This is the band I feel most nostalgic about. The line up was: myself playing guitar and writing lyrics, John Fredericks playing drumkit and occasional trumpet, Nick Carver playing bass and Petria Eaves on voice and occasional flute. We all worked together on chord progressions and riffs etc. The style of the music fiercely eclectic inspired by an obsession with John Zorn and Mr Bungle, we threw whatever catchy ideas came up together as a song regardless of style, and most of them worked out pretty well. There are demos of our songs floating around somewhere which I need to dig up, and our crowning achievement of our career was winning the heat at our TAFE (NMIT) in the National Bands Competition. I hope someone has a picture of me in my green boiler-suit, awesomely funny.

Songs:

Fighting Time

Hodown

Hodown 2

Put That Funk Away

Big Brown Blues

Keys

Prison Tats

Theme From Ortonomy (aka Meander)

Stew Meat

My first ever band and not really ‘my’ band at all. Before I could really play or write or do anything particularly musical these guys got me in as a singer when the wanted to make the transition from punk to mopey post-punk a la Joy Division & early the Cure.

What happened? Absolutely no singing technique and having no idea of how to acquire one after a while completely shredded my voice. That and the fact that the other guys were already having ‘artistic differences’ when I joined, and given my own moody hormonal teenage disruptive influence it didn’t last long.

I wish I still had the demos, at least to know what I put my throat through all that pain for. Somewhere I have a tape of me and the guitarist/drummer Steve Ward playing ‘Dumkopf’ which he wrote for our high schools’ gala evening for its’ language courses. I believe the lyric went:

“Dumkopf

Ich bin nicht ein

Dumkopf

Du bist eine

Dumkopf”

…repeat

That’s some quality vocabulary right there.