A Brief History of Me,
as it relates to my musical life thus far
My musical career must have started two or three hundred years ago when I was presented with a ukulele for my 4th birthday. I don't recall anything earlier than this, although I am reliably informed by Those Who Ought To Know that I was in the habit of singing in my pram. Fortunately for all concerned, I have largely renounced this practice. Singing in general that is, not specifically in a pram, although this is also the case.
Both parents and both grandparents were musicians of one sort or another, and I soon took part in weekend family singalongs (singsalong?), mother &/or father singing, father playing rhythm guitar and me playing ukulele. At the time, brother Ian (your esteemed website editor) was too young to do much other than gurgle appreciatively at the appropriate moments, or otherwise, although I don't recall him having done so, and sister Sherryl was not even a fragment of the milkman's imagination, although our milkman was a woman.
Technophobes may skip this paragraph without losing the plot, although it is quite important later. The ukulele is tuned like the top four strings of the guitar, but in a different key, so that the chords are the same shape, but transposed. This meant that I had to watch what father was doing, transpose mentally and utter the correct chord. Looking back, this is probably why I can jam now - I have always been in the habit of paying attention to the other musicians, and keeping the chord structure in my head while doing something else.
Anyway, I was playing father's guitar as soon as I was big enough to hold it, and there things might have remained, discounting the customary increase in size occasioned by puberty (of myself, not the guitar), but for a fortunate accident. I was a decent rhythm guitarist - I had a twelve-string by then - who could accompany but not sing. I obtained a mandolin, tuned it, and started playing rhythm on this too; I was never really interested in playing lead.
Shortly thereafter, Ian (your esteemed website editor) had started playing guitar, and the inevitable happened - we decided we wanted to start a band. It so happened that a mate of his played guitar and a mate of mine wanted to play drums. Oops - no bass player! So I bought a bass, tuned it, and started playing. Now, I don't recall why - perhaps because I thought that tuning the bass like the bottom four strings of a guitar must be too simple, or whether I was influenced by the mandolin tuning (the same as a violin), or perhaps both to some extent - but I tuned the bass to fifth intervals instead of the usual fourths. I became quite fluent with this tuning before I realised it was incorrect, but by then it was too late. The main thing about this incident was that as soon as I picked up the bass, I knew that this was what I wanted to do musically. I started playing it like a lead instrument, string-bending, pull-offs, full chording, tunes, all the time keeping the chord structure in mind. Those Saturday evenings had not been wasted.
The band broke up amid the usual "musical differences" (Angelbread, by the way - get "The Chairs" by Ionesco out of the library) and I got married, although neither was the consequence of the other. My wife was a concert pianist of no mean competence, and her dad played the cornet in Hammonds Sauce Works Band, among others, and we talked about getting a band together, but all we did was play together at home, Bach preludes mostly. She would play them normally on the piano and I would turn for her - by looking at the bass line (Bach wrote some brilliant bass lines) - or actually play the bass line myself. My favourite was the A minor prelude. Still is. Then we weren't married any longer and I didn't have a bass any longer, although, again, neither was the consequence of the other. I still had my twelve-string guitar, though. Leaving out the dull bits, I went to Poly, left, moved to London again, came back again, got married again, and this wife was a singer.
Ian (your esteemed website editor) and I had started going to the local Folk Club with his girlfriend at the time. I met up with another girl who did the same, and all four of us got together as a folk combo - the two girls singing lead, Ian (your esteemed website editor) and I adding backing vocals and playing a variety of stringed instruments. This was pretty successful, at least on a musical level, and we scandalised some of the pipe-smoking ear-plugging cardigan-people by playing versions of Abba songs acoustically in the folk style, and similar outrageous and reprehensible behaviour. And the more they hated it, the more we did it! Also, we would learn a new song pretty much every week, but we got bored with some of the regulars who always sang the same song, week in, week out. So we packed in.
Not much of any account happened for quite some time, and continued to happen with increasing frequency, monotonous regularity and dogged persistence. I was living out of town at this time with a woman of remarkable resilience. (No, I didn't get married again, which serves to demonstrate that you can fool some of the people some of the time.) Ian (your esteemed website editor) had got a band together with Phil (whom we had both known since the age of eleven, and who had been mooted as a singer in Angelbread) on drums, Sherryl on vocals, Liz on keyboards & Rob on bass. Now, Rob is a very sound geezer but no bass player, so I was asked to join. Mother had bought me a bass as a present; she said that she hoped it was OK; she'd only bought me the best budget priced bass on the market! I still use it today. So we became Chasing Unicorns.
The sequence of events is a bit hazy here, but I think it was about this time that Liz decided, inconsiderately, to go off to Cardiff University to read Piano and Composition. Her father is a Doctor of Music and author of the definitive textbook on tuning harpsichords, so I suppose this was somewhat pre-ordained. Anyway, we continued without a regular keyboard player for quite some time, sharing keyboard duties between the three standing musicians, and earning our first money along the way. As well as doing covers, we all started writing a bit, and we featured some of our own songs in the set. It wasn't leaping-up-and-down music, but thinking-about-it music; we were rather surprised but delighted if anyone got up to dance! I suppose you could call it musicians' music, but that sounds a bit poncey.
So we were playing a gig one night, and who should be in the audience but Liz, recently returned from foreign parts. She was sufficiently excited by the music that she asked to rejoin. We convened a band meeting and after exhaustive discussion, lasting around forty seconds as I recall, we agreed, just as long as she didn't disappear to Uni again. By then she had obtained a degree in the aforementioned discipline, and a post as Music Teacher in a girls' private school, so this seemed unlikely. Easily the most accomplished musician in the band, she nevertheless recognised that a rock band was not familiar surroundings, and she is humble enough to concede that she learnt quite a lot playing with us. This was the zenith of Chasing Unicorns; we played some pretty complex stuff, but kept it rocking. (As an aside, it was about this time that Mal Turner and Trev Gilligan, respectively drummer and guitarist in two local bands decided to get into sound engineering, and one of the first gigs for each of them was doing our sound. Mal went on tour with Starsailor before they were big, but didn't want to tour abroad any more, so he passed them on to Trev who, as I write, is still away with them. But we still see both of them occasionally, especially Mal, on Fudjit nights.)
Eventually, Chasing Unicorns was no more, but it wasn't the semi-ubiquitous "musical differences" this time; Sherryl had a young family and was unable to obtain a babysitter on a sufficiently regular basis - especially since mother was one of the most constant fans; Phil also had a young family and wife, as well as outside interests; Ian (your esteemed website editor) was newly married; Liz and I bowed to the inevitable.
Time passed, as it annoyingly has the habit of doing, and I moved back to Darlington. One evening my girlfriend took me to see a band whose drummer was the husband of a work colleague; while I enjoyed the band, they gossiped. It turned out that Roger, the drummer, and Dave, the guitarist, were in another band that had to fold when the bass player and the fiddle player/flautist got married (to each other) and moved to Inverness. They were keen to revive this other band, so I was introduced, and a week later we had our first practice with Jamie, a fiddle/mandolin player of Dave's acquaintance. The old name was Pluck And Fiddle, but this was rejected and Shale was chosen by Dave; we were drinking cans of iriSH ALE at the time. We played vaguely Celtic-inspired music, and I commented that the name was appropriate because shale is a soft rock. We gigged regularly around pubs from Tyneside to W Yorks, capitalising on the (then) thriving Irish bar chain scene, and when the novelty of these wore off, we called it a day. This was important for me, because it gave me my first real experience of gigging, including twice at the Maggy Bank, which I didn't know at the time had been voted the Music Pub of the Year. I'm glad Roger didn't tell me until we were driving home!
By the time Shale had decided to pack in, I was already in another band. My girlfriend and I had recently been to see a Hendrix tribute band by the name of Sundance; I thought they were very authentic and swapped phone numbers with Simon, the guitarist/singer. He phoned me one night with the news that the drummer was unable to continue, and the bass player had taken the opportunity to bale out as well - a week before a gig. He said he knew a drummer (there's always been plenty in this neighbourhood) but couldn't find a bass player (which have always been scarce). He invited me to a practice/jam the following day. Here I met Dave, who was to become the drummer, for the first time. We decided we all liked each other and, more to the point, could play together, so the following Monday evening Simon dropped a tape of the songs through my door. I managed to learn twenty-three songs in four days, and we played our first gig on the Friday evening. It was a bit funny playing gently lilting Waterboys stuff one day and cult Hendrix stuff the next, but it worked for a while. I told both bands that as soon as I got a gig list from either I would inform the other, so that there would be no double-booking, but one day when I gave Simon the new list of Shale gigs, we found that he had already booked a gig for Sundance and not told me. He engaged someone he knew for that gig, and a few days beforehand I called into the rehearsal room to offer them all my best wishes. A week or so later I was reading a local listings mag and noticed that a gig was advertised which I had not been told about. This was when I discovered I had been replaced, but I hadn't even had the courtesy of a phone call to let me know. In fact, I never heard from Simon again. I was annoyed for a time, but I met the former drummer, Simon's brother Chris, who told me this was not the first time that had happened.
Shortly thereafter I was at a Matrix gig at the Railway and got chatting to a short, fat, balding Geordie I hadn't seen before. He may well have told me something vitally important for the continuance of sentient life on the planet in the first half-hour or so and I would have been none the wiser. I scarcely understood a word he said! As I became more accustomed to the accent, I learnt that the Matrix drummer was leaving and this geezer had been offered the position. I said that I play the bass and we chatted some more. One of the things I mentioned was that I had always fancied being in a Human Karaoke band. Coincidentally, this geezer told me he used to run something like that in Stanley. We were reasonably well tuned up by then, and decided that Friday evening to have a go at it in Darlington, gigs with Matrix permitting. We met the next Monday evening, each with a prepared list of a dozen or so well-known songs we reckoned could be learnt fairly easily, and which would attract a large number of people who might like - and be able - to sing them. Our lists were remarkably similar, so we discussed whether/how it could work. He was confident, having done it before; I was less so; not that I doubted my ability, since I had more confidence in it following my recent gigging experience with two bands which could scarcely be more different. I didn't doubt his either, since he said he'd been in some bands whose names I recognised.
This, of course, was Spence. We were both in favour of offering first refusal to the Railway, chiefly because it was within walking distance for both of us, which was why we were there anyway; I had no other choice, apart from the Quaker, since I didn't go anywhere else. So Spence mentioned the plan to Chris at the Railway. Apparently, he vacillated for a while and Matrix didn't contact him, so he approached Steve at the Quaker who assented forthwith. Mike, the brother of a bloke he knew, was a guitarist, and the following Tuesday we all met. Spence told me later that although I had talked the talk, he wanted to find out if I could walk the walk, which is fair enough. At the end of that first practice, though, we had a dozen songs virtually sorted, so the point was moot and Fudjit was born. Around three weeks later, March 18th 2001, was Fudjit Night #1.
And the rest is history, for all of you who have been with us since then. It took off much better than even Spence thought, and far more successfully than I ever dreamed it might, and one of the reasons it worked was that none of us wanted to be a superstar - there simply wasn't any ego there. None of us felt we had anything to prove - except possibly to each other - but the primary aim of the whole enterprise was always kept in mind, and that is to be a vehicle for other people who want their fifteen minutes of fame. Mike left to take up a teaching post in the south and we were joined by Kenny. Déjà vu took over when he announced he was from Blyth, and I had to learn another new language. But this was also an important period for Fudjit. Would it work as well with Kenny, from a well-known heavy rock band, as it had with Mike, a completely unknown lapsed hermit? Talent was never at issue here, rather, it was whether we would gel as a unit. I leave you to decide, but we are all happy.