Influenced by Lenni who wrote on his Multiply site about his 1st band, this is a bit about my 1st Band, 'Phase iv'.
Dunno where the band name, Phase iv, originated from?, although it may very well of been one of my suggestions? I remember we put names in a hat as ya do and this probably came from there. The giutarist had the idea to just have a symbol for the band name and not use a name as such. I think he got the idea from Led Zep. We could never agree what the sybol should look like and thought the name Symbol was a bad name anyway.
In the music section of this site, there is a song recorded during one of our many rehearsals. I'm singing and playing what little bass I could play at the time.The song 'Take Each Day As It Comes' was recorded in about 1979, during rehearsals.
We rehearsed in a school classroom that we hired out in the evenings and some weekends. The caretaker, Mr McCarthy would let us in and take the money from us. My friends dad used to take us down in his car with the small amount of gear we had. He pick us up at the end of rehearsals. There were always people complaining near the school at how loud it was. I'm surprised as the equipment we were using was pretty dire to say the least. We got thrown out in the end and on the last night we wrote a song for the caretaker... 'Mr McCarthy F*** O**' and it was really as bad as the title suggests!
We never got to gig with this band but had a fair few songs which were mainly written by the guitarist, Rob Otterly, although I had a couple of songs that I wrote also. This one (in the music section) was written by the guitarist. He'd had some lessons on the guitar early on in his childhood and was probably the most musical one amongst us at the time. I was on bass and vocals, with limited experience and the band was completed by Robin Suraz on drums. He'd also got some experience of playing drums in the Boys Brigade, which was a kinda youth movement like cubs or scouts at the time. There was one other member of the band who did'nt appear on this recording, Ian Bradbury, who was on 2nd guitar and also had some experience of playing, early on in childhood.
We got together with all the big ideas as a kid that we could be Rockstars like the bands we followed at the time, AC/DC, Motorhead, Maiden, Priest Sabbath, UFO, Halen, the list was endless. A lot of the bands would play at the Coventry Theatre and if not we'd end up travelling over to Birmingham Odeon on the train to see them.
Early rehearsals (If that's what the noise could be called) for the band took place in my Mum and Dad's front room at home. My dad had a stereo system with Hifi seperates and these big 3x3 speakers. We were able to plug the mic and a couple of guitars through 'em. The drums were nothing more than a couple of drums (tins even) . My Mum and Dad would go shopping on a Saturday afternoon and leave us to it. The neighbours didn't half complain upon their return. We'd have people in the street lookin in the window as I lived on a main road and buses would stop/slow down to let traffic thru, right outside. We had a ready made audience, shame we were so cr**!
Mind you there were practice sessions up in my bedroom where the noise level was kept to a minimum and we did practice our instruments. We had a few rehearsals at the drummers house also when he got a proper kit. He was one of the only people I knew at the time with an attic conversion. His parents hated us practicing there and they were always moaning. Plus the drummer had a younger brother and sister who were always hassling us to come in a listen and would then mess around.
The band pretty much split up after that final rehearsal when we got thrown out of the school. We all had left school by this point (I was a year older than the others anyway) and all began going in different directions etc. I was the only one out of the four of us who went on to do something else in the music field. I took a break for a couple of months before I got a call to go for an audition with a metal band called Malias. But that's another story!
