The Authorised Biography

We all do things when we're younger that we'd really rather not be reminded of later in life. Sadly, this has just happened to me, as Barry has requested that I divulge the details of a particularly embarrassing musical tragedy that he and I were both involved in. 

The year was 1991. I had been vaguely interested in music for about two years. For my ninth birthday I received a small sampling keyboard, which enabled you to record a short snippet of sound and then play it back at varying pitches on the keys. I freely admit now that when I asked for this contraption, I had no intention of using it for anything musical - I'd seen one on a pathetic children's programme starring Bill Oddie, and television was a very potent influence on me in those days.

Having grown bored of the novelty of the instrument, I eventually found myself drawn towards more its melodic uses. This is the point at which I began my compositional pursuits. My enthusiasm for writing songs was not dimmed by the fact that I had no subjects to write lyrics about, and as a result a rather surreal string of tunes was begun. My first was titled "Illogically Simple":

That was the chorus. Fortunately, for all our sakes, I don't remember the rest. This masterpiece was followed by "I Am The One To Repair Your Nose" - the title may suggest that it'd be a winning advert for a plastic surgeon, but its lyrics remained in the same vein as my first song. The first verse was:

The chorus consisted of the title, sung four times. This song got as far as being performed in my Music class at the time. By now, there was no stopping me, and as time went on I had composed several more crimes against the ears in the same style. One of them, "Textile Traffic", was the one that lead to the formation of a band - Rocks And Minerals.

The band's name came about in a curious fashion, as you would imagine from everything I've told you so far. One lunchtime, I was bored in the school playground. Having recently purchased a book about rocks and things of that nature, I was studying the stones on the ground. While staring down into the soil, a girl came up to me and asked me what I was doing (I admit it must have looked odd). I replied: "I'm looking for rocks and minerals." She found this rather mirthsome, and every time she saw me after that she shouted out "rocks and minerals!" My theory was that choosing this for our band name would turn her into our very own groupie - whenever she was in my presence, our name would be shouted out for all to hear. We should have got her to introduce us on stage...

...Because the next step of our band's glittering rise to school-wide stardom was to perform at the 1991 Christmas concert. I seem to remember that the other members of the band booked us for the extravaganza without my knowledge while I was away due to illness, but nevertheless we set about practising in the music room each day.

I haven't yet told you about the others in the band, and it's fair to say that we were an odd bunch in more ways than one. I was the keyboard player and also took charge of our infamous drum machine, of which more will be explained shortly. Then there was Robert, a budding guitarist who had written his own song to add to our repertoire titled "X-Ray Grass". Barry was just one of the numerous members of the group who sang and shook an assortment of percussion instruments. I honestly can't remember how many there were at this time, or at any other time in our history, or indeed some of their names. Not so much a band, really - more of a bizarre collective with regular changes in personnel.

Because of our vast size, I seem to remember that fitting everyone in the practice room at once wasn't easy. It also made actually practicing anything difficult, as getting everyone's attention at the same time was impossible. My drum machine only held two user-programmable beats, and the memory was cleared every time it was unplugged, so I had to re-program it each time it was used. This led to my intense frustration every time I was trying to concentrate on tapping the pathetic plastic pads while someone was jabbering away in my earhole. I shouted a lot, as I recall.

It seems almost redundant to say that our performance was met with bewilderment by everyone who had the misfortune to attend that concert. Nevertheless, we weren't stopped by anyone - in fact, we were positively encouraged. The following term, our music teacher even arranged for us to visit a nearby recording studio for the day to record five of our songs. I had to listen to them again recently, for reasons that will become apparent towards the bottom of the page, and all I can say is that I'm glad I wasn't one of the singers. You can distinctly hear someone whispering during the instrumental break of one of the tracks, confident in the belief that they won't be picked up by the extremely sensitive studio microphone.

This madness continued over the next couple of years, with performances at each Christmas concert to confuse the throng of parents, but it began to slow down as I ran out of stupid lyrics and people wisely lost interest. I only wrote one more song for the band after our recording session, and our tortuous freak-show ran out of steam when we moved on to high school.

So, what happened after that? Well, I carried on with my musical exploits, but turned my attention to weird instrumental electronic stuff instead. I never bothered writing a song again, as it was obvious that I was useless at writing lyrics. And so the phenomenon known as Rocks And Minerals was merely a painful, yet ever-increasingly distant memory. Until Barry dragged the whole thing up again for this article.