Page Maintained By Andy Watt
I've had a pretty normal musical upbringing... starting with Iron Maiden, moving on to more technical stuff like Rush,
Living Colour, then onto Satriani and Vai (i.e. Stu Hamm) and Billy Sheehan (via his work with Dave Lee Roth and Mr Big).
I moved gradually into more funk and Acid Jazz, getting into James Brown, Red Hot Chilipeppers, Brand New Heavies and
Jamiroquai. I've also been influenced by Jaco (yeah, yeah) like everybody else, Rocco Prestia and countless other bassists.
Ultimately, if it's enough to get people dancing, I'll play it. Prince rules! :)
I have an NC in popular music from Perth Music College
- - - -[ The Apostles of Funk ]- - - -
This was the most fun I had in a band up until that point . It started out by meeting up with a fantastic drummer named John Gurney, who also knew a truly gifted keyboard player named Stuart Ross. You can hear their work on the Grand Theft Auto games, believe it or not! John's also a top-class games programmer, and was working for DMA designs in Dundee back then. Nowadays he's back in Edinburgh (he had a great band there before deciding to drop out of professional music for a while) as DMA got bought up by Rockstar Games. We joined up with an inspirational guitarist, Paul McNiven, who I'd been messing about with doing Satriani and Vai stuff for quite a while. He had all those Vai moves! Add the unique talents of Peter Cridland (more of him later) on vocals and you had the original line-up.
We played covers, starting with things like Red Hot ChiliPeppers (Stone Cold Bush - great bass solo!) and attempting some Prince (Sexy Mother******!) and James Brown (which stayed with us all the way through!). Later along the way we picked up Saxophone, Trombone (great player) and Congas (bizarre right-wing hippy with delusions of grandeur!). We made one hell of a sound and got pretty big on the St Andrews Uni hall ball circuit, a little like a sort of funked-up Commitments. Some great memories. In particular playing a 15 minute version of "sex machine" where someone almost passed out from dancing too hard! I remember the fire alarms going off that night... ah, chattan hall!
Now here's an adorable bunch of nutters. All for of us (Greg Coates, Drums, Peter Cridland, Vocals and Stuart "Smurf" Ralph, Guitars) keep in touch and meet sometimes - we rehearsed for the first time in years in 2003 and went on to play a set (including a new Chilipeppers cover!) at my own wedding in August! Sounded pretty good too, all of us have improved loads in the time in between.
- - - -[ The Wilderness Years? ]- - - -
Well, they weren't completely without interest. Thing was, we moved from St Andrews (where I'd been involved pretty heavily in the local music scene) via Nic's parents place to Salisbury, which doesn't have a huge music scene anyway - and it's hard work finding bands to join. I have pretty much done enough band organisation after the Apostles!
So, collecting the big sack of old leaves that is my memory. a whole bunch of stuff has fallen out of the holes in the bottom which were made acceidentally by the trowel of forgetfulness, but there's enough still lying around in the bottom there to remind me of some great musical fun.
Amongst the stuff I was involved in was -
- A folk-rock act in Salisbury fronted by a spectacularly "charismatic" frontwoman who was quite mad, and a total megalomaniac. She had a couple of pet musicians whose steady, unwavering and slightly hollow gaze should have marked her out as a bad idea. That lasted a month I think, before they rang me about a gig in a shopping centre. I bowed out over the phone - playing in a shopping centre??? Thank god I didn't have a mobile at that point!
- A blues-rock covers act called StrawberryCoatedZebra with a top guitarist called Paul Rose - nice chap, stupendous chops! Seriously, this guy can do everything you've ever heard on a guitar and more. He'll take a simple song like Little Wing and make you think there were corners of it you never realised existed! This act was actually fantastic fun, we played a fair few pub gigs and had a great time. I got the Warwick Combo to get some more grunt!
- An Camden-based acoustic Duo who needed to try to play live with a bass/drums thing. This was a boyfriend of Nic's workmate and his brother, Dan and Lawrence Mount, and their act Chosen by Moses. Really nice music, it'd do really well in todays "KT Tunstall" type environment! While I filled in all the stuff they wanted OK (using the new 6-string Tobias Nic brought back for me) they never did find a drummer who could do what they wanted so it all petered out. Pity, the music was fun. They have an act called The Distance now - on Myspace here.
- Another acoustic duo, this time named Haematic. This was good stuff too, and we gigged in london a fair amount - playing at the Dublin Castle in Camden and the Grey Horse (although I've forgotten where that was!). Again though, this really wasn't my kind of music, and the drive to Sutton where we rehearsed (great drummer!) was getting on for 2 hours which was a real drag sometimes. It sorta petered out as well.
Janeiro was a life breath, a wonderful mixture of vibrant souls which reminded me that Panasonic had my physical presence for 8 hours a day but they didn't have a single ounce of my respect or emotion! I joined Janeiro in March (shortly before I broke my wrist snowboarding, nice one Andy) and it's was fun ... Janeiro represented the culmination of my 2005 new years resolution: to find a serious band.
We got up to a lot - including the FoxFM Party in the Park, which we won the right to play at, after Texas, no less!). There was a brief name change to Tempa Tempa (which I personally hated - especially as I'd made the friggin' website and we had T-shirts, good ones too) - honestly, that's a name for two pretty boys twirling with radio mics, innit?
These guys are a blast: Steve, Rich and Jamie's covers band. We knocked about in Oxford at O'neills most weeks on a thursday or friday night. Sweaty fun, big sounds and huge amounts of energy! Seriously, Jamie gets up on the bar (provided I've fixed the radio pack again) and plays solos using light fittings as slides. To see is to believe. Steve just pounds a kit like the world is falling down - intense energy and a lot of focus. I've seen him drum when he couldn't stand up and still sound wicked.
We did a whole winter season (2007) in the Aspen bar in Soldeu, Andorra - You can find the band [ on facebook ] - and I wish them every success and to continue the red bull / vodka fuelled insanity. With Sambuca thrown in. SHOTS! Catch them most weekends down at O'Neills in Oxford, or the Red Lion pub whose location I'm buggered if I can remember the address of...
..:: June 2008 - November 2009 ::..
The latest live musical experiment I was involved in moved me back towards bigger bands and funkier sounds again. I got a bass synth (Roland) on the 6 string, it works (tracks really well!) and actually used it on songs! The guitarist from Jacquoda has a great home studio ("Da Cube") and does sweet mixes, as well as a great line in chunky funk guitar chops. Great drummer (oooo, he's so intense), a full-on percussionist (including congas, timbale, cowbells, electronic hit stuff - the lot! Wicked!), a sax player and a vocalist whose voice is simply huge.
The band are on [ facebook here ].
..:: November 2009 - ? ::..
- - - -[ Solo / Collaboration]- - - -
After a lot of soul searching (how apt is that?) I decided to concentrate on a period of woodshedding (that's technique practise to you) and solo writing. I've had a home studio for a long long time and not spent enough time in it, either writing tunes for the bands I've been in or working on my own stuff... it's time to unleash something monstrous.
With that in mind, it's time to embark on a scary new chapter and get creative juices and output up by squeezing as much out of the limited time available... wish me luck: and watch out for far more material coming soon.
Page Maintained By Andy Watt