I was born and raised in Essex, England. My sisters both learned to play various musical instruments, but I was never interested in any of that.
I first...
I was born and raised in Essex, England. My sisters both learned to play various musical instruments, but I was never interested in any of that.
I first learned how to play the guitar at the University of Kent at Canterbury when somebody showed me the chords for \"Wild Thing\", which I would play incessantly. I was pleased to meet Chip Taylor who wrote the song some years later, and even more pleased when I discovered that his rendition was just as rough as mine always was.
Being too lazy to learn anything anybody else wrote, I quickly began to write my own songs.
After developing these skills during student years, I joined a Surrey-based punk band called Sensucht. On the day I met Pete the bass player, he told me that we had a gig in six days\' time. He also informed me that the band had no drummer or vocalist. With six days\' frantic practising, a stand-in singer and a borrowed drummer who got the tempo from the count-in and stopped when told, I played my first gig. Shortly after that, we found ourselves a drummer and singer and recorded our first Demo \"Until The Next Time\" in Trinity Studios, Knaphill.
The demo was very rough, partly due to Sensucht members\' attempts to talk to the girls rehearsing dance routines in the next studio (these girls went on to become the Spice Girls), and partly due to the ineptitude of their manager (acting as our sound engineer).
After a few gigs, we realised we needed a better demo so we recorded a five track demo in two studios. Three tracks were recorded at Lunar Studios in Cranleigh and two were recorded at Surrey University. With a name change to Sin Cynics we were ready to face the world.
We played a lot of local venues in Surrey and some clubs in London, including the 100 Club, Orange Club, Rock Garden and Kings Head, Fulham. The best gigs we ever did were in Camden for the North London Motorcycle Action Group (MAG). They all just got very drunk and went wild.
The second MAG gig was a Christmas party. We were asked to play for an hour and a half so we spent weeks re-learning old songs and building up the repertoire. We thought we\'d be ok if we didn\'t hurry between songs and we played a few twice. When we got there we found out that the DJ they had booked as a support act hadn\'t turned up so could we play for three hours?! We thought we\'d give it a go, so we played the same material all night and nobody minded at all. I think they were all too drunk to notice.
The band was great fun, and I still miss it, but as time went on I wanted to push the boundaries and try something other than punk. I was writing a lot of songs at the time and only a few of them were suitable for the band. My interest became more focussed on my home recording around the time that some of the other band members\' interests were also straying. Our drummer was in several bands, a couple of them doing quite well. The bass player was going through problems at home and the singer was re-aquainting himself with an old addiction.
The last gig we did was an acoustic session for a local radio show. The singer was late. We were giving him instructions over the airwaves for about twenty minutes before he actually turned up, but we knocked out a few good tunes in the time we had left. I called a band meeting at a local pub a couple of weeks later to announce my departure. The singer never turned up. I heard some time later that he was in prison, although I never found out what it was for.
The drummer went on to better things, and the bass player went on to have lots of children. I lost touch with them all unfortunately. After a few brief periods in a few other bands I gave up on that side of my music. I became focussed on my solo material, recorded on my Tascam 4-Track. I sent it around some record companies but never received more than words of encouragement at best. Most places never even responded, even after chasing. I found that quite hard to take and stopped playing music altogether for a while.
In the meantime I got married, changed jobs, moved across the country to Devon and had two lovely sons.
In 2004 I bought a laptop computer and some music software. I added a midi keyboard and bought a new mixer and microphone later. Due to family commitments at home my music has been mostly made in my lunch breaks. I\'m no keyboard player so the creation of music is very laborious but also rewarding.
I decided to adopt a \"band\" name of Deep Set - an idea I had some years ago but didn\'t use. I like the word \"deep\" and \"SET\" are my initials. How clever.
After a little more than two years of effort I have come up with the album \"Outside Looking In\". I do hope that you get the chance to listen to it and that you will find something of value in it.
I have no plans to put any effort into promoting it to record companies due to past experience, although if you have any interest in that area or contacts in the industry I will be delighted to hear from you.
Thanks for your time!
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Influences
Pink Floyd, Bruce Springsteen, Beta Band, Radiohead