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Quagga - When I Grow Up, I Want To Be

SPRCD002

There are currently only two music files available on this site from this album, the studio demo recordings tracks made by Headland. The album is intended more as a story than necessarily as a piece to stand alone on it's own musical merit. However, the text from the CD booklet (including other lyrics) and the images that went alongside them are also published here on this page.

To listen to an mp3 file, click on the song title link (see the first paragraph of text below for the links to the files). If you have a media player already installed, the track should either appear in your browser window and start playing or launch your player and begin playback. If you don't have a media player already installed, QuickTime or Winamp can be downloaded here. To download an mp3, right click on the file and 'Save Target As' if using a Windows platform, or Control + click if using a Mac. 

The story so far: The first 10 years

Band line-ups

Bad Hair Day

Coffee And Amphetamines

Silver Surfer

I Don't Want To Fall

Electric Sound Parade

Thought On My Mind

‘When I Grow Up, I Want To Be’ is an anthology of early works. It is intended as a tidying –up, chapter-closing exercise that takes the most listenable selections from recordings made by the various bands that I have set up or been involved with in Brighton during the 1990’s, and further serves as a companion volume to The Zamora’s ‘Pigeon Souvenirs’. Given that many of them were made as ambient room recordings on portable cassette players in rehearsal rooms, the sound quality is at best varied and in some places, quite poor. The sole ‘proper’ studio recordings are the two Headland tracks ‘Thought On My Mind’ and ‘Not Letting The Grass Grow’, which were recorded to give that band a good quality demo with which to secure live gigs. All other music on this collection has therefore been taken, remastered or remixed from the mass of old tapes that make up my musical past.

While this probably appears as somewhat of a vanity project and it could be considered that there is little of musical merit or worth to those not directly involved with any of the featured acts, to me it serves as a marker of development over the period that I have been involved in making music and allows me to close the door on the Brighton era to move on to musical pastures new. And hey, in the exhuming of tracks and jams never meant for release, if it’s good enough for The Beatles, then why not for me! It also provides an opportunity to publish the remainder of my lyrics written during my time in Brighton that weren’t covered by the release of ‘Pigeon Souvenirs’.

This collection opens with a (relatively shambolic) run through of a cover of The Rolling Stones’ ‘Get Off My Cloud’, taken from Crash Fantasy’s sole incursion into a rehearsal studio. It was a time when (to me) rock ‘n’ roll was all. None of the rest of that session really merits inclusion but this track was of interest as it was the first song that I ever performed live, with a band (albeit not Crash Fantasy) and in front of an audience. Although that performance was probably equally shambolic, it gave me a taste for live appearances that I’ve struggled to kick ever since.

While my musical ambitions in Cardiff had been limited to clumsy bedroom-based attempts at songwriting with school friends, answering ads in local record shops that bore little fruit or assembling conceptual line-ups with college colleagues that never actually even met, Brighton was intended to change all that. It was imagined as the place where I would meet the like-minded individuals who would travel with me on the road to musical world domination. Ahem!

Crash Fantasy, my first band at University, was an early stab at that. We got as far as an obligatory photo session on Brighton beach and one studio rehearsal before it fell apart in the way these things do. But it felt like big strides had been made and important experience gained.

My second year at Uni wasn’t much more productive either. An exchange visit stay at the University of South Florida in early ’94 produced a short-lived covers outfit with mainly American co-students and no performances given or recordings made. Returning to Brighton, I met a moddish bass player called Jim and we started the band that came to be known as Boxed Prophet. We managed to secure a booking at Rough Man Connection, a rehearsal studio underneath a shop selling reggae and dub records, and somehow managed to find a drummer to join in. Given that I was nowhere near up to scratch to play guitar in the line-up, a guitarist was needed and proved surprisingly difficult to find (in a town with a surfeit of them). Jim asked his friend Jamie to join. I was keen too as he had a beautiful white Rickenbacker and could play ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’. He, however, seemed reluctant to make it to regular rehearsals. The guitar on ‘Waiting For The Man’ in the Boxed Prophet mix was provided by a friend of mine drafted in at late notice. Jamie performs on the rest, which is taken from a session that (once again) amounted to little more than three hours of extended jamming. Of course, entering the studio with some songs to actually rehearse might well have helped things somewhat! Jim ended the band by dropping a note through my door telling me that me wanted out. So that brought Boxed Prophet to a close.

For the dissertation project in my last year I chose to make a documentary film, something that had not been attempted by previous students on the degree but that I understand to now be an accepted medium in which to submit final projects. ‘Let Me Forget About Today Until Tomorrow’ was an attempt to provide an objective look at the potential impact of the legalisation of all street drugs upon Brighton. Although the film was unlikely to be shown outside of the academic confines that it was produced for, I decided to sidestep the issue of having to secure copyright clearances by writing and recording the soundtrack myself. A band was assembled from college associates and other mates and named Taxi For Alice (which subsequently became the title of a song) after an utterance by a cabbie in a pub that conjured up images of Lewis Carroll and Jefferson Airplane to me.

The band met up for one session, recording ‘Coffee And Amphetamines’ for the film’s title sequence and jamming for the rest of the booking. ‘Jane’s On 54^th’, with an improvised monologue, was also used in the film soundtrack; ‘Howl’ was another jam from the same session.

To my great surprise, I made it to the end of the degree without dropping out and actually gaining a qualification to show for it. However, the ‘world-storming, classic four-piece rock ‘n’ roll band’ I’d moved to Brighton in the first place for was proving that much more elusive. So, putting off the inevitability of having to enter the world of working for a living, I set about trying to write some material and start another band. ‘Bad Hair Day’ dates from this period.

In early ’96, as I had started trying to learn to play the guitar, I met Mike, who was trying to learn to play the bass. We decided to start a band together and this time tried to go about it the right way by actually writing some songs first! After many months of shaping and honing, we eventually had enough material to justify booking some time at Rough Man again. Given that the first sessions produced little more than messing around, it seemed only right to expand the line-up to make a full band. By this time, I’d realised that a job was quite an imperative (if nothing else, to be able to afford studio time). I found work at Sussex University’s campus bookshop. One day, after the madness of the beginning of term had subsided, a tall, hip looking guy approached me at the counter enquiring about an autobiography by Gil Scott Heron that he’d heard about. The book didn’t exist but it got us talking about music anyway. Turned out that he was a drummer and given that they were like gold dust in a town for aspirant bands, I invited him to join. Matt, the guitarist who ended up in the band, I met on a train going from Brighton to Cardiff. And so Quagga (Mark 1) was born.

Having a full band that seemed more committed than members of previous ventures provided me with an opportunity to experiment in the studio a little more. One idea was, instead of writing lyrics for the vocal parts, to recite passages from books (a concept that was successfully revived in The Zamora with ‘Hitchcock’). I chose two books to try this out with, ‘Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas’ and ‘Under Milk Wood’. Dylan Thomas’s prose style lent itself well to a lyrical delivery and a remixed version of that recording is included here. The other two tracks are, again, salvaged jams.

This band seemed to soldier on a little longer than previous efforts. A handful of songs emerged from it and more jams meant more experience. However, it eventually started to drift apart and was time to call it a day when Mike decided to become a bus driver instead of a rock star. He blew me out of our first scheduled performance as a duo at an Open Mic night in a local pub, leaving me to enact my first solo performance, after which I realised that the curtain had fallen on that particular venture.

And so, whilst I continued writing a little, I found myself bandless once again. But, as was often the case, this situation wasn’t to last long. At the University Bookshop, I befriended a professor from the campus-based Institute of Development Studies. Gordon White was a wheelchair-bound lecturer with a fearsome reputation amongst the other bookshop staff, who were mostly terrified of him and over-reverent to his face. Never being a great one for reverence myself, he and I hit it off straight away, finding common ground on music and literature. Coming from quite a musical pedigree, he’d studied jazz in California during the 60’s, had seen Mingus in New York and Dylan when he’d just ‘gone electric’, and he had even played piano in front of the Red Guard in China. Naturally, when he heard that I sang and asked me to join E.M.U., his departmental covers band, I jumped at the chance.

So, on the 6^th of March 1998, having waited over 10 years for the moment (and having scaled my ambitions down from global rock stardom to simply wanting to be able to play a proper gig with a full live band), I finally got to fulfill my dreams. The show was a resounding success and left me feeling elated at having finally got there (by whatever means) yet also slightly empty. What do you do once you’ve achieved something you’ve strived half your life for? All you can do, it seems, in order to retain your energies and momentum, is to find yourself new goals. And this being my second album goes someway towards attaining what I set myself next.

About two weeks after the gig, Gordon slipped into a coma, caused by the condition that had led to his confinement to a wheelchair. When it became clear that there was no saving him, his life support machine was switched off. The band, all devastated by the news, were next reunited around his graveside. After his funeral it was decided that he would have definitely wanted the band to carry on, and it was renamed The Better Than Average White Band in his memory. The band may have gone through many personnel and name changes since then (as it indeed had before I appeared on the scene) but it continues to perform to this day, and I have racked up many more successful and enjoyable performances with them. I must say though that I certainly never expected the first time that my musical endeavors would be even alluded to in the national press would be in the shape of a footnote to an entry in The Guardian’s obituary column!

Another consequence of the first show in ’98 was that Julian, the IDS Band’s bass player, asked me to join his outfit. Their singer and drummer had departed and he and the guitarist Mike were building a new band. After years of struggling to get anything serious together, I suddenly found myself with a brand new band, and I already had a handful of my own songs. We set about writing a set’s worth of material and recruiting a drummer, becoming Headland along the way. The Headland tracks on this disc are mostly taken from a rehearsal recorded through a mixing desk (at last!) that were laid down to give the drummer Andy some idea of the material, in order for him to work out the rhythm tracks (which is why there are no drums on them). Also included are the two proper studio recordings that the band made, being my first experience of shifting up a gear from merely rehearsing to actually recording.

And to my great joy, Headland actually stayed together for long enough to start gigging. At the end of ’98 and the beginning of ’99, we fitted in four shows. Although the music I was listening to at home was anything but straight r ‘n’ r, I finally had my long-wished-for four piece guitar band and was, by then, rocking a full Morrison look of leather trousers, shoulder length hair and even a dab of eyeliner for gigs. It was from those performances that I started to cement a certain reputation among Brighton music circles as a somewhat ‘gregarious’ performer!

Then, just as it was picking up, it dropped of again. Andy couldn’t give much as his commitments lay more with acting than drumming. And the band slowly but surely fell apart. I was back at Square One, but had also achieved more than I’d ever done with any previous band I’d been involved with. I couldn’t give up now, not having gotten this far.

In an attempt to better reflect my own listening tastes, the concept I planned for my next attempt was for a group that sounded like Sonic Youth meets Massive Attack, with a bubblegum twist. What did ultimately develop from that germ might have paid a passing nod to the NY noiseniks but ended up pretty far from that original idea. I was introduced by a workmate (then from different bookshop) to Steve, a tall and fairly shy Northerner who had been to an earlier Headland show. Once he realised that the stage persona he’d been so affronted by wasn’t actually my normal character, we hit it off and began to plot another band. After months of talking the talk, we finally began to start creating some material for it. The version of ‘Tequila Mockingbird Pie’ included here (a song that also appears in a different form on ‘Pigeon Souvenirs’) combines the first attempts made at it, by Headland, with a bedroom recording that Steve and I produced with the aid of a drum machine.

There were a number of personnel changes before Pete, the drummer in the IDS Band, was invited in and cemented his place on the drum stool. Steve’s old college friend Justin later joined on bass. ‘Orc Walker’ dates from a rehearsal with this early line-up, then also names Quagga, and features another (barely audible) improvised vocal monologue.

As the year drew to a close, Justin decided to switch to lead guitar. Thus a new bass player was required and in early 2000, Merlin was auditioned and recruited. This completed the band, who eventually settled on Jaded as a name and set about creating a giggable set.

Jaded gave their first performance to a private invited audience in the early summer of that year. A string of other shows soon. Followed, with the band growing in confidence and reputation. After a first recording and in trying to augment the live work with a web presence, it was discovered that there was already another band holding the same name on mp3.com, and therefore something else was needed. After much deliberation, The Zamora was settled on. But that’s another story altogether and where ’Pigeon Souvenirs’ comes in…

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Personnel involved in the making of this album:

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'When I Grow Up, I Want To Be' was compiled, produced and edited by Dom Pates

Lyrics by Dom Pates ('Bad Hair Day', 'Coffee And Amphetamines', 'Silver Surfer') and Pates/Hadlow ('I Don't Want To Fall', 'Electric Sound Parade', 'Thought On My Mind'). Lyrics published by SPR Music.

Photography by Dom Pates, except Crash Fantasy shoot (Mike Sissons), Headland shoot (Cathy Gray), IDS Band (Jenny Edwards) Artwork by D1 Designs - d1_designs@yahoo.co.uk - except Headland demo cover (by Julian Gray).

© Sounds Phenomenal, 2003

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