You are allowed to enjoy this…

This collection was assembled over four years from tracks recorded between September 2021 to June 2025 It’s my usual mish-mash of guitar-led instrumental music with a few more esoteric bits thrown in, as I realised that my more experimental (or odd) side had been neglected in some of my other later releases – so I was trying to re-capture some of that feel from the late 90s to early-00s when we through it all at the wall to see what ended up sticking.

01 Punching Down

02 Kora Sunset

03 You & Me Forever

04 Dog Days of Summer

05 If You Can’t Rock, Roll…

06 Jazz Reels

07 The More You Know

08 Coronado Sunburst

09 Skitter Beat

10 HandPandemonium

11 Ultratappy

12 May Cause Irritation

Credits

Darren Lock: guitars, basses, keyboards, percussion & drum programming + sleeve photography & design
Alan Harwood: Executive Producer
Recorded between 30 September 2021 & 14 June 2025

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I’m a man of few friends. Throughout my life, I think I can count my friends on one hand. I’ve just never been very good at maintaining a social scene. This means that I can pretty much remember everyone who has had any meaningful connection with me throughout my life. I was tinkering around on guitar today when the name of one of these meaningful connections flashed through my mind. I’m not one of those people who slavishly looks people up using the world wide web, but this person had reconnected me briefly back about a decade ago via a year of email communication. Nothing came of it other than some chats about music, like old times, but I was still busy looking after the kids so my mind was elsewhere. Like I said, I am the worse person to have as a friend.

Well that name flashed into my mind and the search revealed that Warren Wilson had passed in January. This really hit me. It does, doesn’t it? We were born not that far apart in terms of weeks, he was an Aquarius, I was a Pisces – born the same year 1971. We were firm friends a couple of years between 1985-1987 when we both attended Leyton High School for Boys in Essex Road, Leyton.

Time means that I don’t remember all the details but in those days, people hung around in their cultural groups, so that those lads who were into predominately rock music kind of orbited each other to form a sub-set in the playground. Whereas I’d gone to Norlington Boys School previously, he had come from one of the others in the district (I’m thinking George Mitchell, but I can’t be sure). Anyway, for some reason we fell into each other’s influence and I think it was our shared sense of humour that bonded us together.

Unlike many of our peers, we were smart and realised that if we paced around the top floor of the school during break times we could avoid the cold and the rain and not actually be noticed by any of the teachers, so that’s what we did a lot of the time. It was there that Warren concocted the legend that Brian May had actually played guitar solo on the Rainbow kid’s show theme and we managed to get a few people to believe it. But we’d spend a lot of our time cracking jokes, doing silly voices, reciting whatever comedy we liked and talking music during our time together.

I’d often go around his gaff (for that’s what he’d call it – “do you want to come round my gaff?” he asked). This was quite a walk as he was based in a part of Walthamstow near the edge of the forest and I had about a 30-40 minute walk to get there. But I’d dutiful trudge there to spend my Saturday afternoons with him, enthralled by whatever entertainment he had planned.

Sometimes we’d spend time listening to music and this is how I head so much rock music back then. His record collection was EPIC and whenever we’d leave the house his mother used to give him a whole twenty pound note (which for me, who was dirt poor from a single parent household, was like hanging around with Rockefeller) and we’d head to the second hand record shop in Wood Street where he’d spend it and then we’d go back and listen to those records. It was certainly educational!

If there was something good happening on the TV, he might videotape it so we could re-watch it. So if there was a good video on The Chart Show or The Tube, he’d tape it and we’d settle down to analyse it. Again, in those days, a video premiere from Peter Gabriel, Genesis or Queen or whoever was a cultural event and something we consumed with gusto. It was there that we’d rewatch his recordings of Blackadder II over-and-over so we could memorise it and recite lines back to each other at school. Then there was the time he rented “This is Spinal Tap” and we laughed and laughed and laughed our way through the movie until we cried. We honestly believed those guys were British until we found our they weren’t. 

Then there was the times he’d play guitar. And this is the important bit…I do believe that if it wasn’t for hanging with Warren, I wouldn’t have done all the music I’ve done. I knew I was in the presence of an actual musical genius. He was one of those “true” musicians, the ones that can hear something ones and instantly replicate it on the fretboard or keyboard or drums. I’ve been in their presence a few times and it always humbles me to the point that I know I am still feeling my away around in the dark. He was a formidable player and played his black Fender Strat through a giant Marshall amp stack that you could feel in the chest, emulating Hendrix or whoever’s records he put on his record deck. 

One afternoon, we were mucking around and he pulled out this old guitar that only had four strings – I think it was a battered old semi-acoustic thing that had seen better days.

“You’re a bassist,” he said. And that was it…I was a bassist. From that moment on, I had been dubbed “a bassist” and the bass guitar became my instrument. He showed me how to hold the neck and move my fingers and pluck out a rudimental bass line, even though this was just a guitar tuned down badly to emulate an actual bass. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end as we made our noise together. The seed had been planted.

I remember quite clearly how the first fracture of our friendship happened. Turning up one Saturday afternoon, I discovered I wasn’t the only person to be entertained. Another chap was there, someone I didn’t know, who wasn’t from our school, who seemed a little older and he smelt a little off, funny cigarettes I think. It was an odd atmosphere in the room and I felt like an intruder, like my time had come. They wanted to go up into the forest to go smoke and that wasn’t my scene as I was still recovering from pneumonia, so I made my excuses and left. Our friendship cooled somewhat after that and I never went back.

Then at school, Warren decided that he was anti-exams and that he wasn’t going to continue. We were literally weeks away from sitting our O-levels and this guy was so bright and smart and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It didn’t help that our hippie art teacher Mr Vinton said something like “Yeah, well…exams aren’t everything, you know…” That fuelled his desire to drop out and he was trying to convince me to join him. So it was at that point, I made an active decision to step back even further. This always bothered me. Maybe I should have tried harder to convince him to give his exams a go? I don’t know. You’re just kids and you don’t know what you’re doing…

After this, I saw him when I was working at Woolworths at Bakers Arms. I was there doing my shift behind the record counter. On reflection, I reckon this might have put his nose out of joint because as we talked music, he asked me what I was listening to and I was telling him about the Mike Oldfield Boxed set that The Missus (she was The Girlfriend then) had bought me and he laughed at me for liking that old hippy music and said I should be listening to Bruce Springsteen. Now considering we’d spent a lot of time listening to hippy music in his bedroom, I took this personally and was a little upset by it. I was hoping I’d impress him, but I was totally confused by his reaction.

Then a couple of years later, we saw him at Walthamstow station and he seemed a little dishevelled and not himself. He was telling me about how he was trying to study art at college and all I had to tell him was how I was almost through my degree – in fact, I’m not sure I told him exactly what I was doing. Again, I didn’t know what to say or how to react to him. I’m no good at being friends – it weighs on me. Stay away, I’ll only disappoint you!

But then fast forward to 2015 and I received an email from him out of the blue and he’d seen me on YouTube (back when you could actually find me on YouTube) and we started chatting music again, not before our communication faded seemingly as quickly as it started. Again, I’m now thinking that I should have made more of an effort, but he seemed to be a single guy without a family and I was at the time looking after two kids under 10. My mind was not in that zone.

So here we are. This person had a big influence on me at that crucial time in your life when you are forming your character. I’d found a kindred spirit and it was because if him I took on the bass guitar (on the hope he might come back to school, that we might reconnect, and I’d be his bass player) but it never happened. He went onto do the rock and roll star thing, playing with a number of bands most notably with Kirk Brandon’s Spear of Destiny (who wrote a lovely eulogy for him). He did it, he lived life on his terms and it is a tragedy that sniper’s alley claimed another soul.

My deepest regret was not saying to him via email just how important he was to me in those days. But we’re men, aren’t we, who are full of bluff and bullshit… I think he might have seen a previous post I’d made to the blog waxing lyrical about his influence, so maybe he already knew?

My most endearing memory is walking back from Walthamstow market in the winter and the snow started falling down like something from a Christmas card and we were fighting our way back to his gaff and I gave him one of my gloves to share and for that moment, I imagined he was the brother I never had…

Rock on, Warren!

Here’s Warren (to the right) playing with Kirk Brandon & The Pack