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| me aged 3 |
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i have had music around me ever since i can remember. my mum playing elvis and buddy holly records were my first memories of music. 3 years of age i used to go to the local market and make the most of the record stalls offer - 3 ex jukebox 7 inches for 60 pence. buying such luminaries as lene lovich and blondie.
i got my first proper guitar on my fourth birthday. i had lessons at my school, but for some reason my teacher insisted that i play the guitar right handed even though i'm a lefty. it felt awkward and not wanting to get into trouble i stopped my lessons and left my guitar to gather dust.
at around 12 years i really started getting into metal. i picked up my old guitar and started trying to teach myself old sabbath tunes. a couple of my friends who were brothers had electric guitars; marcus and tim hanson, and their father had a huge collection of metal albums and a 70s gibson flying v.
around that time there was a few shows on british tv about heavy metal. i remember seeing excerpts from a slayer concert and i was hooked. i borrowed tonnes of my friends fathers albums. i really loved his kiss records, especially his copy of "alive" as he still had the original tattoo transfers. i only knew kiss from their recent "crazy nights" record. i was taken aback by their image and was soon hunting down their albums and video footage. my favourite member was ace frehley and for my 13th birthday i was given a black les paul copy.
i had a few private lessons but my tutor really tried to teach me theory early on and it turned me off going. later that year i wanted to start replicating (or trying to) a lot of solos i heard - notably eddie van halens tapping and sounds he got using the whammy bar. unfortunately my les paul didn't have a whammy bar so i saved i bought a young chang guitar - it was total metal! complete with cracked effect paintwork and a floyd rose.
me and my friends really started getting into the death metal scene at this point. each lunchtime we'd head home from school and spend the hour listening to morbid angel, nocturnus and deicide.
at our school there was one band who everyone apart from us thought were sooooo cool. god i remember them doing an awful free and black sabbath cover at assembly one day and the place going crazy. i thought they were real pussies so devised a plan to make a death metal band with tim, marcus and my younger brother scott.
studying death metal lyric sheets and what-not as we tried to come up with a name, we noticed the lyrics were either gory or anti-christian. we didnt know enough on the subject to portray ourselves as anti-christian so we tried to think of some idea that would also get under peoples skins. we came upon the name "spastic carcass". really just for a shock effect. i designed our logo and had personal guitar picks made. we came up with slogans and i remember making cassette inlays for each taping session we had (usually at tim and marcus' house).
as time went on our playing got better, tim shifted from rhythm guitar to bass. i also started to listen to a lot of different music including frank zappa, bjork and 70's prog rock. my obsession with the smashing pumpkins began too. i started to feel the need to write and record songs that werent necessarily within the death metal genre so marcus and i started a little side project in 1994 called scab sausage.
we wrote silly comedy songs, pretty little guitar instrumentals and anything else that took our fancy. i also started using samples as interludes in our home recording sessions, anything from excerpts of frank zappas "uncle meat" to snippets of me secretly recording my grandfather.
i noticed around the mid '90s all the kids who i knew from school who'd initially picked up guitars as some sort of teenage fad had lost interest, yet here i was, 18, still playing for my own amusement and pleasure. i knew at that point that i would still be doing it some 20, 30, 40 years later.
tim joined a local deathgrind band called "brutal insanity" who had a few demos for sale in the local indie shop. they were seen as a joke in and around where i lived. but their drummer was good; we had found it hard to find a drummer, let alone a good one. up to this time we'd only recorded with drum machines. we asked the drummer jon to join us for a practice. he realised that as musicians we were light years ahead of his band. so he decided to join us whilst keeping brutal insanity on the go.
we played a few local gigs - for me and marcus these were our first gigs. our setlist was made up of death metal covers. we also went to what used to be my local pub where they had an open mic night. surveying the clientele, which was largely made up of middle aged people, we thought it'd be hilarious to get up and play our standard set of massacre, obituary and necrophobic songs. the host band even introduced us as "spastic carcass"! to our surprise we went down really well - the usual criticism though was that most people didnt like the singing. we continued playing those songs at the same places for a few months.
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| cover of inamoratos 2nd demo |
around winter '95 we started to write new material - however it was slightly different to mainstream death metal. we became influenced a lot by melodic black metal and avantgarde music and it started to show in our music. we found a violinist to play with us and changed our name to "inamorato". our line up was me on guitars and screams, tim on bass and main vocals, marcus on guitar, jon on drums and sarah on violin. i felt our material was good, in a way sounding like "my dying bride" yet more melodic and progressive. the original line up didn't last long though as sarah wasn't anywhere near our standard of musicianship so we replaced her and used keyboards instead of the violin. we recorded two demos which were sent off to a few companies but they didn't bite. most responses seemed to focus solely upon our young ages for being the reason they weren't interested.
disheartened and missing music with balls i asked jon what he thought about me joining brutal insanity and actually making it a good band. he jumped at the idea.
i remember the original members at the first practice just stood open mouthed at the standard of my guitar playing. suddenly this laughing stock of a band werent a joke anymore. around the same time jon and i worked on a grindcore side project called grot.
the difference i felt between grot and other bands within the grindcore genre is that the songs i wrote were very intricate and exceptionally complicated. i put a lot of ideas into those 30 second songs! we recorded 2 demos and if i remember correctly they sold pretty well in the spanish underground scene for some reason.
a year or two passed in brutal insanity and several demos later i got my old friends tim and marcus into the band. the line up had become me on guitar, with jon drumming, rich doing the typical death metal vocals, tim on bass and marcus on 2nd guitar.we also secured distribution and recording contracts with indie label "morbid records".
in the summer of '98 we went into the studio to record our first album. i took quite a few of the best riffs i had written for the grot demos and transformed them into real-length songs.
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| brutal insanity album - me bottom left |
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i wrote over half of the material for that album. we received pretty flattering reviews for it too. a lot of people liked it for being half an hours worth of great hooks and non-stop brutality. unfortunately we were not great business men and were maybe somewhat too trusting of one of our very own band mates.
jon the drummer dealt with the label and distribution side of things - little did we know he had copyrighted all the material under his own name! the band lasted for one more split cd but i left before that, upset with what a so-called friend could do when there was a little money involved.
a few years passed. i lost touch with friends and ended up playing smashing pumpkins covers alone in my room for eternity, wanting somehow to start writing material that wasn't just brutal. but that time wouldn't come yet. i was still in the mindset that the music i wrote had to be complicated and a bitch to play if it was to be deemed any good. ho hum.
in late 2001 i bumped into tim. he was talking about putting a band together. not a death metal band though, which immediately made me take notice. he was trying to find the best musicians he could and he stated that as i was the best guitarist he knew would i be interested. so we formed a band called x.amp.L 3. the idea behind the band was that we wanted to obliterate any peers in our city (which wouldn't be very difficult! even now they all still seem to be oasis and pete doherty clones). as if when we played live it would be so intense and so beyond other local musicians comprehension, it would make them bow at our feet and throw down their instruments. if i had to define the music we wrote i guess i would have to say it was jazz, prog, maths metal. i was on guitar, tims vocals were now more that of an emcee. we recruited a guy called lee on the bass with whom tim had been working on music with and a guy called pete who tim had also worked with as the drummer.
i remember our practices were very harsh and negative. the atmosphere felt like if you made a mistake you were castigated. which i never understood as after all it was only a practice. the longer the band went on, the longer we took during practice for a breather, usually hanging at a nearby bar shooting pool. x.amp.L.3 disbanded before we recorded anything which was a shame. i think some recordings from practices are laying about somewhere though and some electronic versions of pieces can be heard upon our "motion sickness" recordings.
deluded with the thought of being in band i decided to go it alone. i took to my bedroom once again and started to really analyse how writers such as billy corgan and thurstan moore put songs together. i know there's no real formula but it started me off writing songs that were much simpler in their form yet probably more complex in emotion than what i had written previously.
during the next couple of years i split my time between holding down a day job, writing a novel (which remains unfinished) and writing around 20 basic tracks, taking in the styles of grunge, psychedelia and prog-rock.
in 2009 and 10 i recorded these songs and new ones using the audacity programme, using my keyboard for the drum and bass tracks and anything else i felt a song would need. these became known as the "hence the hat" recordings. i went under the name of "hence the hat" for a while. i recorded around 30 plus songs, all of which were instrumentals as i had little confidence in my vocal ability.
In the beginning of 2011 i became very ill. Mentally and physically. I found solace in music more than ever during this time. going into overdrive musically, nearly every waking hour was spent in my room writing and recording new material.
i found myself drifting from the "hence the hat" style i had created at times. one day i'd be writing an elegy on the piano, the next i'd be writing a 10 minute black metal symphony. i remember hearing how billy corgan used to pretend he had a band called "the smashing pumpkins" long before he even had one member which i felt drew paralells to my "hence the hat" ideology. i also had the idea that as i couldn't pigeon hole everything i wrote or recorded into one genre why not form around 6 or 7 bands - all of which i was the only member.
i think i devised the idea as follows:
hence the hat - pretty music
dads mod porn club - strange funny brutal music
spastic carcass - death metal
baal ov - black metal
mike t.v - grunge, shoegaze music
the torture garden - goth, doom, melancholy music.
overall in 2011 i wrote and recorded over 130 songs completely. my greatest triumph musically in 2011 came in april when i decided to test myself in the extreme. to see if i could write and record a song a day. the rule was they didn't have to all be regular length songs (but most ended up being exactly that!), as at first my idea was just to record a riff or fragment of a different song a day. i succeeded in this.
i have all of those songs just laying about gathering dust on a usb now, and every now and again i may post one here. i recently got in touch with tim again and we decided maybe it is time to start another band. i told him that if i don't do it now then i never will. maybe it will fail - who knows? but i think it could do me well to get back out into the world and show it what i have been doing with myself.
