NICE AS PIE

I’ve always said that “You can’t teach experience”…and that the only way to acquire it is to put in the time, which usually amounts to many years of passion, practice and dedication.
And when a bunch of musicians with this wealth of experience get together and play for the first time, (which is exactly what happened a couple of years ago at Lundgaard studio in Denmark)…you know SOMETHING is going to happen.
The thing is…getting a bunch of guys that are all great individual players, then sticking them in a recording studio together and say 1,2,3,4,GO….doesn’t  guarantee that what’s coming out of the 2 control room monitors will sound anything like a band, …. More often than not, it will just sound like a bunch of guys all trying to be first to fight their way out of the speaker.
There are some very talented musicians out there that can play a million notes a minute flawlessly, but in the end the questions are ”Does it say anything to you?” “Does it make you smile because it’s SO good?” “Do the words that are being sung strike a chord in you? …Make you laugh...Make you cry…or just make you feel alive when you hear it” and more importantly, make you feel the same way on your 100th listen.

Something DID happen in that studio…it was the formation of a BAND…not just individual musicians trying to outdo each other…it was a bunch of guys that from the very first notes we played together knew that this recipe was something special.
 It was the simplicity of knowing when to shine, and when to ease back to let someone else shine.
When the playing of just a couple of notes means a thousand times more than trying to show everyone how fast and tricky you can play…THAT’S what I mean about experience…and to find 5 musicians like that who can melt together into one unit, is what makes a band world class, and shine above the vast majority. A couple of the guy’s I’ve known for many years, Martin York and I go way back to when we were kids. At the age of 9 or 10 we formed our first ever band called “The Curb Stones” playing cover versions of the music that was around at the time…The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Hollies, The shadows, all that kind of stuff…I wish Video cameras where around at that time..It would have been fun to take a look back at that…although on second thoughts, considering our enthusiastic but limited musicianship at the time, a photo might have been better. One day while rehearsing at one the guy’s parents house (who had decided to go out for the day…I wonder why!)...A guy with long black hair and a big black beard banged on the window and beckoned me outside. To a young 10 year old he looked as though he was 50….but turned out to be an 18 year old local musician whose band was looking for a drummer…I agreed to meet up with them that evening for an audition, my dad drove me and my kit to his parents house (who had also gone out…of earshot) and we all set up in the front room. After playing through ( and without a doubt mutilating) a few tunes, they decided they would like me to join, and so began the task of finding a name for the new band…I mentioned that my current bands name was “The Curb Stones”…so one of them suggested that we should call ourselves “The Pavement”…which we did. So you could say that I went from “The Curb stones” to “The Pavement”…which was a definite step up for me… (Boom Boom!!) Read More