I became fairly obsessed with music in my teens and bought a bass guitar from a guy in a pub. I practised it to the detriment of pretty much all else. As my teens tipped into my twenties I became the bass guitar player in The Lost Soul Band during the early 90s. In the space of four or five years we rehearsed, performed, secured a record deal with Silvertone Records, recorded three albums and toured our butts off. It’s difficult to pinpoint what brought about the demise of the band but around the mid-90s we just kind of imploded. Disillusioned as hell, I immediately sold all my gear and carved a new path that took me far away from the fickle and illusionary world of music.
Our time just preceded the mobile phone and internet revolution so very little evidence of our passing is available. The ownership of our songs and recordings have sunk beneath a sea of murky admin leaving no trace. We reunited for a few gigs around 2010 and I set up a blog which is still out there to this day. It has links to some videos of those reunion gigs on YouTube if you’d like to catch an idea of what The Lost Soul Band were like.
Jump ahead 15 years from our break up and my daughter brought home a guitar from school to practise for music class. I offered to tune it for her. With the instrument in my hands, a firework went off in my brain and I was a teenager again, obsessed with music again and all it can do. This time round though, I’m playing guitar rather than bass and I’m using it to make up music and I’m humming along with new tunes that come into my head. So I write some words to fit the tune I’m humming. The first song I wrote was a revelation to me. It was awful and will never see the light of day but I discovered then that writing a song is a fascinating and rewarding act of alchemy that I still don’t fully understand but which holds me captivated to this day.
I like to think I’ve improved since that first song. Writing songs, performing them, occasionally recording them and meeting people who also enjoy that elemental craft is now my happy place.