Biography - How it all began...

Biography

(a Carefree biography by Jeff)

So now you know what we look like... Aren't we all cool and beautiful? We hope we don't look like guys from a rock band! We hate rock bands, really. They're playing this awful music and they are on drugs all the time. Not like the ravers... Those are clean people, always serious and caring about their health. Yeah, we like ravers. I even think we are ravers, too... Yes, we're ravers! Come on, trance dance, boom boom... Whoo... This reminds me of an anecdote a friend once told me which happened at a show by the Fat Wreck Chords band Propagandhi. They were playing at some Scandinavian festival when suddenly during the show, their singer started like 'Uh... you know... we hate Bad Religion! They have turned so commercial... In fact they have never been any good at all. Yeah, I hate Bad Religion!' -'So why are you wearing a t-shirt of Bad Religion?' -'What? I'm wearing the Bad Religion t-shirt today?... Oh, you're right... it's the Bad Religion tee... whoops...'

Well, if you're still thinking 'Gee, that's an interesting band!', you can go on and read our biography for even more private and hot information on us. If you've ended up bored to death like a sane man at a Backstreet Boys show, you should perhaps go on reading our biography to get even more sleepy... Carefree proudly presents...

THE CAREFREE BIOGRAPHY

Which teen doesn't dream of being in a rock'n'roll band? (Well, except the ravers, the yos and the chartsurfers...) Mmh...? Not many?... Well, shit... I guess I've forgotten how I wanted to start this text... Mmh. OK. At least I still know that we made our dream come true: We made CAREFREE. We meet at least once a week (well, at least we should...) and that's what we call practicing. We, that's Robi on the bass, Yves playing the drums, Mike (Michel in Luxembourgish) on one guitar and finally myself on a second guitar, desperately trying to sing along (I sound like a sick dog whining along with a Nirvana song...) We're happy to have Yves on drums now, because it took us some long time to find an 'appropriate' drummer, because... I think I better start right at the beginning... You may have a beer while I'm telling you our story, cause it's pretty long, it all started up in 1992...

You've got your beer? Fine. Well, it was in 1992 (I was ten) when I eventually got a classical guitar from my parents. I wanted to play the music of the Beatles and all those Oldie bands I was listening to, so they bought me a cheap guitar and we even searched for a study-course I could go to, but we didn't find one and I was kinda too lazy to learn from books on my own. The guitar ended up in a corner of my room and got dusty... until 1994. Meanwhile I had become a fresher in highschool and it was the big punk revival with Green Day and Offspring as chartbreakers. This new music was something completely new to me (I had somehow slept for about 12 years and missed a lot of things like Nirvana, Grunge, the Pixies, etc. A gap I'm still trying to fill...), but over a long period of time it changed my life! I caught myself singing along with those songs without even understanding the lyrics. I didn't go deeper to find the whole paradise Green Day came from, but at least it reminded me of my own guitar. This time we found a school...

Two years later another carefree person came to highschool, and during the endless journeys from Luxembourg City back to our home town Wormeldange we talked about making music. Mike wanted to play guitar, too, like his heroes Silverchair, a grungeband from Australia. He eventually got a classical guitar, too, and started at the same school as me. After a year, I think it was around Christmas 1997, we started practicing together and managed to write our first song which was finished during the Easter holidays 1998 (unfortunately we have forgotten it meanwhile...). It worked, we had smelled blood! In May we bought two completely identic 'nice price' 'guitar/amp/strings' sets for a few hundred dollar and started jam sessions in my garage, covering/murdering songs by Silverchair, Bracket and Nirvana or playing our own bits. Soon we realized that we had lots of ideas we wanted to develop... we just needed a bassist and a drummer...

Mike came up with Philippe (a friend from school), but unfortunately Phil had the bad idea to accompagny us to an excellent show by Ash without any ear protection. His ears were really down! Fortunately the doc managed to get them back to what they had been before the show, but Philippe had to sell his drum set. We lost our first drummer without having ever practiced with him... Instead of a drummer we now found a bassist: Robi, an old friend, joined us. He had bought a bass one year ago and was starting his studies at the same time as us. He used to jam around with his friend Chris, mostly playing songs by Nirvana. Their band was called 'Dirty Minds'.

The accident with Philippe having somehow troubled all our plans for practices and any kind of band life, our first practice was delayed to the saturday before Christmas 1998. Benny, Robi's younger brother, helped us out by playing the drums. That week, Mike and I had made an instrumental song with 2 chords and a whole bunch of single notes. It was quite easy to play along for everybody, so we started trying out everything that went to our fingers if it matched and ended up half an hour later having just finished our first song: 'It's all over now (Wir lieben euch!!!)'. After we'd recorded it on minidisc, we realized it wasn't much of a rocksong. But as we liked it, we decided not to care about how sweet it sounded and kept it. We also decided to choose a name for our band, a name that shows that we don't care about anything. That name was CAREFREE (tatatataaa...).

We made one practice with Robi's friend Chris, but he's not from the neighbourhood of our town and he is only starting to teach himself how to play the drums, so we agreed not to take him. Now finally we have Yves on drums who's from the same town as us, only 5 years older and with live band experience and all we can say is that we really hope he's gonna stay with us, because he's a really good drummer. The practices are getting better and more and more frequent, lots of songs will get on this page soon, and we're looking forward to our first show in July and to our first demo release (be shure, it's gonna come!).

(Well, meanwhile there have been a few changes concerning the line-up and the songs etc... To be always up to date with what we're doing please check out the Stories and News sections...)

Octobre 10th 1999: Philippe has joined us on the drums...

The map tries to show you where we live. Luxembourg lies in Europe, between Belgium, France and Germany. Philippe lives in Cents, a part of the city of Luxembourg, Robi and Jeff live in Wormeldange and Mike lives in the neighbour town 1km down southwards (called Kécker)...