By now, any of you who sit there reading any of this must be wondering why this guy isn’t in a band or collaborating with other people? Well, that’s a road I’ve been down before and not one that I have much patience for. When I was a younger fellow there were a host of folks at school who got bands together and I was a bit late for the party, finally buying a bass guitar when all the wannabe rockers were gone to earth, not making the move to A-Level exams like yours truly.

My introduction to the bass guitar came from via a school chum. Only we didn’t have a bass guitar in our jam sessions, he had the lovely Fender guitar and the biggest guitar amp I’d ever seen and I had an old 1950’s style guitar (I think might have been his brother’s or his dad’s), with the lowest four strings detuned to get the closest approximation of a bass guitar. Of course, it sounded rubbish, but I enjoyed my role as the back-up guy and so getting a bass guitar seemed right for me.

The bass guitarist is solid, dependable, holding it together; the straight man, the guy in the corner who knows where everyone is going, etc. So it seemed natural for me to go that way and after much cajoling I convinced my dear old grandmother to give me the cash for my first bass guitar, which I still own, sitting in the corner there in its slowly decaying vinyl gig bag. Later on, I blew some grant money on my first four-track and bought my first proper guitar, a Yamaha RGX one using some cash as I got for payment during my work experience working at Macmillian Publishers, working in the production office of the Nursing Times for a month.

I practised and jammed with myself on my four-track, recording horrible little songs and mushing up my guitar sound with my Zoom 9000 guitar pedal. I think I managed to fill a 90-minute cassette full of these horrible songs. But I thought I was limiting myself just doing the four-track compositional thing and decided to get myself into a band. Now I can’t remember which way around it was, I think I might have put an advert in the music press at this time or I might have responded to adverts. I can’t remember. My memory is murky, fogged by lots of other things that have happened in the interim.

But I remember going to an audition for a band near Walthamstow, in Pendlestone Road. I remember desperately trying to impress the guy, who was a drummer, by telling him how I was into “a wall of sound approach” and stuffing a cassette of my songs into his hand. I must have come across like a complete jerk, but I all I wanted was to be accepted. I tried too hard. Anyway, on the day of the rehearsal, the drummer duly picked me up in his car, which I thought was very nice of him and took me to his parent’s place. The trouble was that he lived in the attic and I had to scramble up into the loft hatch, with my guitar and gubbins. I remember this put me off and then I met the bassist, who was a skinhead and wore some sort of anarchy-based T-shirt.

I was standing there with hair down to my arse and wearing a tie-dye T-shirt. I had a feeling that this creative relationship was dead before it started.
So I plugged in, pulled out my Zoom 9000 FX pedal and tuned up. I made my first mistake of asking what they wanted the guitar to sound like. “A guitar?” they replied quizzically. I was into effects and delays and fuzzes and flangers and they just wanted it to sound like a guitar. This is when I realised that I was coming to music from a slightly different angle to everyone else. I was interested in sounds, rather than notes.

The drummer started and the bassist went off and I just jammed along. It was enjoyable, but I wasn’t really paying attention. I just played what I felt was right. Lots of mushy chords, a little bit of soloing here and there, etc. Then they clattered to a stop and asked me to play “that bit” again. What bit? I was improvising. I didn’t expect to have to replay anything. Another classic mistake, Darren.

So we stopped and discussed things and talked about how the drummer could only play for an hour or so a week because the neighbours complained and we joked about things and talked about music. Then the drummer said something that I’ve never forgotten to this day: “Let’s play out to Wuthering Heights…”

And so he put Kate Bush on the turntable and him and the bassist clattered along to the wailing Ms Bush and I sat there, pretending to play along, but not having the faintest idea what I was doing. I’m not sure whether it was the fact that I didn’t have enough musical experience to figure out the chords or whether I was just completely banjaxed by the song itself, but I was like a rabbit frozen in the headlights.
Let’s just say I didn’t get that particular gig.

Another audition I attended was with a female singer-songwriter in London. I can’t remember the how’s and why’s but I think I’d sent her a tape and she called me along. I was to meet her at the Oddbins on King William Street and not to bring a guitar. It was all rather mysterious and like meeting a Russian spy. I didn’t know what to think and I don’t think the Missus was that impressed that I was going gallivanting off with some mysterious female to make sweet music.

So I am standing outside Oddbins like a complete spare part when I hear someone calling my name. There’s this young woman in the most battered old car I’ve ever seen and so I have to vault the barrier along the road to get my lift, nearly getting run over in the process. She drives me a short way to an old terrace just off that street, a mere five minute walk perhaps, and I am sitting there wondering to myself exactly what I’m letting myself in for.
The building was run-down, full of art student types and she takes me upstairs to a room with her gear set up. She impresses me with the fact that she owns an actual Fairlight synthesiser that her father bought her (at that time only people like Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush were using these very expensive sampler/synths and would have cost the same amount as a small bungalow to afford). She sat me down, handed me a beautiful white American Fender Strat and cued up the recording she wanted me to play along to.

I remember the sense of panic and fear that came over me. There I was in a stranger’s house, about to listen to a song for the first time, expected to play something amazing, using a guitar I’d only just touched, and had no way of adjusting the amp or adding my own effects. It was like telling an actor to act a play he’d never read before and then handing him someone else face to use. I felt sick, sick to the pit of my stomach and time seemed to slow down as she pressed the “play” button on the impressive Tascam eight-track reel-to-reel cassette recorder she was using. How I lusted after her equipment…

So the song began, but there was something wrong with my ears because the bass was mixed so badly on it that I couldn’t discern what key the track was in. It was a horrible mush of a track, no treble or middle, just this thudding distorted bass and I wished for some headphones so that I might at least have a chance of nailing this one down.

I don’t think I actually played a note. Or if I did, the song was so loudly amplified that anything I’d played was drowned out by it. I walked away shell-shocked by that experience and vowed never to audition for anyone ever again. I actually thought it might have been some kind of psychological experiment conducted by a crazed scientist a la Milgram’s 37. “See how far you can push the silly little guitar player before they explode”. But I remember walking back to the tube station a little upset and confused and wondering if all musicians were like that.

It was safe to say I didn’t get that gig either…

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