A brief history of me and bands!

I bought my first bass guitar, a £50 Hohner, when I was 15 from a friend at school. For a few years I was a ‘bedroom bassist’ until I met Mark Day at Crowcon who needed a bassist for his band Monkfish. We went to the studio and produced a couple of recordings and did a few gigs in a ‘gothic country’ style.

After Monkfish split I didn’t play much until I responded to an ad for a bassist. I met Alex Horwill, Jon Hollingsworth, Andy Groom and Paul Wood in Cafe Coco on the Cowley Road, this was to become Switch. We also went into the studio and recorded some tunes. Switch was well known for Paul’s cheery lyrics and original song endings (’no..no..no..no……nooooo’) and also his inside out jumpers.

Switch eventually split and again I was without a band until Andy Groom asked me if I’d like to join a band Nation at the time the linup was Terry Nathan Andy and me. Although we had a couple of original songs we were mostly playing covers which weren’t my cup of tea. I soon quit the band which carried on and is now very doing well.

10 months later I bumped into Stu Boon, he was looking for a bassist to join him and his brother (another Andy) we formed Iris which soon became Yield, We had a couple of guitarists, Mark and then Jon and also James on Keys. We produced some good stuff and did a couple of gigs fronted by Stu’s powerful vocals and soulful songs. Having played with Stu in the early days and really enjoyed the simplicity of our three piece, I got frustrated with the bands direction and left. A few months after that yield split.

During this time I had kept in touch with Alex from Switch who had by now become a good friend, he was playing in a band in London called The Product, fronted by Ric. When The Product hit the rocks, Alex and Ric teamed up with Andy and Stu to form what was later to become numbernine, based in Oxford. With two prolific songwriters in the band, numbernine started churning out vast amounts of material and rehearsing full tilt, soon I was asked to sign up and for a while we were a 5 piece.

Stu then split away to team up with his friend Tom and started playing acoustic gigs as a duo. numbernine has carried on as a four piece and has remained unchanged since then, regularly gigging in London Oxford and thereabouts and also nipping into the studio to record our tunes.

It doesn’t stop there…

Back in 2005 Colin Mackinnon asked if I’d like to play a little bit of bass on a side project of his (The Mile High Young Team) to record his E.P. Four Seperations. This turned out very well and soon we were sorting out a gig to promote the disc. Colin couldn’t stop writing more material which he decided we should record. This new cd should be released early next year.

That’s a grand total of that’s 6 bands, 4 basses, 4 bass amps and 21 ‘band mates’ in 13 years.