|
Everything you never wanted to know..
Author: mookid on June 26 2006 Viewed 3693 times. 10 people liked this blog. You can rate it below if you haven't already.
-->
Born in 1975 in Barking, Essex. My father was an electronics engineer, my mother a programmer for Lloyds Register. I was surrounded by the sounds of Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Hawkwind and the likes.
My first memory of making music was with a small toy xylophone during my preschool years. I distinctly remember associating the colors of the bars with the tone they produced. My grandfather made me a rubber band guitar too. I was also amazed at how the length and tension of the bands change the pitch.
My father came home one day with a 'build a home computer' kit. It was the UK-101. He soon became hooked on the programming thing too.
It wasn't long before they set up as freelance programmers. Originally writing utilities, it wasn't long before they saw the merits of writing computer games. When I was 6 or 7 I helped them by transcribing 'The Flight Of The Bumblebee' into machine code.
For most of the 80's my parents worked from home. Initially this was great, as before when my mother worked at Lloyds I would spend most of my time at my grandparents. My father often worked late shifts so I didn't see him as much as I would have liked too either. Now they were at home i could pester them as much as i wanted. I remember our living room in our small house slowly becoming overwhelmed with computers and disk-drives. Cub monitors with lethal snares of static electricity, waiting to zap the uninitiated. We had every platform you could imagine at that time, Spectrum's, commodores, bbc's, electron's, amstrad's, tandy's.
Due to the nature of their work a lot of their wages came in the form of royalties. These would be sporadic huge checks that seemed to come from nowhere. unfortunately, payday only coming once a year had its setbacks. I remember just before Christmas one year, my parents were skint. They were waiting for a cheque to arrive so they could get on with Christmas. I remember my mother in tears on the phone to a certain company, asking why it hadn't come yet. Christmas day came and no cheque, no money and no presents. I understood and didn't resent my parents for what happened. We had a really good day though, mainly talking about what we were all going to do when they got paid. A week or two after, the cheque finally came and we all went shopping and had a late Christmas.
That was when i got my first keyboard.
I started to get really into synthesis. It was the mid 80's and bands weren't pop unless they had a saxophone and a synth in them. Other than the flying dude in the Madness video, I wasn't into sax much, but synths ruled. I became quite an anorak and could name synths on sght in videos, being able to tell you what synthesis method they used etc. I started using a piece of software for the bbc micro called 'music maker' It was a sequencer/synth, and it was great. I got a casio SK5 sampler and was like 'WOW a sampler!'
My parents were getting fed up with the whole stress of their business and decided, after my father started to suffer from panic-attacks and a minor heart complaint, that a move and a career change was in need. We soon moved to Reading. My father became an electronics engineer again and my mother started general admin work, although soon went back into programming databases.
In 1990 I got my DSS-1. I lived behind it creating bizarre patches and weird filtered samples. I got to know it better than any equipment/software i have ever used. I teamed up with a couple of guitarists who were into experimental and had a laugh recording Spacemen-3 meets Magic-Band jams. This went on for a couple of years, ultimately ending with a recording session at a local studio, with us franticly recording whilst going home to see if our exam results had come through. Everyone went their separate ways after that as uni/college was beckoning.
It wasn't long before I got married and tried desperately to settle down. We had a daughter, Olivia. To be honest I was far too young and never got away from being in my little world. I wished I had studied more, and was a little more down to earth. But the again, I wouldn't be me. I started to get really depressed, which ultimately wrecked our marriage. Not long after a year of marriage and we arranged a quick and painless divorce. Not long after our split, my ex-wife met a new guy, who for no real reason hated me. He made it impossible for me to have access to Olivia. And the stress it was causing was starting to be way too much for the fragile state i was already in. I started drinking heavily. I was the cliché bottle of gin a day wreck. Music went on hold after my DSS-1 got stolen from the crappy bedsit I was in. I took this as a sign to take respite from the world and moved to a cottage in somerset.
That helped a lot. After I had calmed down and quit the excessive drinking, and the failure of yet another minor relationship, I felt ready to face the world again and moved back to the city. I got a nice job working in a record shop. I was happy and had new friends who were cool, and fun to be around. When that job run out I went to the the local pub to have a pint, and got chatting to the manager of Alleycats, the main venue in Reading. I needed a job, he needed someone to help out so I took the job. I quickly moved up the ladder, and before I knew it he'd left and i became bar manager. I had such a great laugh working there. Sure, it was hard work but the good times out-shone the bad.
I'd soon saved enough money to get a computer. With all this music going on around me, I was really missing the days of making my own. I heard about Cubase and a package called rebirth, and was desperate to get my hands on them. We were hiring a small PA for the bar area of the venue, and after chatting to the guy who owned it, I started working for him on my days off. On sundays I used to have to go to Alleycats to get the PA, drag it through a muddy backyard to a club next door called the Purple-Turtle. I got 50 quid for doing this, and 50 quid to give to a dj to play. One day I thought to myself, instead of paying a dj why don't I bring my computer along and do a set on that? I'd doubled my wages, and with my bizarre gabba-esque rebirth sound, doubled my popularity too.
After a while Alleycats was starting to show cracks, and it's fate was looking enevitable. After loosing a great promoter, we went through a string of crap ones. Guy's that were under the impression that we could survive of bands like Saxon, and tribute bands. Obviously the crowds that used to pack the place for bands like Blur, and Terrorvision and shed-seven disappeared, and so did the takings. I will never forget how saddened I was when Moloko played to 10 people as the gig had not been advertised because the promoter had never heard of them. Eventually the directors dissapeared and we were running the place. Without a clue as to what was going to happen the next day. Eventually new padlocks appeared on the doors and we were out of work.
I never really realized how much that job exhausted me, and after leaving I took a lot of time off, writing music on a full-time basis. A few of my friends were starting to get into computer based music too, they had an Atari running cubase, and lots of synths, including a real 303 and 909. We wrote lots. The PC based music studio, was starting to become a possibility now and was amazed at the quality of recording that I could barely afford at that recording studio a few years prior.
I went solo after a while as my friends were going a bit trancey. And I was more into the experimental and ambient stuff by now. I started publishing tracks on getoutthere.bt.com and then I found a website after a google search called em411 ....
>>EDIT<<
Just to add a bit of good news. My ex-wife recently dumped the miserable git who wouldn't let me see my daughter, and over the last couple of years I have slowly started to get to know her. She's going to be twelve this december and revels in the fact that she makes me feel really old! I get on really well with her mother, she is like a cousin to me now. Other than that, we don't know what we saw in each other. My daughter is well pleased to finally get to know her real father, and we both are surprised at how similar we are, even though we were apart for so long. |
