h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

 Better stop this and get revising, I suppose. Hey ho. Strange how all this goes dead over the weekend. I thought it might be the other way round.

It's because it's full of people like me who are accessing it at work!

It's OK though 'cos I'm in charge of the computers here and I'm not going to tell anyone.

At the weekend, people must be of doing other things like playing in bands (like me). Did you say you had a band? What kind? Are you any good? We're terrible!

A band with an australian singer that's buggered off home for the summer. Therefore the band only half-exists. We sort of play any stuff as long as it's not jazz or dance - there's a nice mediaevel-sounding thing amongst some bluesy stuff with a bit of poppy rock as well. We're not bad, but weren't young or scottish enough to get onto the T-break stage at T in the Park, though it's possible we weren't pretty enough. You can't help being not disappointed when you're asked to send in a demo and a photo. The competition was co-hosted by the PRS and the Sunday Mail, the latter probably being the reason why we weren't accepted. I don't know.

We did a couple of "Battle of the Bands" type competitions, but we were never trendy enough (actually we weren't trendy at all). Out claim to fame is having a single produced (one of those black vinyl things which superceded wax cylinders and gave way to the CD). I also had a couple of tracks used on a program on Sky Sports (in the days before you had to pay for it). Never made a penny, but it was good fun. I packed it in about two years ago, but I've just started writing / recording with two other former band members (they left before I did).

Once it's in your blood...

I can never understand people when they say they haven't picked up their instrument in two years, especially when they're still young. A bloke at school claimed to have given up guitar for two years by the time he was 17. I've not played for a week whilst moving flat and miss it. As the rest of the band are leaving university as I speak, I was going to look at the ads in the windows of music shops for people needing musicians in the hope that one of them might be both talented and prepared to work hard enough to make music their job. Most people I've played with can't see how it could get past being a hobby.

I suppose it all depends how confident of your own abilities you are. I always knew I was a pretty poor keyboard player, but as a band we were OK and we wrote some pretty good tunes. These days, I don't do the playing live bit,and concentrate on writing and recording (when I can get away from the kids). My mate the bass playr has a realy great cellar recording studio which he is attempting to fill with equipment. He has about 5 colaborators (including me) and we are recording new stuff all the time. I've got three new songs waiting to record, but he's in Portugal....

When I pick up the tape from the bassist I was going to put a few seconds of one of our tunes on my site and reference it from here. I've been trying in vain to put a background sound on some of my pages but it works not. There's a nice little sparky riff thing recorded on my extremely bad yamaha kiddies-toy synthesizer that would make a lovely jolly accompaniment to a flying pig and some crawling bogies. http://www.angelfire.com/az2/fishbloat