I wrote this for a Getting To Know You thing that my work are doing whilst everyone is working from home and not doing any interacting.
From when I was very little I always had an interest in playing music. I thought I was going to be a rock star when I was playing air guitar in the living room watching Guns’n’Roses on Top of the Pops.
One of my earliest memories is borrowing my dad’s acoustic guitar when I was super little and making what have been a horrendous racket. I’m sure my parents didn’t think it was too much better when I was starting to learn to play for real.
The attached photos are bands I have been in over the last 20 years or so where I have varying quantities of hair on my head and my face.
I started to learning from about the age of 14 and during my school years my best friend and I were in a number of cover bands together. We vaguely started to branch out into writing our own songs but only ever managed to get one into our set.
The first band I was in which played regularly was called Battleska Galactica (top left picture), a ska punk band. The band had been going for quite a while at the time I joined, and I think I was mainly asked to join as I had been driving them to gigs and they felt guilty that they couldn’t pay me. The band was together for the best part of 10 years, and recorded 4 CDs in that time and played all over the south of the country. When everyone started to grow up and move away, we disbanded. Some of the members of the band are still playing regularly under the name Call Me Malcolm. I’m not sure how they do it as we used to get back from gigs in the early hours of the morning but now I like to be tucked up in bed by 11pm.
When that band split up, I was in a short lived band called SuperPartyFunTimes (top right picture) with three other guys who had been in local bands that had been regularly performing in Kent. We wrote all our own songs based around Arnie or Panini football stickers but we only played around 6 shows, mainly because the world couldn’t handle that much awesome.
The bottom right picture is of a band called Pirates and Pirates and Pirates. There used to be a festival called Lounge on the Farm in Canterbury and one of our friends was running a stage where they had someone drop out. We borrowed a guitar, formed a band, wrote some songs based mainly around our experiences that festival and performed all in a weekend.
After a long break from performing, I formed a band called The Cool Kids (bottom right) with two close friends. We are mainly playing covers of songs in styles you wouldn’t expect – for example Marilyn Manson as a ballad or Prodigy as a country song. I think I’d had such a long break because music had started to feel like a chore and this has reminded me why I enjoy playing music – goofing around with friends and pretending to be rock stars.
With the £250 training budget that L&Q give us after 5 years service, I have been having singing lessons. My current fanbase consists of my 3 month old daughter who enjoys my big hits “Incy Wincy Spider” and “Hickory Dickory Dock.”