A Musical Year Zero

You can always escape your past if you’re careless enough not to curate it. That’s how I felt about my musical adventures. 2002 was a convenient cut off point. I am a man of words now and all that came before that shall be forgotten.

While I tried my hand at the writing game – and then briefly sold myself as an internet DJ – my brother was enjoying other more fruitful musical adventures. In 2006 The Rustic Age were born. They started out as simple summer holiday entertainment for my niece and nephew, but over the course of several years and several albums they established themselves as a credible band. What our collaborations had lacked – mostly due to my inability to improvise or play more than a few prescribed notes – these three thrived upon. The Rustic Age had no manifesto and no grand plan, it was just three music enthusiasts having fun.

There was no subtext. It was all there in the finished product.

But children grow up eventually. Another essential beauty to The Rustic Age was that they had a defined endpoint. They came, they saw, they laughed at what they saw and then they went away again and everyone felt blessed to have experienced them.

In 2012 I was back in the saddle. I could no more regularly journey to London (now Slough) from the far west, than I could before, but the internet had rendered distances irrelevant. 91 Vibrations reopened for business. A nifty piece of software called Ohm Studio promised to allow people from all locations to play together in real time with no lags or delays. It was never perfect, but then we were never likely to jam (see reasons noted above). It did make sharing ideas and files and all the behind the scenes music making stuff more seamless.

Tim had continued post The Rustic Age to make solo outings, soon adopting his long term alias as Statski. On the side he would moonlight in a successful Moody Blues tribute act (Blue Onyx). I’d made some albums as Ghostword, committing one of those to CD just as that medium was breathing its last. (It revived itself again about 15 years later, or never went away, depending on your reading of musical history). So pooling some ideas to come up with a comeback ep was not difficult.

What this music 2.0 lacked was any cool stories. No neighbours to annoy. No band members to disappear off the face of the earth. No music press interest. No rickety old studios or unprepossessing industrial buildings containing hidden histories. Just the minimal whirr of a hard drive spinning as a few more discrete soft synths were coaxed to make some sympathetic noises while a virtual drum machine beat out its hopeful rhythm.

There was to be one final in person session. Down in the depths of the New Forest where Tim was now attending to half the local avian population, mostly retired from his statistical real world responsibilities, and surrounded by an ever growing array of modular synths. It was a couple of months before the world came to its brief Covid hiatus. I’d brought my guitar up with me from the recesses of Cornwall and across a couple of days we worked on some music together. It was like the old days, but also not like the old days. It was fun and it bore some fruit. It was the only time the two of us ever jammed together, both of us playing guitar.

But at the end of those two days, we’d been cooped together for too long. If I’d been booked in for a week we might’ve ended in separate rooms, ignoring each other. As it was, I walked calmly through the nearby town of New Milton (homeward bound) and was pleasantly surprised to be hailed from across the street by a middle aged man who’d spotted the guitar case on my back and was keen to know what make or model I was carrying. It was the one time in my life that I felt like a bona fide musician. Someone had viewed me as a person who could’ve been on their way to a gig, or someone who could’ve unzipped that case and started to perform for the entertainment of passing strangers. (None of this was true, but I had carried off the pretence.)

Between 2012 and 2017 we dallied with a few projects here and there. Nothing immediately followed that modest return ep. I had a Bandcamp account for Ghostword. We created a separate one for 91 Vibrations. Then at some point we decided to relaunch the old record label, this time purely as an online concern. It made sense to have a central place to collect all the different projects (Statski, Ghostword, 91 Vibrations, the soon to be Tomorrow’s World and The Goodbye Look) in one place.

This was where I was keen to enact my year zero policy. I didn’t want to dwell on the past, I wanted to look forward. I had no interest (and minimal love) for all the things we’d done in the 80s and early 90s. I think Tim had fonder memories of those times and that music. He’d kept the receipts, whereas I had largely adopted a slash and burn policy to my past. We were different people by 2018 when the discreetly branded LR2 set forth on its adventures. I did think there was a potential market for what we were doing. I hoped we could reach an audience via Bandcamp, generate some publicity and make some sales. A decade earlier that would’ve still been possible. A raft of interesting bands had carved small niches for themselves via Myspace and the like, but music was tipping over into saturation point. There was too much of it for anyone to feasibly keep on top of it all. Better people than us were making great music and getting lost in the weeds. I got to reflect on how much publicity and how much radio play I’d accrued in the past with music of a very low wattage.

It had taken me decades to find my feet, to make stuff that seemed to mean something to me and to which I could listen to later without hanging my head in shame. Maybe it didn’t matter that the audience (if there was one) would never find it. Maybe the act of creation was all I needed.

LR2 boasted a lot of bands, but in reality it was just combinations of me making music with different people, supplemented by a steady stream of Statski releases. I was heading away from the margins with my simple indie pop songs, while Tim was drifting with due rigour off into the dreamy realms of ambient and drone music. The final 91 Vibrations release was 80% or more of his making, which served it fine. I think the band ended on a high and if that album and its preceding ep are all that now remains for people to discover, that’s all to the good in my mind.

There’s no real ending though. No antonym for the year zero, although Project 60 is a final statement of sorts. It doesn’t feel like there needs to be an ending. If the audience went home hours ago, but you’re still playing and no one’s come along and unplugged the sound system then I guess you’re free to continue doing whatever the hell you want to.