History

I wrote and recorded my first album in my final year of sixth form. It was called "Somewhere To Jump From" and was recorded on an old Cutec 4 track which I got second hand from a music shop in Newcastle. I also had a badly repaired second hand electric guitar and a badly repaired second hand bass guitar as well as an old drum machine and some little keyboards. I made my own effects pedals following instructions from some electronics books I got from my local library (the pedals distorted and wahed pretty well but with a fair bit of hiss).

I made a few tapes (the album has ten tracks)  which some of my friends got, but didn't do much more as I was already writing some new stuff which I thought was better. The songs on "Somewhere To Jump From" are pretty decent but aren't recorded that well. It's strange to listen to it now - it does still get me.

When I went to University I managed to get my hands on a Yamaha 8 track recorder (amongst other things). And essentially I recorded a second album called "Throwaway" on this - most of this album was written in about 1994 to 1995 on my old acoustic guitar (with only a couple of songs written before then). I took a year out after University to record it and by this time I had a nice electric guitar but the same crappy bass (which I tweaked to try and lose the crap). My old badly-repaired electric guitar had fallen over at some point in my first year and it's neck had snapped. (I still remember the sound).

A few months into recording my cousin gave me an old bass that have been gathering dust in his loft and I played this one on the later tracks - it sounds far warmer. I had the same drum machine with some slightly better second-hand keyboards, which I hooked up to an old Atari STe. I got this running a Steinberg MIDI studio which I used to program all the drums, synths and keyboards. In total - arranging, playing, programming, recording, mixing, mastering etc - it took about 9 months. Again, I made some tapes up and I got myself a CD cut but I had to start work and my job got in the way of anything else then.

Over the past few years I've written many more songs which I again think are better, but work still gets in the way. I'm trying to record a selection of them to put together on a third album sometime in the future. Look out.