Like Being Struck By Lightning

I quit the music business in 1992. Certainly as far as running my own record label went. For the next ten years or so I was literally a one man band. The band – if you could call it a band – was Ghostword. After that one record in 1995, I carried on making electronic music from my bedsit in Bristol. Computers, new music technology, the internet, were all changing the landscape at what seemed to be an ever increasing pace.

We can probably skim through those ten years.

I made a couple of well put together demos that generated some interest in my music. There was a music tech magazine called The Mix that had a section each month dedicated to reviewing reader’s demos. Both of the tapes I submitted to them got positive reviews. A couple of different A&R people were interested in what I was doing off the back of that. In one case, where the woman had a connection with (and soft spot for) Bristol, I came close to getting a deal with a London-based record label. It never came to anything – which in retrospect seems like a good thing. The music I was making wasn’t really that good.

I also didn’t have as much time for music as I once had. There were too many other things going on in Bristol. I had a job, that started as mostly evenings and weekends and then began to become full time. There were bands to go see, socialising at weekends, films, writers group.

In the room opposite mine, among an ever changing cast of tenants, there was a guy who worked as a filmmaker. He became involved in a small local cinema called (I think) The Cube. They would show arty and experimental films. At some point he’d had the idea of showing films combined with live music and we were going to collaborate on this project. It sounded cool in theory, but I’m not sure how it would’ve turned out in practice.

There were a lot of interesting things going on in Bristol at that time. Bands like Portishead and Massive Attack – artists like Tricky and Roni Size - had put the city firmly on the map. Aardrman were gaining a foothold in the animation market. (The guy renting the basement flat below where I lived worked for Aardman). Every day I walked past the recently added (but subsequently to become iconic) Banksy mural The Mild, Mild West. Where I worked, alongside a lot of students, there were a fair scattering of performance poets, writers, musicians, artists. It felt like a creative scene, but not one that I ever quite became a part of.

I didn’t play live. I didn’t get to perform anything. I worked alone, with the computers in my bedroom. I knew people in bands. I knew people making films. I had friends of friends of people who were in the scene. I almost certainly knew people who would’ve known who Banksy was (bearing in mind back then most people outside of Bristol wouldn’t have heard of him). Hell, there’s every chance I could’ve met Banksy. He could’ve been working in the same office as me.

 But I digress.

By the time the new millennium kicked in, I was soon to be living in Cornwall. In Penzance. From The Mild, Mild West to the far, far west. There were no scenes here. (Probably not true, there were for sure scenes in Penzance, but they would’ve been smaller, more insular and harder to break into). But it didn’t matter because now the internet was the new scene. I was making music with a piece of software known then as Fruity Loops (It grew up to become the more soberly branded FL Studio). Designed for use by people making dance music. Like an upscaled version of tracker programmes that had been prevalent in the 90s on the Atari and Amiga.

Loosely affiliated to Fruity Loops was an online music community called Section Z. Here was a place where creators could hang out and share their music with other likeminded people. There was no Soundcloud or Bandcamp back then. Even Myspace was yet to exist.

I liked Fruity Loops as a tool for making music. I fully embraced this new computer age. In Bristol I’d had a bulky Yamaha analogue keyboard, physical rack units for reverbs and compression, an analogue bass unit, a sampler the size of a large VCR and three times as heavy. Wires and connectors all over the place. A box that supposedly kept all these different units synced to each other running off midi data spat out from a second hand Atari computer.

There were so many places for things to go wrong. It felt like you needed to pass an Open University degree just to get everything connected and working. And by the time you’d done all that, you had no energy left to be creative. Minimalism I felt was the way to go. In a short space of time all that equipment – enough to fill up a decent sized bedroom – had been replaced by a laptop that you could (as the name suggested) rest on your lap.

Back on Section Z I found a niche for myself. I was making dub-inflected electronic music at this point. People listened and downloaded tracks in modest numbers (everything on the internet felt modest back then). I got some nice feedback. I found fellow artists who made music I enjoyed. Section Z was the launchpad for many different artists, I’m sure, but none went on to be bigger than Deadmau5. (If you don’t know who that is – let’s just say he’s a Canadian electronic musician who has received seven Grammy Award nominations and won four Juno Awards for his songs. Oh, and he performs live wearing a giant mouse head).

It feels odd in retrospect that there we were on the same platform all those years ago. Maybe fifty people would download one of my songs, a few hundred one of his. And then a few years later he’d become a multi-millionaire and… I hadn’t.

(I didn’t want to be rich, but to have made some money from my music would’ve been helpful. And the anonymity of a giant mouse head would’ve suited my personality.)

After 2002 my music career (it wasn’t anything you could call a career) took a backseat to my writing. I drifted away from Section Z and meanwhile 2003 saw the arrival of Myspace. Music sharing on the internet started to upscale just as I was downscaling.

*

I wrote for a long time. I wrote a whole novel in three days. I wrote another novel in the month after my fortieth birthday. I sold five short stories. I wrote ten times that number that I failed to sell. I was a man of words. Then I guess I got bored of the words. Writing took me a lot of time and effort. The end result was often satisfying, but it was a lot of pain for not much gain. You can write a crap song in under an hour, but to write a crap story might take a week or more. If you’re going to fail at something, fail at something that requires less effort. (Didn’t Samuel Beckett say something like that? Maybe not…)

I was back on the music trail by 2008, but nothing really changed until around 2015 when I bought my first guitar. It wasn’t an oh-my-god midlife crisis decision to buy a guitar. It was done on a bit of a whim. The first decade of the new millennium had been a rollercoaster of emotions, travel and finances. It spat me out in a bad place and it took me a while to recover. But 2015 was about the sweet spot for my finances. I’d gone from scary debt, to reasonable savings and a random fancy to get a guitar was something I didn’t have to immediately shut down with the prevailing thought, ‘Well obviously I can’t afford that.’

Let’s be clear, I can’t play the guitar. I never learnt. (I did try, via multiple YouTube tutorials). I’m too dyspraxic, too uncoordinated. But I found a way to eke out a few basic chords, to layer some plucked notes on top of each other.  I had achieved my own (primitive) style. It gave me a new way to write music and it set me off on my songwriting career.

(For context, in DFTND, Tim and Dave wrote the songs. In 91 Vibrations, if we had lyrics at all they were often abstract words paraphrased from SF tropes or movies. For C.O.M.A. I’d written stream of conscious nonsense. When we reconvened 91 Vibrations around 2012 I did start writing proper lyrics – we even had a never to be released album that was 90% songs, some written by my brother and the rest by me – but none of those lyrics were personal to me.)

For all the different music tastes that had fed into all the different types of music I’d tried to make, there was still an itch I wanted to scratch. It was represented by The Go-Betweens, who I worshipped. (Spring Hill Fayre is another solid top ten album of all time for me, but the group made loads of great music.) There were numerous others that I aspired to. The Field Mice. The Lucksmiths. Camera Obscura.

This is where The Goodbye Look took shape - what I chose later to describe as 'literary infused indie pop songs' (or some such marketing bollocks). I gradually made some developments in my guitar playing style. I got better at crafting lyrics to go with the music. Things were coming together. All I lacked was a voice.

I mean I had a voice. A thin, speak-sing style voice, like an anaemic Leonard Cohen. But I wanted something more expressive, something that would add the colour to my sparse and scratchy monochrome music. I had no idea where I was going to find it. I’d decided on a female vocalist. Perhaps, harking back to Richard (the office manager from my Bristol days), I felt a female voice was best suited to the type of music I was trying to make.

But great singers prepared to sing the songs of a novice songwriter don’t just grow on trees. Or do they? I’m not sure how deep into my search I’d got when I came upon Reddit. Bear in mind Reddit had been going for about a decade at this point, but it had mostly passed me by. I didn’t even really get what it was for. (I still don’t really). Anyway Reddit had a sub-reddit at the time that was dedicated to musicians looking for singers and singers looking for musicians. Mostly what it was (when I signed up and took a cursory look) was dance music producers looking for female singers who could belt out a few ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ and ‘you take my love higher’ and other such hackneyed phrases to be inserted over the top of their 130 beats per minute techno bangers.

It certainly wasn’t a promising ratio when virtually every post was some guy looking for someone to sing on their project. I didn’t hold out any high hopes. Then, randomly, like being struck by lightning, I logged in a day or two later as I was about to sit down for a lunch break and there was a post from someone looking for a songwriter with original songs they needed a singer for. It was exactly what I needed.

The post had been made less than thirty minutes earlier. I dropped everything, gathered together 3 or 4 of my best scratchy lo-fi demos and sent a link to where they could be heard. The singer – an Italian called Ilaria (but recording under the anglicised name Hilary) – wrote back shortly afterwards. She liked the demos. She suggested trying out a couple of them to see how they turned out.

It was pure right place, right time. I’m sure if I’d been a day later, several hours later or even an hour later, there would’ve been many other respondents in the queue ahead of me. And even discarding the techno bros, many would’ve had better songs to offer than mine.

Across the following few months the first Goodbye Look release took shape. Three from those original four songs and then three newer songs were eventually recorded. I helped out by funding a better microphone for Ilaria to record with. I availed myself of my brother’s skills for arranging, producing and playing, to turn those scratchy demos into decent sounding songs. I converted a simple guitar based song called Deep Below into a sweet little electronic number, by transposing the guitar part on to an electronic piano. Tim added some bass and pads.

That first Goodbye Look ep was probably one of the highlights of my long musical career. Ilaria had an amazing voice. She suited the songs really well. I was new to this type of music and while it still sounded DIY and lo-fi and like what it was (largely constructed in my bedroom), it seemed to come out far better than I could’ve hoped for.

The Goodbye Look had a long way to go and there were a range of bumps on the way – not least the loss of Ilaria (not just to The Goodbye Look, but to music making in general) – that set us back, but I’d had a huge share of luck at the start of the journey and I’d made the best of it. It was the closest I’d ever come to winning the lottery and I’d barely even got around to buying my first ticket.