunning with a single coil guitar through it.

A couple of years later, a guitar-playing work colleague suggested we put a band together so that’s what we did. I managed to recruit my old Speakeasy singer and bass player (the unmarried one). I also persuaded my brother to join, knowing that sax in a band was unusual in these parts and could give us a fairly unique sound in the area. We went back to mixing covers and originals and the sax really opened a door for new covers to try out. We added songs like Van Morrison’s Real Real Gone and Osibisa’s Sunshine Day to our set lists.

We resurrected Speakeasy as the name of our new band. I’d been the one who’d thought it up in the first place and three of us were old members. Just like you had different marks of Deep Purple, this was Speakeasy Mark 2.

We needed a drummer and here I made a fatal mistake. The bass player persuaded me (against my instincts) to recruit a drummer a few years younger than us. It just didn’t work. I remember one practice where we were trying out a new piece of music. It was meant to be a bit on the mellow side and there was the drummer knocking seven bells out of his kit. So I stopped the session and went to speak to him.

I asked him if he would try using brushes (for the uninitiated, brushes are exactly that – instead of sticks, drummers can use them for a softer tone).
‘I am using them,’ he said. He held them up to show me the brushes, which he’d wrapped in insulating tape making them almost as hard as sticks. After the practice, I spoke to him and said it just wasn’t working and, oddly enough, he agreed. So we parted ways and he went on to join a thrash metal band, which was probably where he should have been I the first place.

A new drummer now was a priority and I can’t remember how we actually found him but we found, perhaps the best drummer I’ve ever played with. He was about fifteen years older than the rest of us and had his own business (which included a very large van….perfect for gigging). Not only was this guy a superb drummer, but he could sing harmony at the same time. He quickly became a real asset to the band.

I’m writing this no names, no pack drill so just for ease of writing this, I’ll simply refer to him by his first name – John.

John had a cottage on a farm just outside town and he rented a large barn for storing all his work materials and tools. It was a perfect place to store all our band equipment. By now, we had our own 1 kilowatt P.A. system. That sounds impressive but it’s not particularly big. It’s more than enough, however, for a gigging pub band. We also had an array of mikes, stands, cables etc. They were all stored in John’s barn.

John’s business was building displays and stuff for companies to show off their wares. One day it might be a big car exhibition in Birmingham and the next, he might have built a frame for a company to show off their latest double glazing products in London.

John was also quite a political creature and was an active member of a certain party (I won’t mention which because of the forum rules) but, one day, I was sitting vegetating in front of the TV. I was on nightshift and was simply whiling the day away until I went back in. Anyway, there I am watching this political conference beamed live from Inverness and I’m looking at this guy speaking. I begin to frown because something is bothering me. I move closer to the TV and study the distinctive tape wrappings on the microphone stand. ‘That’s my stand,’ I say to myself, ‘what the f**k is it doing in Inverness?’

I mentioned this at the next practice to John and our vocalist chips in…’Aye! And he was using my f***ing mike!’
John just laughed. He’d built their stage set up and used our gear so they didn’t have to pay for hiring the stuff. The crafty sod!

This band was a bit of a pain in the arse because it seemed impossible to hold together a steady line up. First, the lead guitarist left to go work abroad and, for the first time since the original Speakeasy line up I found myself having to cover both lead and rhythm and, if the truth be told, I’m probably not good enough to do it on my own. I think I work much better as a second guitar than as prima-axeman. But sometimes you just have to deal with it so I just got my head down and did what I could. We still had the sax that I could rely on to help out. That wasn’t to last, however.

The bass player was next to go. Sometimes you can just tell when a person’s heart isn’t in it. One night, I went to visit him.
We had a drink and a chat and, eventually I said, ‘do you want out?’
He just nodded and said he didn’t really know how to tell me.

I was a bit disappointed but he’d been a friend (and still is) all my life. I’d known him from about 5 years old.

So now we needed a new bass player and one was recommended.

He came along to our next practice and we played through a couple of covers. I still remember them. The first was Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Proud Mary and I came away from that thinking he was a pretty damn good bass player.

The next one was The Doobie Brothers’ Long Train Runnin’ and I just thought Wow! This is the guy!

He was a superb bassist who often brought a funk edge into his playing. I loved that!

Unfortunately, he also turned out to be a complete and utter tosser (more shocking revelations to follow later on this matter so stay tuned).

 

[Foxbat]

Volume 4

Next to go was my brother, the sax player. It was a good few weeks after our new bass player had joined and it turned out my brother hated him. I’d already guessed something was up so wasn’t really surprised. There goes my safety net, I thought.

This departure was followed by the singer for pretty much the same reason. He also had learned to detest our new bassist. For reasons of harmony (no pun intended) I kept these reasons secret from the rest of the band.

The bass player was definitely difficult and I spent a lot of my time arguing with him. We had opposing views when it came to playing covers. His was that it should match exactly what was on the recording. At one point, we even argued about my upstrokes on a particular song.

My view was, if you’re going to play a cover, don’t be a parrot. Do something new with it. Put your own stamp on it. Maybe you didn’t write it but play it like nobody else is playing it.

Perhaps I was too tolerant but by then the damage was done. We were two members down and in danger of falling apart.

Luckily my brother’s girlfriend had a friend who auditioned with us and she was superb. Along with my original Speakeasy singer, she’s the finest vocalist I’ve ever worked with. Although we never played it live, we ran through Sinead O’Conner’s Nothing Compares 2 You for her try out and she absolutely nailed it. I’d never heard anybody sing that song as good as O’Conner until that moment. She was in. No doubt about it. With hindsight, maybe we should have put that song in our set list and really let her shine.

She could rock too. No problem. I remember our first gig with the new line up. I was bricking myself and she was cool as a cucumber. John had set up a light show for us and we started off with Bob Dylan’s From A Buick 6. She changed the lyrics around a bit when we did Black Magic Woman and it went swimmingly. It was a good night and, apparently, the lighting really added an extra edge to the proceedings. We were back!

Things started to improve despite my constant fallouts with the bass player. We now acquired a keyboard player. He was a bit highly strung, didn’t take criticism well but was very good at what he did. I’d been the one pushing for either a keyboard player or another guitarist to help me out so I was delighted when his audition went well. It added a new dimension to our capabilities. One particular cover that we used to do was Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer. Absolutely nobody in the area was doing this song and it used to go down a storm. Although it sounds an incredibly complicated song, it’s not. In fact, the guitar parts are very simple and playing it was a nice way to relieve the pressure halfway through a gig.

Things, however, were about to take a downward turn. It took me a while to realise that I was the only member left with any interest in creating our own new material. We were slowly but surely moving towards becoming a straight covers band. You can only hold the tide back for so long. The gigs were coming in thick and fast – so much so that for the first and only time in my life, I was in a group that had been picked up by an agent. But I wasn’t happy. I spent my time working Monday to Friday (I was working days by then), leaving for wherever on Saturday morning, setting up and sound-checking Saturday afternoon, gigging on Saturday evening. Then everything had to be taken down, packed away and travel home. Often it was 4am before I got to bed. Then it would be back to work on Monday followed by a Monday night practice (and post mortem of the previous gig if required). It was starting to become a grind. I was isolated in my desire to continue injecting original material, tired of holding the band together or hunting for replacements and dog-tired of gigging almost every weekend.

On top of that, I was beginning to have problems. It started with a tingling numbness that stretched from my left elbow to the tip of my left pinky. Then one night (luckily on the very last song) my left hand went completely numb and I had to fake it until the end. The bass player realised something was up and angrily asked me what the hell I was doing. I explained that I couldn’t feel the strings.

To this day, it gives me problems but not as bad as then. I can play for about half an hour and then the tingling and numbness begins to set in. Wear and tear, I suppose.


I want to digress for a moment because, in 1998, I lost a very good friend. His name was Max and we’d often spend nights jamming away into the small hours. It was usually a threesome: me, Max and a bottle of tequila. He was a fabulous slide guitar player and I’d just sit (half-sozzled) playing twelve bars for him to embellish with the bottleneck. It was great fun but, unfortunately, Max had worse stage fright than me. I could battle through it but he couldn’t and, therefore, never played in a band. Most folk never got to hear how good he actually was.

A few weeks after a jam session, I got the word that he had died. We knew he was on medication for a heart condition but this still hit his friends hard. I think Max was the first friend of roughly my own age who had reached the end of his natural life. I’d known others who had died. They had been suicides or accidents, never natural causes.

His mother wanted something done for his funeral, something that would be a mark of some kind so I got together with the ex-singer of the band (he was also very friendly with Max). We put together a tape of his favourite songs to be played at his funeral. There was Donald Fagan, Steely Dan, The Doobie Brothers, Bebop Deluxe and some John Lee Hooker. After the funeral, his mother told us that the music we had played summed him up to a tee. I didn’t know whether to be happy or cry. Who was I kidding? I cried buckets that day.

Then, at the end of March 2000, my father died. I called the band members and told them I’d be taking a sabbatical. They understood.

About six months later (still on sabbatical) I knew I should make the effort to go back but really didn’t want to. Luckily, the phone rang.
It was John. For work reasons, he was moving his business back to his native Sheffield. Whilst I was sorry to see him go, this was the opportunity I had been waiting for. I’d been reluctant to leave the band and upset the balance but now with John going, it was the perfect opportunity. I called the others and told them I was out too. None of them wanted to go through the hassle of rebuilding the band so that was the end of Speakeasy Mark 2.

At this point, I had no intention of ever playing live again and I think it was about two years before I touched a guitar.

Coming soon - the concluding part.....

 

[Foxbat]

Volume Five

In about 2003, I met a guy who had just started at my place of work. He was a fair bit older than me and worked in another department but he’d heard that I played a bit of guitar and asked me if I fancied getting together at lunchtimes for a bit of jamming. He’d already found a small room we could use so I said yes. We kept a small practice amp in our lockers and would bring in a guitar two or three times a week. When everybody else was stuffing their faces at lunchtime, we’d just sit back and play the blues (or whatever else took our fancy).

Alex turned out to be the best guitar played I ever played with. He’d been semi-professional in his younger years and the band he played in, at one point, supported The Kinks on part of a UK tour. He was a bit like me – self taught and musically ignorant but he could make a guitar sing. He became the mentor I’d always needed and I learned more from him than anybody else I ever played with.

He taught me the importance of tone and how unique it can be. Some folk might think tone comes from the instrument you play or the amplifier it uses and, to some extent, it does. But it also comes from within. Tone is far more nuanced than it first appears. It comes from the way you touch the strings, the way you manipulate them or apply vibrato. It’s as much a part of the player as it is the equipment. You could take two guitar players of great skill, give them the same equipment and they’d sound totally different. It’s all about the way the attack the music and the most important thing about attacking the music is to do it with confidence. Don’t be timid and don’t be afraid to make mistakes. I’ve made some howlers in my time but every mistake you learn from helps your path to being better. It might be a cliché but it’s true.

Tone becomes part of a musician’s identity, their audio DNA if you like. If anybody was to play me a piece of music by Tommy Bolin (a guitar player I rate highly) or violinist Alexander Balanescu, I’d know them right away because I’m so familiar with their styles.

In fact, I remember a few years ago watching University Challenge and at the end, the theme tune started. I knew right away. Sure enough in the credits: The Balanescu Quartet. He has a way of playing that is as glaringly obvious as a foghorn being let off in a library. He sticks out a mile when you know what to listen for.

In 2007, I played my final official gig and I didn’t even have a band. Alex and I were asked to play at a charity event along with a number of other bands. We had no practices as such. We just invited a drummer who worked in the same place as us (a very good drummer I might add) to our lunchtime jam sessions. All he could do was listen in and then try it out on the night. Meanwhile, Alex brought his son up to speed at home with the bass. It was all very nerve wracking for me. No real rehearsal and straight in front of a crowd.

We carried it off pretty well. I had to take over singing duties so we kept the songs (vocally) fairly simple. We started off with Deep Purple’s Lazy and then just stuck to a few twelve bars. It was a relief to get it over with but also a pleasant surprise at how well received we were considering we weren’t even a real band.

That wasn’t to be my last performance. I was the victim of a con trick.

The organisers of this previous charity event were a couple of guys who were a folk duo on the pub and club circuit. One of them was having a sixtieth birthday party and the other came to see me about it. He invited me to the party and asked if I’d bring a guitar and amplifier. I wasn’t keen but he explained that there would be a few folk getting up to do a turn and, not only that, Alex was keen to do it. Of course, I took the bait. I didn’t want to let Alex down so I said yes.

On the night of the party I met up with Alex and told him I wasn’t keen on doing it but because he wanted to do it, that was fine. He then said that the only reason he was doing it was because I wanted to do it. That’s when we realised we’d been had.

It got worse. We took to the stage and played a few numbers. I’d brought along an electro-acoustic (Takamine Santa Fe) and Alex had brought his Fender Telecaster. The combination of electric and acoustic meant that we could cover a nice tonal range together.

We were about to give over our guitars to somebody else when our resident conman pops up.

‘You guys are doing fine. You might as well just carry on.’

The Coup de Grace!

We didn’t have any material, just stuff we mucked about with so we did the only thing you can do in that situation: decide on one of two choices
Choice 1: panic
Choice 2: go into f**k it mode.


We chose choice two and just mucked around as if it was one of our lunchtime jams. I can’t even remember what we played but we seemed to get away with it.

And that was the last time I ever played in public.

Not long after that Alex retired and that was the end of my days of having a mentor.

He died earlier this year. He’d been suffering from cancer and lived up north. Because of the pandemic I never got to see him before the end and wasn’t able to go to his funeral. I think maybe that's what drove me to write all this down. Maybe somewhere on a subconscious level I feel like I've let him down by not being able to see him before he died. Life, as they say, can be a bitch.

There are a few loose ends I need to tie up.

The first drummer of Speakeasy Mark 2 (the one with the brushes) died a couple of years ago. It was an alcohol related illness and he was only in his forties.

The female singer who joined Mark 2 went on to join a local lyric group and quickly became their star performer. I went to see her about three years ago. She was playing the lead in Evita and (unsurprisingly) stole the show.

The bass player who turned out to be a complete tosser actually turned out to be much worse than that. In 2016, he was sentenced to two years in prison for domestic abuse. He’d beaten up his girlfriend, who then made a complaint to the police. After that, a couple of his ex-girlfriends came forward to say that he’d done the same to them. It was also revealed that one of his ex-girlfriends had a young son at the time of their relationship and he used to put hot spoons on the boy’s arms and generally knock him around. What made it all the more startling was, reading the report in the newspaper, it was happening a number of years back – including whilst he was playing in the band. We didn't have a clue.


It all goes to show that being a good musician doesn’t make you immune from being a worthless piece of s**t.


The End.

Dedicated to all my musical collaborator friends that are no longer with us.

 

[Brian G Turner]

What a fantastic set of posts.

I can relate to only a small part of it - like you I was a self-taught rhythm guitarist, with no training in music theory. Practiced a few times in bands, but only ever did the one gig - someone's birthday party - and I was so nervous I made a lot of mistakes.

Later in my 20's I hung out with a group of people who just had acoustic guitars lying around, and it was perfectly normal for someone to pick one up and just play a few pieces - sometimes someone else would join them for an acoustic duet. Very chill times.

I wish I could have taken music further, but I never made the personal connections needed to take it further. Haven't written new music for a long time, either. Always been my aim to get my small collection of songs recorded and put them out there, though.

Great to hear about your own gig experiences and general musical life, though - really is appreciated, and I found it a really enjoyable read.

 

[Foxbat]

It occurred to me that I could be telling you a lot of nonsense so I thought I'd put myself up for ridicule by sticking a track here. It's one we used to play in Speakeasy Mark 2. I don't have a recording of the band doing it but here's me all on my lonesome from about a dozen years ago. I used a drum machine but everything else is me....including (unfortunately) the vocals. I'm not a singer but i'm still better than th guy that cost me the gig in Poison Whiskey. Anyway, here's my version of Black Magic Woman. It was originally written and played by Peter Green in Fleetwood Mac but was made famous by Carlos Santana. I love the latin style so here's my trying to sound a little bit like Carlos. Enjoy or mute the sound...your choice

https://soundcloud.com/kvob%2Fblack-magic-woman