Arse Arse Arse (a few Timo thoughts around the turn of the century, London) DRUM THINGS WHO ARE THOSE GUYS THE LAD STRINGS GUITARS LITTLE PEOPLE THE POINT EQ MICROPHONES CENSORSHIT PICKUPS TAPES OR WHATEVER MIXERS AND STUFF DRUM THINGS I remember in the early days of decent drum machines, or “DUMB machines” as a friend of mine used to refer to them, you were a wanker or a techno-head if you tried to use one in recording or live settings. Those horrible fuckers who thought they were REAL musicians (just about anybody who ever played a gig in front of at least five other people) looked down their noses at those of us who would use such a thing. People with drum machines no doubt also had inflatable sex dolls under their beds. So, consequently, drum boxes were mainly used by socially inept nerdy types who sat at home in their bedrooms under the covers with their primitive sequences and Casio keyboards making tapes of crappy techno-ish music to exchange in brown paper bags at dimly lit street corners with other social pariahs of like mind. I was one of them for a while. Of course it’s not so bad now, but I am talking here of the EARLY days, late 70’s, early 80’s, and all that. Times were hard back then. We didn’t have it nearly as good as bastards do these days with hard disk recording and digital newfangled gadgets. No, we made do with mere sticks and rocks and instruments that had to be TUNED and such like. People lost limbs trying to record their music. We may have had it bad but at least by damn we were MISERABLE. But I digress... And I’ll digress a bit more, as those of us who still bear the scars of battle often do. I remember once my band, Joe’s Nose (me and Pete Studtmann), was using a cheap Casio keyboard as a beatbox for one of our live gigs as we sometimes did. Some irate drunken fucker came up to the stage in the shitty pub we were playing and had a right go at me for “putting drummers out of work” and such shit. Like we were getting paid a lot of money for the gig or something. He was mental. But he scared me. The pure hatred of us in general and myself especially really seemed way over the top. I was sure he was about to bite me or something. But then in those days the general consensus was that if you played original music it was obviously because you weren’t good enough to play cover tunes. If you used a drum machine it was somehow an affront to the dignity of the audience. So there was a lot of anti-beatbox sentiment around. We would at times gladly use drummers, usually from other people’s bands when they weren’t gigging- something I highly recommend. They’re already good and are glad to sit in on some stuff other than what their band does. But if it was a crappy little free gig in some shithole bar in Kansas we would just drag out the horrible keyboard, press the SAMBA button, and we were away. It helped provide the feel we were trying to achieve. That of a cheesy, stupid, untalented punk band. It worked a treat. I’ve not really had many drum machines in my time. They have always been overpriced and generally complicated to use and I’ve always been a skint lazy bastard. Most of my equipment comes from pawn shops or some other second hand joint so my choices have been limited really. But there are sometimes treasures to be had in pawn shops because the fuckwits working there really don’t have a clue about musical stuff. The two drum machines among the few I’ve had that spring to mind are the Boss Dr220-A and the Dr550. The 220 was my favourite until it died a horrible death recently. It was so simple and basic and was really a fun tool to work with because it had only ONE of each sound, not like seventy different snares and a hundred different bass drum noises all with individual tone, pan and dweedle settings. It was a little grey rectangular mono thing with limited capability and little memory but it sounded great and was oh so easy to use. It didn’t waste my time setting it up and programming shit into it. I could get on with the more important business of writing, if you want to call it that, and recording my music. They used to be fairly plentiful and about the cheapest ones in pawn shops. Mine cost me something like 30 or 40 quid at the time, but recently I saw one for sale at nearly 90 pounds because it was a “classic”. Go figure. I stepped on mine one day and broke the little LCD screen so I couldn’t read it anymore. I got mad and flung it at the wall and it broke into several pieces and scattered around the room. Too bad. I really loved that little drum machine. Now those little 220’s are getting hard to find. At the time of this writing it seems that the average price for a pretty good drum machine from a pawn shop in London is somewhere around 100 quid. The 550 I currently have was had from a pawn shop in north London for, I think, 40 quid or so because it had no owner’s manual and the little battery door on the bottom of it was missing. I bought it because I used to have one a few years ago and still remembered how to use it. A drum machine without the book is bloody useless if you don’t know your way around it. This one’s a lot more complicated than the 220 but I can get on with it just fine. I also run it mono to keep things easy. Too many stereo tracks get way out of hand really fast. I’m a bit of a minimalist as far as that goes. I almost never use more than four tracks on a recording. Nothing I have at the moment goes stereo. I’ve only ever had cheap 4-track cassette decks so I’m used to it but I have recently had a little experience on computer based multitracks and they’re a million times better which is sort of sad, really, since only now have cassette based 4-tracks finally become cheap and good enough to deliver CD quality sound recording for poor skint fuckers like me. Still, tape is a sort of a 1930’s concept of recording and has had a bloody good run for the last few decades. But the newer computer based things are really far superior for quality of editing and things like that but you’ve got to shell out nearly a grand for a fucking computer to start with. But if you can find your way onto a computer I highly recommend the N-Track recording thing. It’s really easy to use and a demo of it can be found at the Hitsquad website for your perusal. And there’s some great drum stuff on computer these days and it’s fairly cheap and works really well, but I still like the little doodad that sits by my cheap amp. It’s just really handy. I hate to have to get on a computer very much. It’s so mindnunbingly dull to sit in front of the screen. Log off, live life. Back in the days of Joe’s Nose I met what I have often said was the best drummer in the world for me. His name was Chuck Pierpont and he was the drummer in a rockabilly band called The Marauders. He didn’t have a big monstrous kit, just the basic set-up, and he wasn’t all flashy wanker crap. But he must have had an ear for it or something. He got the best sound out of his kit and was an absolute pleasure to work with. He was unpretentious and never had to be told anything. I’ve always hated the heavy metal and jazz fusion type drummers. Well, not so much hate them, because I’m a big fan of metal and fusion music, but their style just didn’t work in my stuff. Chuck had his own particular style of drumming that just made me shit my pants. It was spot on what I wanted. It was like he was telepathic. He could also, if you wanted, just turn up at a gig with only a snare drum (picture the dark smoke-filled room, the lone diminutive figure appears in the doorway, rockabilly quiff and leather jacket silhouetted against the night sky, snare drum in one hand, sticks in the other, a smooth voice breaks the atmosphere- “Where’s the gig.”- and in steps...cue the music from The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly...CHUCK). He would be a better drummer on just that lone snare than anyone around. Anyway, the point of all this is that I almost always do the drum parts in my music by asking myself  “How would Chuck do it?” and then programming my unworthy little beatbox as best I can to be like him. I don’t know where that bastard is now but if I ever win the lottery I’ll buy him a house with a recording studio in it and make him be my drummer sometimes when he’s not gigging with others. Of course, I still get shit from people for using a drum machine sometimes. It’s usually the purists who sort of think that if it isn’t solo acoustic guitar then it’s not really music. Fuck them. You shouldn’t be so narrow minded as that. I have to admit that a fair old lot of people really don’t like my music for any number of reasons, and sure I’d rather hear somebody say something NICE about me than anything mean, but I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that most people think my music is pretty crap for one reason or another and some folks just hate drum machines. Oh well. I know you can’t please everybody. But sometimes people just don’t seem to see that I’m not here to come up with music that THEY would like- I’m here to be a musician, and the most important person in that thing is ME. It’s what I do. So, mister dipshit muso wanker purist review bastard, you don’t like my cheesy drum machine? Well I quite get bored with somebody banging on a solo acoustic guitar and being all sincere and shit ALL THE BLOODY TIME. To me, that sort of thing gets old quick. There’s been far too much of that sort of thing where you’re not taken seriously in music unless you do it with a solo acoustic guitar. That’s fine with me when it’s done well, but too often a piece of really bad music will be given some legitimacy simply by virtue of the fact that some whinging prat gets all sincere and does a lo-fi recording and then suddenly people think it must be good because it’s so unpretentious. No, I’m sorry, it’s still just crap. Not a lot of people can get away with rough solo recordings. Those who can, like Frank Peck (KAW Tapes), are beautiful and rare but most people just sound like fools. Cave men with guitars. I guess they still think it’ll impress the birds or something if they whinge and strum a shitty guitar in a plaintive way. Bollocks. So anyway, if I use a drum machine it’s probably because I’m trying to keep my music from getting stale sometimes. I’m keeping it changing and interesting for ME, not you. WHO ARE THOSE GUYS Actually, since I’m on the subject of musicians I admire (was I actually on that subject?) let me just say that I don’t seem to be impressed with most well known names and that. It seems that the ones who make the greatest impression on me are the ones I’ve either played with or have seen in action like the bass player from Nomeansno and that tall bass player in the old Rollins Band and that even taller bass player Reggie from Headquarters (oi nigger where are you- I want to see you again!). Then there’s that bass guy that was in Yes (don’t really know how tall he was), and the really short skinhead bass player in that punk band who opened up for GBH that time in Stoke Newington. Then there’s that bassist, Smith,  from Klyde Konnor, and that one who was in the Beat Nigs when they played in that cow barn in Kansas, and that other bass player from The Buttworms... But mainly I admire the kinds of musicians you find on those truly underground labels like Lonely Whistle Music, Bliss, and KAW. Real people doing real music in the real world. But most people you’d meet in a pub don’t know and aren’t interested who those musicians are, so for the sake of polite conversation I then have to rely on well known names to spout whenever some prick asks me “What kind of music do you like?” Nat King Cole. Bloody Hell. Now THERE was a guy that could have sung the fucking phone book and made it sound great. My musical idols are relatively few, but that guy is definitely one of them. And I don’t particularly like “singers” much. I recognise that Frank Sinatra was one of the greats from my childhood but I just don’t really care for his stuff that much. Couldn’t STAND Bob Dylan and never really liked The Beatles when I was young. I do really like Marilyn Manson, Slipknot and Leonard Cohen. I thought Harry Chapin was great when I was a kid. Maybe later I’ll relate the story of how he kissed my girlfriend at a gig and made me jealous. Jackie Gleason and Fred Flintstone were also great singers. Oliver Hardy. Jimmy Somerville. I like the music of John Lee Hooker but I can’t say he’s a good singer. Neil Young has a bloody awful voice but I like it. I like Cab Calloway stuff, too. I’m probably spelling some these names wrong but you get what I mean. Johnny Cash was a hero of mine. His “Live At San Quentin” album was the first record I ever actually remember owning. Fuck, I could go on and on like this, but the point is...well, just exactly what IS the fucking point? Looks like there are no women in my mental musical hall of fame. Well, I did really like Carly Simon when I was a kid but that was just because you could see her nipples on that album cover and “You’re So Vain” was permanently on the radio. And I was into Patty (or was that Patti) Smith as well. “Easter”, “Horses”, and all that. Couldn’t stand Ella Fitzgerald and all that sort of crap. I don’t know what the fuck I’m going on about here, but I’m sure it all meant something when I started. You see, I type with two short stubby fingers so it takes a bloody long time for me to get anything done and consequently I loose the fucking plot quite often. Bugger. I’m sure there was SOMETHING I was trying to say... THE LAD Underground music didn’t seem to exist when I was a kid and no one in my family was the least bit musical or even interested in music as far as I could tell. I lived in Oklahoma on a farm so my only exposure to music was television (all two and a half channels of it) and my prized possession- a little blue round Panasonic transistor radio on a small chain. It fucking changed my life. I’d spend hours in the dark of my bedroom at night, when I was supposed to be asleep, with my ear pressed to the tiny speaker at low volume so no one would know I was still awake. At night in Oklahoma in the 60’s and 70’s you could pick up absolutely zillions of radio stations. It was a fantasy world that took my mind away from the hard work on the farm and school and all that shit. I was mesmerized into sleep each night under the vast, clear, beautiful Oklahoma night sky by the hipnotic sounds of alien worlds that came to me and comforted me secretly from my little blue transistor orb, battery permitting. And things got REALLY weird in later years when I got into antique short-wave valve radios. Seems a bit odd now that I never listen to music radio, considering it’s impact on me when I was young. It all just seems so shit now. Here in England the radio is REALLY shit. Sometimes I might listen to a bit of classical music but the fucking braindead DJ’s on those stations always end up playing some totally unsuitable crap next to the odd good piece of music. And it’s always the safe, popular works like the greatest hits of Mozart or some such shit. Never much really interesting. The handful of “pop” stations around all play the same things as each other and the jazz is even worse. If you tuned into a jazz station here ten years ago and listened for half an afternoon you will have heard EVERYTHING they will ever play, even today. It never changes. It’s like “Jazz Hits For Morons”. I almost never go to gigs. I do not buy tapes, records or CD’s. I don’t give a damn about mp3. I fucking loathe most music videos. I hate almost every aspect of music there is. I hate the people who make music, produce it, sell it, advertise it, I hate the people who listen to it and I ESPECIALLY hate those who talk or write about it. There is only one thing more mindlessly fucked up than the whole music scene and that’s art. But as a child music was my only release from the drudgery of the world and without it I’m certain I’d either be a serial killer or dead. It literally became my reason for living and I soaked it up at every opportunity. The problem was that there just wasn’t much CHOICE in music when I was young. Apart from cartoons and kids shows like The Banana Splits and The Monkeys my real musical education was just AM radio and, eventually later, FM.  But it changed me. I can not remember a time when I didn’t want to be a musician. I CAN remember when I wasn’t capable of making music because I was basically crap. My mother wanted me to learn to play the piano but I was having none of it. I threw tantrums until my parents conceded to let me take guitar lessons. For that I will always be grateful even though I was the world’s worst guitar student at about the age of twelve or so. I was thick as pigshit and couldn’t learn a fucking thing. The teacher just finally gave up, poor guy. He tried hard but I was a total loss. I just could not or WOULD not learn a thing. It was absolute Hell for the both of us. He’d get so frustrated with me he’d turn red in the face and I’d just fuck up and fuck up. I don’t know what it was. I just wasn’t suited for it or something. I actually tried to take some guitar lessons again when I was in college but it was the same shit all over. I was totally useless. But from a young age the desire was always there. Somehow I’d been poisoned and it was all I ever wanted to do. Now all these years later I sometimes wonder if the reason a lot of people don’t really like my music is because It didn’t come naturally to me and it still shows. I still struggle every time I play and maybe that puts people off. They can see that I’m nothing special, no genious or boy wonder. I’m just some bloke with a guitar just like them and anybody who wanted to could be at least as good as me with a little practice. I wasn’t a natural musician, I had to fucking TRY to play guitar and I’m no singer either. Maybe people don’t want to listen to Mr Average Joe Bloggs, what they really want to hear is some real genious who’s pushing the bounds of music and things like that. And who can blame them? Harry Parch, and that sort of thing. But I just always wanted to somehow do music. It was an obsession as far back as I can remember. One of my earliest memories is of looking up at my mother’s old green radio on a table and hearing the voice of Leonard Cohen. From that moment on I wanted to do what he was doing. Underground music was non-existent to this little Oklahoma farmboy. I just thought you did music, made records, and nice people at radio stations played them. I just didn’t know any better. The thought that there was any other aspect to all this music stuff didn’t happen. All that was to come later thanks to one of my greatest heroes: Don Campau. His “No Pigeonholes” radio show really changed my life. When I was a kid I liked the music of Sly Stone, Pink Floyd, Deep Purple,Yes, The Isley Brothers...OH YEAH- FUCKING HELL...What the fuck happened to Stevie Wonder? When I was a teenager I used to belong to this record club that would just send you a tape every month for like very little money or something. Anyway, I got this cassette tape of Stevie Wonder- “Talking Book”- and I’d never heard of the guy. FUCK ME- it blew me away. Every song on that tape was brilliant. EVERY BLOODY SONG. That doesn’t happen very often, that you get some album where everything on it is great. Only a few spring to mind. AC/DC “Back In Black”, just about every Nomeansno album, Mussorgsky “Pictures At An Exhibition”, one or two Pink Floyd albums (can’t stand that Syd Barret crap) but that Stevie Wonder tape really got me. So I saved my money and ordered another Stevie Wonder tape and it was fucking abysmal. A complete load of old shite. The same thing happened with Elton John. I loved “Madman Across The Water” but everything else the little wanker did was total rubbish. Anyway, I used to get all these tapes I’d never heard of and amaze my friends (few though they fucking were) with them. I was the first kid in my class at school to have a Slade tape. Proud times, I can tell you. I was probably the ONLY kid in my class to ever have a Blind Faith tape or a Robin Trower. Where I grew up most kids had shit like Dr Hook, Merle Haggard, and Marie Osmond. Other than what was on the radio I was fairly deprived of any good music for most of my childhood, really. STRINGS Strings. Fuck. I hate guitar strings. They’re all shit no matter what you pay for them. But, being always skint, I used to save that little brass thingy off the end of guitar strings and keep reusing strings as they broke until they got so short I’d have to solder two together to make one. I still do that sometimes. My yearly guitar string expenses must be about five quid or less. Long ago when I was in this dismal cover band in Oklahoma (Bad Axe- I mean REALLY...) the other guitar player used to put brand new strings that he’d special ordered from France or somewhere on his gold plated Les Paul for every practice and then, right in front of me, he’d cut them off with wire cutters when practice was over. And he was a really crap guitar player. He’d carefully pack his fuckoff expensive guitar into it’s special flight case and bugger off while I’d secretly pick up his dead strings from the floor and sneak them into the army duffel bag that served as a case for my cheap piece of shit guitar. I’d go home and try to solder them back together and use them on my own guitar. Christ, I was a sad bastard. I have tried using “good” strings in the past but they never seemed to me to be worth the extra expense. I’ve had cheap guitars and really fucking good guitars and it seems to me that the cheap strings are just as good on any guitar as all the rest. Don’t get caught in the wanker trap of believing that if it costs more it must be better. These days even the cheap strings are really pretty good, and in some instances even better than big name strings. I really hate going into a music store to buy strings. I just want strings that won’t break or go out of tune. Those fuckers in the music store just want to sell me as much useless crap as possible because they think I’m stupid. The idiots in English music stores are the worst. Total fucking moronic bastards the lot of them. Unhelpful sneering cunts. Fuckwit no-talent widdlers. GUITARS I’ve got a Hohner GT-60 electric guitar at the moment. I really like it. Well, I really like it now that I’ve ripped all the guts out of it and rewired it in my own way with different pickups. And dribbled all sorts of fingernail polish all over the front of it. And made some other alterations. But it plays really well for a not-so-expensive guitar. I’ve got some other red thing I traded a good MZ motorcycle for, but it’s basically a piece of shit. I think it’s only good for spare parts. The Hohner was had from a little music store in south London called Polymart for something like £225 new. I was unemployed and on the dole at the time and the nice man in the shop let me pay it off at something like a tenner a fortnight. It took me ages. But I really wanted that guitar. Then one time I got skint and hocked it to a pawn shop and fucking lost it because I became homeless and couldn’t get the money to get it back. I walked by the pawn shop one day and saw it in the window for sale for more than I had paid for it NEW. I hung my head and cried. I used to walk by and look at it every few days. Somehow I managed to scrape up enough money eventually for a down payment before anyone else bought it and after what seemed like a terribly long time I had it again. I had now bought the thing twice! It’s never been in the hocker again. Somebody did steal it once from me but by then it was in such a state with my rewiring and fingernail polish paint job the pawn shop wouldn’t take it so it lay hidden under somebody’s bed until his girlfriend booted him out and told me she found my guitar. The bitch still made me pay something like £25 to get it back though. Still, I have it now. I recently bought an Encore bass guitar from a pawn shop. A copy of a Fender Precision. It plays real well but the pickups are pretty crap. It’s too fucking big for me but it was only about 100 quid and it looked like it had never been used. I used to have one of those short scale Fender Musicmaster basses when I lived in the States. It was great. It fit my little hands and everything. I’d love to find another one of those again. I’ve got really small hands and it’s hard for me to deal with a bass, although I actually prefer normal scale guitars to short ones. I had a short scale Fender Musicmaster guitar when I was in Joe’s Nose but that’s the only short scale guitar I’ve ever had. I actually prefer a Gibson style neck. Fat frets. Rosewood fingerboard. Like on an SG. The best playing guitar I ever had was a Gibson SG like the one in AC/DC. It was a quality guitar. It had one of those hard-shell flight cases. I got it from a pawn shop in America where I used to buy guns a lot. It was only $200. It must have been stolen or something because it was brand new and untouched. I didn’t ask why it was so cheap. When I first came to England It was with me on the plane as my carry-on luggage. I was proud of it and didn’t want to let it out of my sight. The best guitar I ever had. But I sold it to Charlie fromThe Blivets for $75 when I was trying to get some money together to come back to England after having only been back in the States a week or so. I couldn’t stand it there. I had been in London only a couple of years and had gone back to the States to stay, I guess. I was broke and sleeping in people’s back yards and shit. Going downhill fast. I did a gig to help raise the money for my plane ticket back to England. I was sick with something like the flu or the plague when I did the gig for tips at this shithole bar. I was sweating and had a sore throat and was dizzy and shit. I thought I was going to die. When I finally landed back in England I only had four dollars to my name, no guitar, and nowhere to live. It was HELL. London can be a real nasty place when you don’t know anybody and you ain’t from here. Sometime later I saw an identical guitar in a music store window on Denmark Street. It was for sale for over £600. It made me sick. Mine had been in better condition. Oh well. Life sucks. I would have probably been better off musically and financially if I’d learned to play drums or, even better, if I’d put my talents and effort into really electronic stuff like keyboards and computers. I was just NOT suited, physically or mentally, to play guitar. It was HELL trying to learn. I don’t really know why I chose it. It was probably peer pressure or that shit you believed when you were young about how guitar players were really cool and got all the glory and the women. But I was absolutely useless at it. I started trying to play the guitar about the same time I started playing with my dick. I got really good at one of those two things. I’m stuck with playing guitar, really, partly because I’m such a thick bastard and it took me so long to learn guitar that I wouldn’t think of starting all over again with some other instrument. It became some kind of obsession with me. I was going to learn to play the fucking thing if it killed me. Never did learn to play it “right”, but eventually I did learn to handle it a bit. Then I buggered up my left hand fingers not once but TWICE and now my hand is even more useless than it already was. Did I do something to offend some sort of Gods? Why does all this shit happen to ME? Fucking Hell. I still play, of course, but it’s a lot harder now. And there’s some stuff I used to do that I’m no longer able to because of my screwed up fingers. That’s why I’ve started to put a lot more bass guitar in my work now. It’s easier for me to play bass than guitar now. Or at least it would be if I could find myself a decent short scale bass. Generally I can’t stand piano noises. The fucking instrument drives me batty. Like a violin. Great instruments if you want to start a fire. There’s just some weird hidden aspect in it’s tonal quality that grates on my nerves. It might be that a piano uses more than one string to make a single note and the strings, usually three I think, are all slightly tuned differently so that together they make up one sound and I hear the slightly out of tune bits and it annoys me. Is that how pianos work or am I completely fucking wrong here? I didn’t like Hendrix because most everything he did was way out of tune to me. I recognise that he was probably a very talented guitar player but what he played just sounded horrible to me. I fucking loved Robin Trower stuff and people have compared the two guitar styles to one another. It’s just that, to me, Trower sounded in tune and Hendrix didn’t. LITTLE PEOPLE These days I almost exclusively only listen to music that comes to me by way of Lonely Whistle, KAW, Bliss, and a few other small-time truly underground “labels” that put out compilations and things by such as myself. It’s a bit funny, but some of them usually try to give the idea that they are somehow an altogether bigger organisation than just some bloke in his bedroom with a dodgy tape dubbing deck. Some are more foreword in admitting their humble realities but some seem to scream WE HATE THE BIG MAJOR RECORD LABELS from every orifice and then act like they are, actually, doing the same thing as them. To some it’s a glorified hobby, to others it’s a major statement bordering on religious fanaticism. In “The Early Days” everyone wanted to do a label thingy. Most never went far but a few still survive. I was going to do a little independent label thingy once with the idiotic assumption that all the local bands and artists would be happy to have such a resource at their disposal. Fucking HELL was I wrong. My pathetic ideas were derided and my good character besmirched for my efforts. I was amazed to discover that 99% of all talentless local musicians were convinced that they were somehow special and just about to be “discovered” by some big faceless corporation who’d throw wads of money at them to do the same shit they did last Thursday night down the pub. Oh dear. And the very mention of getting anything played on radio was met with howls of laughter at my ignorance of HOW THINGS WORK. If I said I knew a guy (Don Campau) who had a radio show (No Pigeonholes) in California (KKUP in Cupertino) who’d play their songs on the air they would either not believe me outright or demand to know how much money THEY would get paid for allowing poor old Don to use their music. No, no, my dear. One does it for free. And you can even get a taped copy of the show to amaze your friends with! I was, of course, always sent away in shame. I do not know of one single instance in all my years of telling this to people whereby someone actually sent Don or anyone like that any music. So I finally just got tired of trying to tell people anything and just withdrew into my own head and my own bedroom and did it alone, like some weird addict with a secret habit. As a consequence, I have been on the radio somewhere in the world fairly constantly since 1981 and my tapes have gone to all corners of the globe, much to my amazement, and not one of those self important musical assholes I met along my travels have I ever heard of again. So it would seem that in my entire history of music on various wee labels and radio shows I have yet to personally meet more than, I think, three people in the underground music scene. And those were all at once one weekend thanks to the God Campau. I really want to meet Lord Litter (German musician and Radio guy on Radio Marabu), Mark Ritchie (KAWtapes, musician, and all around good egg), and Alessandro Crestani (Best Kept Secret label in Italy). But all of these guys live a million miles away. I have, though, corresponded with possibly hundreds of such folk through the post. Remember, I’m from the OLD days before email. I’m sure that the internet will prove a welcome thing to the underground music scene but I really don’t think one should count on it entirely yet. I for one find the internet in it’s current state to be a ramshackle and disappointing thing. It’s got to change or it’ll fucking die of it’s own complications. And I have no desire to set up a web site for my music. I’m sure there are others who could do me bigger favours with their own sites and I’m afraid there are just too damn many people out there trying to do that sort of shit. It’s self-defeating if there is an overload of websites about insignificant, unknown but self-important little fuckers you really aren’t interested in. But it’s early days yet and maybe things will get better sorted out. THE POINT But the point (ah- there’s that point thing again) is that I am really happy and proud to have come in contact with such folks and to have had my music travel the world. It boggles my mind sometimes. Crap Oklahoma farm boy makes good. Sort of. The fact that I have yet to make ten pence from all this effort is of no consequence to me, really. I don’t even sell my own tapes. I let others do it and expect not a dime in return. I learned rather early in my musical career that if I wanted to make money at this music thing then I was going about it all wrong. But that was fine with me. Music became my own personal statue, my monument, and one day my gravestone. It is the mark of my having once passed this way. And though I’m fairly certain that should I die tomorrow my music would be mostly dead within a year or so, it gives me a great sense of accomplishment and self worth that nothing else in life ever has.  And really, isn’t that the point? Yes, that “point” business again. Ever ask yourself “What’s the point”? The point is that life is shit, doesn’t last very long, but it’s all we’ve got at the moment. And even though the actual audience for our underground music is a small, specialist, and scattered crew it’s still somehow really good to be part of it. Fuck knows- maybe somewhere out there, completely unknown to me, there’s a kid with his ear pressed to whatever today’s equivalent of a blue Panasonic transistor radio is and he’s listening to ME. But hold on here. I’ve found that most people are not in the least bit interested when I’ve tried to expose them to my music. In fact some are quite insulting and just plain mean about it. The worst pain in my life is when someone horribly derides my music and makes fun of me like I was the village idiot dancing for their amusement. I mean it. It fucking hurts. However, it doesn’t hurt at all if somebody tears my music to shreads in a well done review. That’s fine. An intelligent slagging off is almost a good thing. You respect it even if you don’t agree with it. But to just attack my BEING simply for the fact that I dare to do origional music at all does hurt. So why then do I still take the chance of trying to get people to listen to my music by giving away tapes all the time? I don’t really know. I was at someone’s party once who I had given quite a few of my tapes to over time and I happened to notice them on the shelf among all their other cassettes. I was pleased to see so many of my tapes all in one place and commented on it. He said he’d never listened to a single one of them. I can not describe how awful I felt. I stole a bottle of scotch from the kitchen  when no one was watching and left the party to wander around the streets of London drunk and screaming at people. Why I wasn’t arrested or beaten to a pulp I’ll never know. I suppose it’s sort of good that most “normal” people wouldn’t dare listen to true underground music out of fear that their peers might find out. The results could be devastating to anyone trying to be part of that self-appointed clan of morons who truly believe that only THEY are really with it. THEY are usually the sort of people I loathe anyway. THEY can fucking listen to the shite radio or to their sacred record collection so they’ll all have the same shit to talk about and none of their kind will feel left out. They are like religious fanatics on a witch hunt to destroy anything unfamiliar and therefore alien. Not just to ignore alternative musical tastes, but to seek out those of such mind and either convert or destroy them. Fuckers like that can actually get so disturbed and upset about a lack of interest in or knowledge of their little musical world that they will even resort to physical violence. It’s true. I saw a real bust-up in a pub spawned by an argument over what was PUNK and what was NEW WAVE. Who gives a shit? I still see sad bastards with their fashion victim hair and ancient (replica?) gig T-shirts still trying to act like it’s the days of punk and they aren’t really pathetic mindless zombies eating up everything thrown at them in the name of nostalgia. Fucking Hell, don’t you lot ever change or grow? So this whole music thing has also been the loneliest times I’ve ever had. I can’t name a single person I know and see on a regular basis who gives a damn about my music. Some people like me for other reasons, most dislike me for unknown reasons, but I can think of no one who likes me because they like my music. And that, to me, makes for a very lonely life indeed. EQ Equalisers. Oh dear. Evil things in the wrong hands, and mine used to be just those hands. I used to try and try to use equalisers to make up for my shitty recording quality and substandard monitoring methods. Bloody Hell. I’d tweak and adjust things for hours to get my master tapes sounding just right in my cheap headphones. And as soon as I’d put it on somebody else’s stereo for them and me to listen to it would be painfully obvious through the tinny tinkings and muffled rumbles that the music had become lost somewhere in the shite. And believe me- nothing so quickly drives someone to find excuses for shutting down the stereo as a friend’s badly recorded demo tape. They’d politely nod their heads 15 seconds into my hour long creation and then say something like “hey, have you heard this ZZ Top album?” and I’d see all my effort and hope running for the horizon with it’s ass on fire. Then one day I read some small piece of musical wisdom that said an equaliser is NOT an instrument and should NOT be used to make up for lousy sound. It should be used only to SLIGHTLY adjust the delicate tonal quality of the sound. If it sounds bad in the first place no amount of EQ is going to fix it. If you bear that in mind it greatly helps your cheap home grown recording setup. Thankfully there is a lot of good quality recording stuff for computer these days, but if you don’t have a computer and are as skint as I am you can still get fucking good quality out of tape or whatever. Just always tell yourself “I will NOT fix it in the mix” and get it right in the first place. It’s not expensive, it’s just clever. My early recordings, and some of my later ones for that matter, are often barely listenable due to crap recording techniques. And if it’s badly recorded (lo-fi) it’s often ignored. Most people equate bad recording quality with bad musicianship or lousy songwriting. It’s a shame but that’s the way it is. It seems like only us skint underground music makers can listen to something without deriding it if the recording quality isn’t up to modern standards. And I must say that some of my early recordings are fucking AWFUL that way. Now I know better and if I try it’ll come out good. I could go on about the little things I’ve learned over the years about how to get good recording from an old 4-track tape deck but what with all the new great quality recording gear available these days it would be like hearing your grandad waffle on about how to drive a Model-T Ford. The point is that no matter what you’re using to record on, try to get it as good as possible BEFORE mucking about with EQ and stuff. People don’t really see lo-fi recording as quaint or whatever. Most just see it as crap. It’s not that hard to get a decent recording even with really primitive stuff. MICROPHONES My favourite microphone used to be this 1950’s Electrovoice thing some guy gave me. He’d gotten a couple of old mics at a charity shop or car boot sale or somewhere that had been turned into bookends and gave me, or sold me cheap, one of them. It looked so cool. Elvis the Mic. Unfortunately it didn’t work. Well, it did work but it broke up and distorted a lot. The diaphragm was broken or something. Anyway, I tore apart one of those cheap plastic mics you get from like Dixon’s or somewhere and put all the guts into the 1950’s mic. I used it that way for years before somebody stole it. It was a great live gig mic because the cheap guts in it were so bad it wouldn’t pick up much beyond a few inches away so it wasn’t prone to squealing and feeding back like “good” mics do in a live setting. A lot of bands try to play WAY too loud at gigs and then you can’t hear a fucking word they sing because they can’t turn the microphones up enough without feeding back. USE CHEAP MICS YOU STUPID PRATTS. Save your quality fashion items for the studio or the photo shoot. I still like to use cheap microphones because they cost seven quid, nobody steals them at gigs and, like strings, even the cheap shitty ones seem to be pretty good these days as far as sound quality goes. I am not at all impressed when somebody shows me their expensive microphones. They sort of remind me of those sad bastards who take you over to their record collection and carefully pull out some old tawddle and offer it up for you to see with such words as, “Look- original spelling mistakes on the cover! Never been played! Worth a fortune!” Oh dear. Not to me, it ain’t. It’s fucking VINYL and it’s probably crap music anyway. It just makes me want to grab the album out of their hands and fling it at the wall shouting “And look- it really flies!” Dead Tom was great when he sang (or whatever you call it he did) sometimes with us. At a live Joe’s Nose gig in some jumped up recording studio/venue the knobs that ran the place made us use their very expensive mics instead of our own shit. I think they were recording the gig or something. We may have been supporting Henry Rollins that night. Anyway, at the end of our set a sweaty knackered Dead Tom stood at the front of the stage dangling this expensive mic by the cord in front of the riotous crowd of skinheads and mohawks, and I’m sure he knew the knobs were watching, and just, disdainfully........let go of the mic. It plunged headfirst onto the floor with an almighty amplified WHUMPWHANG and we buggered offstage. I’m not entirely sure, but I think some mohawk nicked it before the knobs made it to the stage to collect their gear. Love ya, Tom. CENSORSHIT So I’m not allowed to listen to things like Screwdriver in public, and yes there ARE laws to that effect here, but violently racist music is played all over pirate radio and poor stupid fuckwits are allowed to go around with a chip on their shoulder spouting hatred and stupidity but it’s all right as long as a nigger, wigger, or religious fanatic says it. Fucking HELL what has happened to society? Music about fucking people up, shooting people, and race hate is tolerated as long as it’s “nigger music”. Try to be white and say the same shit in your music and you’ll be in deep trouble. There are even laws in Britain against free speech and thought if it’s racist, but in reality it’s only wrong for non-black people. I saw  America get really fucked up because of this shit but I didn’t expect it in England as well. It’s bad enough that in this fucked up little country you can go to prison for THINKING, but the worst bit is how blatantly these laws are used against the wrong people. I know, I live here and I see it happening all the time. Black racist violence against non blacks is largely played down. Even “black on black” violence is largely ignored by the media. But any crime against a black or Asian person perpetrated by whites(ish) makes major headlines and  accusations of racism, even if the crime WASN’T racially motivated. Fuck off. I see a Hell of a lot of crime against whites that never gets a peep in the news and unfortunately there’s a general feeling in society at the moment that we mustn’t make a fuss about it. It’s blamed on “institutional racism” or even blamed on the victims themselves somehow. But I don’t have the time or the patience to go into all that here. It’s the music thing I want to touch on. Why is it socially acceptable for hate music to be spread around the airwaves by a lot of radio stations as long as it’s BLACK hate music? The same thing from a NON-BLACK station would be instantly shut down amid a screaming media circus and somebody’s going to jail. Don’t get me wrong here. I’m not for ANY form of censorship, and unfortunately there actually is NO such thing as freedom of speech in England which is another fucked up issue altogether, but I’m severely against the one-sided view that hateful and hurtful rantings from blacks or Muslims or Jews or take your fucking pick is to be tolerated whereas the same thing from anybody represented as  “white” is not. That is a fucking DANGEROUS road to travel and there are signs that this is causing some severe damage to the fabric of society. Let me explain myself here. I don’t see anything wrong with venting your anger or views by way of music, I’m just against the fact that it’s only socially acceptable for SOME and not for everyone. I quite often have strong views against things like religion and spout my hatred blatantly in my music. Most of that sort of thing never seems to get noticed or played on the radio. Fair enough. I accept that it might be offensive to some people and if they choose to censor me then there’s nothing I can do about it. It’s THEY who are strange, not me. I’m not the one sticking my head in the sand. To refuse to hear someone’s views on the grounds that those views might be offensive it to ignore a truth. The very fact that those views exist is confirmation of that. Not that everybody’s views are necessarily healthy or helpful in any way. Fuck knows there are a lot of sick, twisted fuckers about in my view (ha ha). But such things, good or bad, are a reflection of the real world. Ignore them at your peril. Music is and always has been a reflection of the society it came from and if there’s a problem in the society then that problem often makes it’s appearance in music very early on. Archaeologists should take note. But when society makes it a crime to have free speech in music, or any other form, then society is going wrong and all of human history knows what happens when censorship gets out of hand. Dictatorships, underground movements, civil wars, and rewritten history books. When people are not allowed to express their views in their society then that society is failing. We live in a REAL world and it’s not a perfect world. If you censor part of that world then instead of “curing” the trouble you give it credence and legitimacy and it becomes the underdog, the “us against them”, the festering cancer in hidden back rooms and basements that grows unseen and unchecked until it’s suddenly bursting forth right in society’s blinkered face to bite that face off. Black Panthers. The KKK. The Nation of Islam...don’t ignore things just because you aren’t interested. Take note. But DON’T censor some things and at the same time let others go. Censorship doesn’t work and doesn’t help anything. Selective censorship is an even greater evil. So make insane laws and lop-sided social values like severe reprimand for racist talk from “whites” and what you get is the increase in intolerance and racist crime that we’ve seen lately. But you get shit from BOTH sides of that issue. If you’re not allowed to vent your views you resent it. If you know somebody isn’t allowed to vent their views toward you then the temptation is there to push things that extra bit too far just because you know you can get away with it. Far from curing any problems, it has made matters worse. A black friend of mine recently said “This is a great time to be black. You can get away with anything.” I found that to be a terribly shitty thing be coming from a seemingly intelligent guy like him, but then I’m sure I’d probably think just the same way if I were in his shoes. Society is a hard place to live in with all it’s weird rules, laws and intrusive governmental bullshit and if you see a way by which you can get one up on everybody else then the temptation is too great to resist. That’s why people play the lottery. Not so they can give large amounts of money to the government or to nice charitable causes, but so that if they win a bundle they can opt out of the fucking rat race and to Hell with the rest of you poor sods. Just remember It’s the real world out there and everybody isn’t going to like or understand everybody else all the time. But don’t just look the other way and hope it all works out by itself. It fucking won’t. And things may never get settled in any way by an equal airing of people’s predjuces, but it’s a far more socially healthy thing to allow EVERYONE the right to have and speak their views than to try to stamp out certain unfashionable intollerances by selective censorship. As a kid I never suspected that music could be used as such a vehicle for hatred to the extent that it is today. Well, not really just today. If you study a little music history you’ll find it has always been a vehicle for opinion, good or bad. But as a child I didn’t know that. I knew a lot of country music was stupid lowlife crap for stupid lowlife rednecks, and that the world of country music often involved drunken fights, bigotry, and kicking the shit out of anyone who wasn’t part of it, but the whole gangster nigger and skinhead thing didn’t even exist to my knowledge. I think it was Steppenwolf that first turned me on to the social criticism thing. I was just at the age to start understanding shit like the Viet Nam war and Big Brother. Gill-Scott Heron, James Brown, Sly Stone, the Isley Brothers and loads of other black artists were obviously very black conscious, sometimes even a bit militant, and as a kid they were some of my favourite artists, but whatever their message was it was delivered with intelligence and, the bit that got my attention in the first place, GREAT music. I thought I was living in a time when everybody was generally cool with each other as long as you weren’t an idiot. All that racism crap was like something out of the history books. It didn’t touch the lives of us kids from that era. We were perfectly happy to have friends of any and every type, race, gender, and nationality. It just came easy to us. And I think music played a big part in it. Nobody cared what colour or nationality the bloody artist was as long as the music was good. It wasn’t until I got a little older and saw shit like drunken Indians sniffing copper spray paint, black kids stealing our lunch money, and Mexican kids at school drunk and doped out of their skulls at such a young age that things began to go bad. To be Mexican was to be a drugged up car thief, to be Irish was to be a drunken, ill tempered cunt. To be Catholic or Jewish was to feel superior to your fellow classmates. The sad thing was that it was the older folks like the parents and grandparents that took you as a child and made you into a fuckwit. You had to be brainwashed into being some kind of stereotype and hate all who were different. Had we been left to our own thoughts about such matters we would have grown up a lot better educated. My own parents were in no way racist or weird but I knew there was a lot of it about from other kids. But when music was so important in those early years to my friends and me we didn’t have a bigoted thought in our heads. To appreciate music was to appreciate cultures and people from all over the fucking world and, in some way, to be educated about others. But now we live in a world that is retarded from the world of my childhood, partly because of censorship, and at my age I see music as suffering greatly from the cancerous stupidity forced upon us by idiotic elders and the Nanny mentality of crap government. Let’s face it- music today sucks. It sucks because of, among other things, it’s commercialism, it’s hatred, and it’s lack of talent. Where are the likes of Miles Davis, Wes Montgomery, John Coltrane... care to know what B.B. King thinks about gangster music? Dead Tom and I were turned away from an MC Hammer gig by the doorman who took our money and then told us that it was a “blacks only” gig and if we didn’t leave we’d end up dead and he wouldn’t do a thing to stop it. Lovely. But we didn’t blame MC Hammer for it. We blamed the local bigoted, racist moronic niggers who made it their business to stir up intolerance at every opportunity for any old reason. I’ve got some great stories to tell about when I was the only white guy in a reggae band. Scary times indeed. But a fucking great band. Anyway...“You’re free to speak your mind, my friend, as long as you agree with me.”- Steppenwolf. “I’m no physicist, but I know what matters.”- Popeye. PICKUPS The two humbucker pickups on my old Gibson SG guitar were the best pickup arrangement I’ve ever had. I really can’t stand the way a Strat is set up with those three single coil pickups. To me they always sound harsh and the middle one gets right in the way of my playing because I like my pickups to be really close to the strings. I just love that “fat” blues sound from like a Gibson with those big double coil pickups and they also sound really good when distorted. My current guitar pickup arrangement is a big fat double coil humbucker thing at the neck position and a single coil back at the bridge. I seem to get along with this set-up. I’ve done away with the tone and volume pots.They’re usually crap anyway. I usually play the bass with a pick and on my bass the pickups are in EXACTLY the wrong place. I’ll eventually gut the bastard and change all that. TAPES OR WHATEVER I used to make these bloody long epic works of music and put them out on 60 or 90 minute tapes but I found that if you do a really long tape it doesn’t matter how good it is, a lot of it goes unnoticed. If you do shorter tapes it seems to be more remembered or something. That’s why I often send little three or four song tapes for radio play. It’s easier for the DJ to select something they want than if they had to trawl through 90 minutes of my heartfelt epic looking for something that stands out to play on the radio. I quite like the thing of doing split tapes with people. Mark of KAW, bless him, seems to put out a lot of split tapes of two different people or bands and I find it a lot more listenable than compilations. It seems that a lot of compilations are really just a collection of unrelated, unremarkable songs by people you never heard of (and never will again) and such compiles are therefore hard listening and often forgettable. The split thing is a much more “user friendly” listen. And it keeps people from putting out too much stuff of theirs all at once on some collection and thus creating audio boredom. Just 30 or 45 minutes is really a very good amount of time to showcase your stuff at a go. I’m more likely to listen to both sides of a split tape even if I don’t particularly like one of the artists on it. However, not everyone is happy with such a setup. Again, the fuckwit purists. Crap bands always seem to think that EVERY fucking song they do is FANTASTIC and that EVERYONE will want to hear EVERYTHING they’ve ever done ALL THE TIME so they put out these lengthy collections of EVERY fucking THING they’ve ever recorded no matter how bloody awful and long it really is. This is death for your music. Small selected doses of your work are far more likely to get heard and noticed than epic creations. At least that’s my experience and my view. Still, it hasn’t stopped me from putting out loads of shite on long tapes from time to time...but then I don’t really mind not being listened to. I’ve gotten used to it. I really hate the fact that now it’s fairly cheap and easy for any old moron to make a CD of their intolerable shite, and any old moron usually DOES.  All that lousy home-made music in all it’s crappily recorded quality in a wonderful digital format. Makes me want to puke. I think it’s because home recordable CD is a fairly new thing at this time and every idiot wants to be on a CD to impress their friends so it’s not the QUALITY that counts, it’s the cool cover art and sheer number of CD’s you can do, launching each one with fresh hype and bullshit even though nobody cared about the LAST one you fucking did. The actual music means very little. I’m still too skint to have recordable CD, so it’s also sour grapes all around. But there really is far too much absolute shite being recorded and put out these days. But it was like that in the early days of cassette recording. Way too much pure CRAP was put on tape just because it was cool to be on a tape. I was quite guilty of that myself. I wish I could go back in time and erase about 75% of the shit I put out on tape over the years. I am definitely guilty of putting out vast volumes of talentless, feeble soundings just because I thought it was really cool. But, as is often the case with callow youth, I was a fucking wanker. Probably still am, but at least I only try to put out my best stuff now. I actually DO throw away stuff no matter how hard I’ve worked on it if it just sounds like crap to me. MIXERS AND STUFF Ever hear of a sound man that actually knew what they were doing and did a good job? FUCK NO. All sound men are idiotic cunts too stupid to play an instrument. Knob twiddlers. Music destroyers. Useless fuckwits. In the beginning I had almost every gig I did absolutely ruined by these cave men. Then I finally decided there was no reason why I couldn’t run the sound myself as well as play the music. Let’s face it- if you’re a musician you are also a technician by default. Especially if you were as skint as me and had to use the sort of rubbush I had to make do with from pawn shops and the like. So I started doing it myself and believe me there was a lot of friction involved when I told Soundy Man (Homo Stupidious) to fuck off. A lot of the time I used to put a small shitty mixer on stage and run the sound myself either in bands or solo and the most I’d let a sound man have was a single mono output to run through his big knob-encrusted blinky lights oversized million watt deck of shite. Never give them more than the bare minimum of stuff to screw up. And don’t take any of their crap, either. The audience is there to see YOU, not some wanker in the corner trying to act important or impress people.. That’s what those pathetic club DJ’s do. The more you let a sound man have, the more he CAN and WILL  fuck up. Just fucking REFUSE to let the cunt ruin your gig. Nobody knows your music like YOU do so do your own sound and just maybe it’ll sound all right for a change. And there’s really no need to get all stereo in most small shitty venues. These places weren’t made for decent sound anyway. They were made to pack in as many poor fuckwits as possible, charge them way too much money to get in, and then make them buy overpriced shitty beer from surly barstaff while listening to whatever shite local band happens to be on that night because they’re all brainwashed into believing that this is the place to be if you want to be cool. Good sound never comes into it. Ever notice that most places that put on gigs have got WAY too big PA speakers, usually taking up valuable “stage” space, and a sound system ten times too powerful for the place? And some insane Darwinian throwback leaping around on the mixing desk playing with the knobs and blinky lights and trying to find out just how badly one can use an equaliser. I used to just use a little cheap 80 watt mixer onstage for monitoring and only let the stupid Sound-ape simply amplify what I already had. Never ever let anybody take control of YOUR gig. I want to see a Wicker Man full of sound men and their oversized mixing desks. If you use intelligence and go for a good clear sound instead of just the most fucking volume you can get then you will find that your music will stand out from the hundreds of other local musical assholes. If you’re serious about your gig, be HEARD but CLEARLY for fuck sake. I hate band practice because it’s often just a drunken noisefest and has nothing to do with actually getting the songs right. It’s like turning children loose with guns or pointy sticks and expecting them to play nice with each other. In the practice space it’s usually just a contest to see who’s got the loudest amp or the stupidest pose. It’s very rare in my experience for any band to actually USE band practice to hone their craft. But if you can generate a reasonable level of intelligence in the practice room then I think it’s a good idea to practice as if it were a live gig, getting the mix right and working out the song list, and that way you’ll know exactly how to run your own show when you do play live. Minimise the damage that can be done to your sound by maximising your control over it. Remember- the sound man is the enemy. He is only there to do you harm. It is not even human. It is less than the dogshit you scraped off the bottom of your shoe. No one will care if you shoot him. Kill the vermin. He is Evil. He is the Anti-sound. You must destroy the Evil Anti-sound. Kill. Kill. Terminate. Exterminate.