It was twenty years ago today...

...well, OK, it was nine years ago some time this week, I forget exactly.

When I was at school, around Christmas 1994, I joined a band with a few friends. In August of 1995, we recorded a number of songs we'd written (mostly by David Kane, our guitarist, often with Roger Barden, the keyboard player, although I and the drummer, Chris Velvick, also have writing credits). Since David is now getting married (in Toppenish, Washington, USA - he's marrying an American girl) in September, and I have some free time () I thought I'd get the demos onto CD. The master is a standard, albeit very expensive, audio cassette - it uses different material to get very low noise.

I also converted the songs to MP3. I thought I could actually upload all of them to my Demon web space, but it's only 20MB, and I encoded them (all 4+ minutes, we were a little long-winded) at 192kbps. There's arrogance. So there's only space for one, really. I've chosen one of my favourites: Survivor.

Oh, my part? I do the vocals. That's it. While I now play a bit of guitar - and Survivor is one of the few things I can play - I couldn't at the time.

As for what happened to the band - we found that our final Upper Sixth year was a lot harder than the previous one and didn't find a lot of time for rehearsing, let alone writing and recording new material. David continued with his Music A-level; David and Roger then took a year out travelling (Japan and the Amazon) before going to University to study Music at Bangor and History at Exeter (I think) respectively, starting in 1997. Christian studied Chemistry and drinking at Edinburgh, while I went to Aston (which I've written about before).

David is now studying for a PhD at SOAS having completed his MA in Ethnomusicology and I believe is still planning to visit Bangladesh again some time in the winter. Roger is with some kind of missionary organisation in Leeds, last I heard. Christian is some kind of high-powered recruitment consultant recruiting middle managers, somewhere in the Thames Valley - I last saw him a year ago at Roger's pre-wedding meal (you can't really call that a stag night ).

And I'm muddling along as - mainly - a Pocket PC C/C++/C# developer working for 5D / Mnetics. It's a little unclear right now, actually - I answer the phone as Mnetics, but still officially work for 5D, which is now owned by Mnetics as of a couple of weeks ago.

[Update: I forgot to link to Audacity, the software I used to capture and manipulate the tracks.]