We always had music in the house growing up, but my parents were much more interested in classical music. I think there was one 'Best of the Beatles' album (never really liked them), One 'Best of the 60s' (which had the usual mixture of excellent and less so), and a best of Simon and Garfunkel (which I always loved - Paul Simon is undoubtedly my longest running influence).
Going to boarding school was what opened the door to what else music had to offer. There were about 60-70 of us in the boarding house, and a few tape-to-tape recorders, so we recorded every chart show off the radio on Saturdays and whenever someone bought a new cassette it was duplicated within an inch of its life!
Apparently we were killing music... :\
The first 7" single I bought was Rock Me Amadeus by Falco, my first cassette was a slightly-more-respectable Zenyatta Mondatta by The Police.
The Police, The Pogues, The Cure, The Clash, The Cult, Dire Straights, The Men They Couldn't Hang were probably the core of my early teenage years, accompanied by some more heavy stuff from the likes of AC/DC, Iron Maiden, and Van Halen; as well as some more pop stuff from The Pet Shop Boys, Eurythmics and Ultravox.
Round about this point I bought my first guitar, a Westone Thunder 1A I think. That was a cracking guitar. I started off with the blues, as a lot of people do, and whilst I never got the heavier side of blues, the early delta-style stuff still gets me.
When I first heard REM on a documentary on the TV it blew my little mind, Green had just been released and it was pretty much everything I wanted music to be at that time. They weren't well known in the UK at the time and it took me a while to get hold of all of their albums. Then Out of Time came out and everyone went nuts for them.
Round about that time I started listening to a few more southern hemisphere bands. As well as some of the South African lot (Mango Groove, Stimela, Boyoyo Boys and anyone else who'd been on Graceland) I found a few Australasian ones: Split NZ and Crowded House, Things of Stone and Wood, Men at Work and Midnight Oil. My mind was blown again by the Oils.
When I was 16 I sold the Westone to upgrade but ended up spending the money on vodka in the space of a month.
I still have regrets about that.
And that kind of parked my music for a while until I got to Uni where I met a Chinese chap who remains one of the best and most creative guitarists I've ever worked with.
The first night we jammed it became immediately apparent that he was many times the guitarist i would ever be so I took the singing role. Which was interesting as our music teacher at school had described me as the only person he'd ever met who couldn't sing.
But it gave me an excuse to stick to the chords and that worked for both of us! Round about this time Radiohead released The Bends and Counting Crows released Recovering The Satellites. Guess what happened to my tiny mind?
With Frank we formed our first few bands, but with people moving in and out of Uni none of them ever lasted that long. Eventually I moved to Holland for a bit and he moved to Australia. I think he's still running a very swanky Chinese Restaurant near the Sydney Opera House.
The next phase (which is pretty much the current one) was moving to York around the turn of the century. By this point I'd pretty much settled on being a singer-songwriter and I was playing a lot more acoustic than electric stuff. My flatmate at the time introduced me to Tom McRae and I introduced her to David Ford. Since then you can add Josh Ritter, Gregory Alan Isakov, to the influences list, along with a few more experimental acts like Public Service Broadcasting, Bon Iver and a fair bit of Scandinavian music.
It was in York that I had my brief dalliance with the business side of music. A recording studio in Leeds had moved to York and hooked up with a promoter to start up a record label and they were looking for local acts. I was signed along with a duo and a couple of bands. Sadly the business plan didn't really extend beyond 'play gigs, sell CDs' and the promoter didn't really live up to his end of the deal so we weren't getting gigs, and everyone stopped buying CDs...
So now I do this stuff for fun. I'm still not much of a musician, but I think I'm a reasonable song-writer and I'm improving as a recording engineer and mixer. That's where the bulk of my music time goes now but I'm still fronting a band that was gigging reasonably regularly until C-19 hit. We're just finishing up our second lockdown video now.
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Originally Posted by blinddrew
