Music As A Time Machine

I’m preparing for my next show, called Battery Park which is a fictional story of a Britpop band from Greenock that almost made it. It looks at the bruised and bitter mid-40’s main character and flashes back to his youth in the 90’s, when his band almost became the next Oasis… almost. In my latest draft I wrote the line, ‘music is the closest thing we have to a time machine’ that then got me thinking.

I thought back to my own days in a band, Blind Pew (why we were called that, I can't recall, I know it's a character from Treasure Island but... well... that's all I know!) some of which makes it into the play. I thought about doing something exciting and fun with your pals but also the boredom, the arguments and the crushing disappointment that comes with the territory. 

 This was before smartphones so we don’t have many photos outwith the official ones from gigs, but when I put on our old albums, it was incredible how quickly images and people came rushing back into my head. Hearing your younger self is an interesting, and complicated, thing. I can't but help attach it to mistakes made, things that I wish I had done differently, all the usual stuff... but there's also a part of me that enjoys hearing the pure love that I clearly have for making a racket!

We made one ‘official’ album with a record company supposedly backing us - that I don’t think any of us like - but before that we made a ton of music, I was always recording, buying more equipment and creating stuff with the rest of the band.

Blind Pew, playing in McCabes pub in our hometown Largs

After graduating from university I moved into a disused hotel bar in the small village of Fairlie. This wasn’t complete madness of my part. Joined onto the bar and extensive reception area there was a wee tiny ‘flat’ with a electricity meter you put pound coins into and a dubiously stained carpet on the toilet floor; sure it was fun to have my own jukebox and pool table but the real reason I was there was because the cellars of the bar seemed to me the perfect place to set up a little recording studio. Amongst the smell of forgotten stale beer and tobacco I made a wee musical haven. One room was filled with amps and a drum kit, where we would rehearse relentlessly, and the other was filled with my recording equipment - the walls covered in pages from Q magazine. 

This is the only photo I can find from that time - Thom Yorke looking over me - :

I had so much fun in that place. Recording the demos for Dogs Die In Hot Cars, then working with them a bit more as the record companies started knocking, recording Sweeping The Stars by Indafusion - a brilliant indie record - and working with countless other bands who were all delighted to be spending their time making tunes whilst sitting in a run-down dive of a bar in a random hotel in a tiny village on the west coast of Scotland. I didn't really know what I was doing, but that was half the fun!

My main focus was on making tunes for our band. We recorded an album there called The Fear of God, with myself and Paul McGranaghan sharing the songwriting, Stu McIntosh on bass and Del Lamont on drums. I roped in various friends (including my pals 12 year old daughter on trumpet!) to add some sonic spice. 

The recordings are scratchy, bits of it out of time, overstuffed with ideas that you can’t quite hear right, but on listening back to it you can feel the excitement, the rush that playing rock’n’roll can give you. You can hear how the four of us sounded so together, locked into one another's styles. You can hear how the bass is rocketing away doing its own thing as the distorted guitars fight for space and the drums try to keep us all together. I love listening to the silly voices we put on when singing some of the songs, trying to get that Rolling Stones vibe - or the opening track was definitely us channeling Stevie Wonder singing the bridge in ‘As’. I think the end section of the title track sums us up best. 

Playing in our pals garden!

Everyone gets a wee solo, I'm screaming in falsetto as various pals we rounded up shout 'Is he the way and the light' before Paul congratulates everyone in a silly voice 'well done children' - this section has a wee bit where we sing 'Hal-le-lu-jah' but totally mess up the timing, I can hear Del attempting to get his drums out of the situation and make it work, I think the song is all the better for the chaos!

One of our first photoshoots

I still think some of the songs are absolute bangers, most of them didn’t make it onto our official album, and those that did were cleaner recordings but lost a lot of the soul that made this album so exciting. So I’ve uploaded the album to the usual places, search for Blind Pew and ‘The Fear of God’ and it should now be wherever you normally hear your music. 

Alongside my Myspace logins, Bebo uploads folder and MSN Messenger icons pack I found a whole bunch of other songs that we recorded. I don’t remember most of them, we must have written them, bashed them together, recorded them and moved on, but again you can hear the fun that we were having as a band. I’ve stuck them on the end of the record, the overall volumes are all over the place - as are the mixes - but the commitment to the cause from the four of us can never be in doubt! Paul and I are totally different songwriters, especially back then, but I quite like the changes in style, as the sound of the band remains consistent throughout - Stu’s bass goes on crazy runs as Del’s drum keep a steady rhythm, attempting to reign in the impending chaos.

The feeling I get when listening to this music, jumping back to 2003 (or thereabouts) is what I want to explore with Battery Park. The power of music to remind us of our younger selves, to remind us of good (and bad) times and to transport us to somewhere else. As close to a time machine that we will ever get. Battery Park tour Scotland this Autumn. Head to the Sleeping Warrior Theatre Company website for more details.