Prolific Teenage Years.....(Music Career part 2)

So, after two years and 24 "releases" between me and my brother Peter recorded on an old tape recorder, he finally bought himself a 4-track Portastudio.  Not only did our sound improve, but the amount of songs we wrote and recorded over the next two years was massive, over 50 "releases" (I keep putting it in quotes as we never actually released any of them, with the odd exception of a few which were copied for anyone that wanted one).

The date was August 1995 and I was just starting my second year at college, therefore with free periods, evenings and weekends I had plenty of time for writing songs and recording them.  At that time my main concerns were Pyf Belly Machine (mainly indie and pop punk) with my brother and Marvin (pop punk), which was me solo, although I was about to start branching out.  In 1991 when I started getting into music properly I was an indie kid who liked a bit of rock and the odd metal song (incidentally Europe's 'The Final Countdown' was my third ever 7").  By 1995 it had turned on its head - I was now a metal fan who liked a bit of rock and indie and for me the mid 90s were dominated by Pantera, Sepultura and Machine Head plus the more extreme Earache bands Bolt Thrower, Carcass, Napalm Death etc.  I needed an outlet for my more extreme leanings....

But first came the inaugural four-track recordings, a double whammy of new Pyf Belly Machine albums, 'Lummon' and 'Buy This Or The Seal Gets It'.  The latter album containing quite possibly my finest cover art.  The 4 tracks usually worked like this: I had no bass amp, so I would plug into an old stereo and hit record and play my bassline in full, this would be played into the 4 track - track 1.  Track 2 was me playing (keyboard) drums over the top of this, track 3 was my brother playing guitar and track 4 was for the vocals (and occasional solo if required).  Of course we could now mix the volumes of the various instruments and everything was a million times better.

 

Highlights were the jangly 'Surfing Boy', the rockier, groovier 'Fob Off' which featured lyrics from the dictionary of all places, and a cover of 'Blame it on the Boogie'.....more on that later.  The next release to surface, however, was my first foray into heavier territory and a new project called Uranium.  It was meant to be my version of Nine Inch Nails, but without any kind of technology to speak of I was scuppered from the start.  The result was a set of OK rock songs, not bad for a first effort, with the odd attempt at keyboards to make it sound a little bit industrial.  There were also covers of '...For Victory by Bolt Thrower, 'Sanctified' by NIN and 'The Last Time' by Paradise Lost thrown in to make up the numbers.  This also marked me getting back into being a proper guitarist again after being predominantly a bassist before.

Marvin also got a new lease of life and after previously writing some fairly average songs, the new sound bucked my ideas up and allowed me to go all out on my bass-driven pop punk, writing undoubtedly my best songs to date on 'Getting Serious' and 'Easier Said than Done' over a period of 6 months.  Shame about the whining teenage lyrics though.  I'm still quite proud of the guitar sound, breakneck basslines and overall feel of the best Marvin songs of that time, great memories (I later renamed Marvin for public consumption, choosing Spraypaint inspired by the Manics' 'Stay Beautiful'.

  

Another new band who appeared in April 1996 were The Personnel.  Their songwriting consisted of coming up with random song titles, which would be exchanged between lyricists, who would then write down the first things that came into their heads with no thought towards song structure or melody.  The music was then recorded and a host of vocalists would bring the songs to life.  The debut EP 'Geese' featured the likes of 'Bakers', 'Dogs', 'Cassocks' and 'Excremential Air Freshener'.  Did I mention the songs usually last between 15 and 60 seconds?  Quite possibly the best band there has ever been.  You can hear some of their songs (the ones marked as THE PERSONNEL obviously) by clicking here.

At the same time as The Personnel were finding their feet, another new band came into being.  I finally decided to have my own metal band and, against all my better judgement, decided on the name Oakenshield.  The name would later change into Beneath Utopia when I decided to unleash my songs onto the world, but Oakenshield/BU will be the subject of part 3 of this blog in more detail.

So, from August 1995 through to the end of 1997 there were 9 Pyf Belly Machine albums, 3 Marvin albums, 3 Uranium albums and 2 Oakenshield albums, mixed in with releases by The Personnel and various other side projects.  They covered various genres including an instrumental guitar EP by Lengthwise, a catchy but bonkers set of songs by Brouhaha and a grunge album under the name of Vein which contained some of my favourite songs from the ones I've written.

But the highlight of all this activity was undoubtedly some outside recognition in the form of an appearance on a compilation tape.  My brother occasionally used to order what we would call "benefit tapes", raising funds for some cause or other, and we put forward our version of 'Blame it on the Boogie' not thinking that it might actually be accepted.  But it was and so, among respected underground punk bands such as Oi Polloi, Bob Tilton, Baby Harp Seal, Wat Tyler and J Church, came a couple of teenagers singing in falsettos along to a guitar-based Jackson 5 cover.  We had probably never heard the original at the time, we actually covered the Big Fun version and never even bothered finding out the real words, singing "We spent the night in Bristol" for one line. It never got us anywhere but we felt kind of famous in our own little world.

Incidentally we also recorded a cover of Gina G's Eurovision classic 'Ooh Aah Just a Little Bit', which I managed to inadvertently add a Steve Harris bassline to.  We also sounded like the most Northern people ever while singing it.  Other notable covers over the years were Pyf Belly Machine's 'Not Superstitious' (Leatherface) and 'From Out of Nowhere' (Faith No More) plus Marvin versions of 'Mean Machine' (Sugar Ray), various Senseless Things songs and 'Biscuits for Smut' (Helmet).

After 1997, things slowed down recording-wise.  Beneath Utopia was my main concern, getting some mainstream magazine attention, and The Personnel still appeared every now and again, but the prolific college years were over, replaced with the slightly less prolific university years and the arid desert of the working years.  At some point the old bands probably will record some new material, but as to when who knows.....

My Musical Beginnings....(Music Career part 1)

I first started learning how to play the guitar at primary school when I was about 10 (my teacher was called Dave Lister, although not the one from Red Dwarf), and even though I'm left-handed the school only had a stock of right-handed guitars so me and my left-handed friend Sam had to make do with playing the "wrong" way.  Several traditional songs and Beatles standards later (using only one-fingered chords) there was no going back....I wasn't great I have to admit, my fingers kept catching on the strings below and subsequently adding more notes and fingers to the chords I was playing didn't help much.

So I kind of gave up and decided to play bass instead....the Senseless Things were one of my favourite bands around 91/92 when I was 13/14 and Morgan Nicholls made me even more convinced that bass was where it was at.  Closely followed a few months down the line by Flea and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, although I never really attempted much in the way of his style (too afraid of breaking my strings I expect).

It might have helped if I had a bass at this point but no, all I had was the top string of an old battered acoustic guitar and in 1993 after an initial foray into solo recording under the name of Listy (nothing to do with my old teacher), myself and my brother Peter formed the band that would occupy our teenage years, Pyf Belly Machine.  Initial recordings were improvised (badly), my brother had an electric guitar and a keyboard, so more often than not we would record him playing guitar with me playing the drum pads of his keyboard into an old tape recorder and then play that back through the stereo while I played top string bass and he added keyboards.  Sometimes it would just be one take with a built in drumbeat from the keyboard. Slick.

While this was going on I had my own solo material under the name of Marvin (God knows why I chose that name).  I would use the same tricks - layering each instrument over the top of the last one while feeding the previous take through the speakers.  The songs, if you can call them that, were really pretty bad at that stage, one particularly memorable one called 'Neale James is a Saddo' was just me singing words I made up over the top of 'Shadow' by the Lurkers.  I think my brother may have guested on bicycle pump later on in the song.



But after 7 Pyf Belly Machine "albums" and 2 from Marvin in the space of about a year ("released" on our made up label Petit Rouge Ballon Records), some decent songs suddenly started to emerge i.e. we actually started writing them more than five minutes before we hit the record button.  During that time I had started college and we decided to add two of my mates to the Pyf Belly Machine lineup.  We swapped instruments a lot but it was essentially Peter on vocals and guitar, me on vocals and bass (I got a proper bass for Christmas in 1994), Gord on guitar and Swinhoe on drums.  We practiced every Wednesday afternoon, after the three college kids in the band had finished their maths corrections, over at Swinhoe's dad's house as that was where the drums were set up.  He had never played drums before buying them but we got by.

It usually had all 4 strings

We played a couple of gigs in Gord's parents' three car garage to a few mates before our live pinnacle at the Prior Pursglove College gig in Guisborough in March 1995.  Our instrument swapping had reached epic proportions by this point, I started the gig playing drums to a cover of 'Girls and Boys' by Blur, came to the front to do vocals and bass on two of our own, guitar for a cover of Ugly Kid Joe's 'Everything About You', back to bass for 3 more of our own before returning to drums for a cover of 'Jump Around' and remaining on the drum stool for our last song.  I started the song too fast and subsequently had to keep up that pace for the next 4 minutes, pulling all my best drummer grimaces in the process.  That would be Gord's final moment in the band, as the live version of PBM slimmed down to a 3-piece.

The 2-piece PBM carried on recording all throughout this period with two decent albums being made still using the old recording method, 'Quality Material' (Dec 94) and 'Joppa Pans' (Apr 95), with many of the live songs being included.  We had definitely settled down at this point into me playing bass and (keyboard) drums and Peter playing guitar and generally whoever wrote the lyrics singing.  Whoever wrote the song also had control of the sound too, Peter having influences such as Teenage Fanclub and Sebadoh while I had a little bit more of a pop punk, Senseless Things kind of style, which would remain in place on most PBM albums.

But then came the big change that turned the whole world of recording upside down......the 4 track Portastudio (to be continued......)