Share Your Embarrassing Early Recordings!

[Stub Mandrel]

This is my first bandn Drastic Action, rehearsing in the huge upstairs hall of Kenfig Hill Labour club. Taped on my ghetto blaster. I still remember the awfulness of hauling an 18" cab up their fire escape

 

Trigger warning: bad bass solo...

 

https://on.soundcloud.com/8FJthgSxervDqK1y6

 

[ASW]

8 hours ago, Stub Mandrel said:

This is my first bandn Drastic Action, rehearsing in the huge upstairs hall of Kenfig Hill Labour club. Taped on my ghetto blaster. I still remember the awfulness of hauling an 18" cab up their fire escape

 

Trigger warning: bad bass solo...

 

https://on.soundcloud.com/8FJthgSxervDqK1y6

 

The sound quality isn't as bad as I was expecting. There's a lot of reverberation from the hall but otherwise reasonably clear.

 

The bass solo isn't that bad either!

 

I'm not sure the name of the song and band matched the music though!

 

I'll have to dig out some old tape recordings...

 

 

[BigRedX]

Here's my first band The Midnight Circus with our only appearance on vinyl as part of the "Angst In My Pants" various artists double EP.

 

This was recorded in 1980 at a 4-track studio behind one of the musical instrument shops in Leicester.

 

Multiple warnings:

Weedy sound, no bass guitar on the first track, dodgy lyrical subject matter (we justified it at the time by claiming to be sarcastic).

 

 

 

However John Peel liked it enough to play on his Radio One show... 

 

And Johan Kugelberg rated the EP 34 in his Top 100 DIY Singles in Ugly Things magazine saying: "...and extremely do it yourself DIY frenzy from the Midnight Circus. Who in "Silicone Baby" and "Hedonist Jive" have out-poignanted a tow-truck full of Aimee Mann's and Michelle Shocked's edgy humanity and funny as shit to boot..."

 

There are older recordings out there in the public domain. We were asked to contribute to Angst In My Pants as a result of our first album "The Bland Craze" which was released on free cassette (you sent us a C-60 cassette and a SAE and we returned the cassette with our album recorded on to it alone with a cover made from a folded A4 photocopy. We distributed about 150 of these so I am sure some still survive.

Edited Monday at 08:24 by BigRedX

[SH73]

I'd love to, we recorded some demos in a garage where we used to rehearse on a mono Aiwa tape player/recorded where you had to push the play and record button simultaneously. Good old garage practice sessions, we'd push the car out the garage to make room, every time you made contact with a  vice on top of the worktop whilst playing guitar, you would get electrocuted. Drummer was safe. Unfortunately, someone nicked the cassette tape during a house party. But have some early VHS from late 80's , rather embarrassing!

[Leonard Smalls]

 

 

Here's some early Roco recordings wot we did live in our rehearsal and living room in Harlesden back in 1990 (89?). I eq-ed them a bit recently and put it up as an archive! one's pure punk rock, the others aren't (there's even some slap bass in Agnes from 2'20 on, plus drum solo in Phoal).

 

... I've got some probably far more embarrassing Dredd and the Badass Weeds tapes from 1985 recorded after far too much imbibing which I may dig out!

Th

 

Edited Monday at 10:20 by Leonard Smalls

[christhammer666]

quite late in life to get started recording wise, think i was 29-30.

 

[Franticsmurf]

Back in the day, I was the guitarist in my first band (which changed its name several times while retaining the same core line up). This recording was made in Neath College studio in 1991 after we'd spent a few days working on several new original tracks. We ended the session with a run through of our original set. This one was written by the drummer (as were many of the originals). In all the photos bar two, I'm the one playing guitar.

 

 

[goingdownslow]

This was my band, Wildlife, circa 1975.
The backing was recorded in a two track studio which later became Amazon Studios, and the vocals overdubbed on a Philips tape recorder in a bedsit.

 

 

Edited Monday at 12:48 by goingdownslow

[Stub Mandrel]

13 hours ago, BigRedX said:

my first band The Midnight Circus

 

For some reason I'm reminded of 'In the Land of Grey and Pink' but I doubt that was your inspiration...

[Elfrasho]

https://www.soundclick.com/lefrash/?content=songs

 

I was in a wee online community for a few years which was about writing and recording a tune a month on a theme. I think this was a movie theme!

 

https://www.soundclick.com/lefrash/?content=songs

Edited Monday at 22:35 by Elfrasho

[BigRedX]

9 hours ago, Stub Mandrel said:

For some reason I'm reminded of 'In the Land of Grey and Pink' but I doubt that was your inspiration...

 

Musically? Probably very subliminally. Much of our early music (including these two songs which were composed several years before we committed them to vinyl) stemmed from both our inability to play well enough to be considered prog rock as well as the fact that we had very few conventional rock band instruments. I didn't have the album in my record collection, but it was definitely to sort of thing that at least one us would have been listening to in the 70s; we tended to favour the less well known bands.

 

The band name comes from The Pretty Things song "Cries From The Midnight Circus".

[Stub Mandrel]

These recordings are all embarrassingly competent! I was expecting some dire stuff.

 

Here's a couple of 'proper' recordings from my next two bands. Head in a Helix which was indy with a touch of psychedelia:

 

And the last band before my hiatus, Two Moon Junction (don't google it...) Which was real pop, and we probably should have tried to get signed...

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Happy Jack]

29th May 2008 at The Luminaire (Kilburn), my first ever gig with my first ever gigging band singing my first live vocal. My daughter forgot to switch on the recorder until halfway through the song.

 

A bit pitchy but could have been a whole lot worse. The guitarist was going through massive back trouble and was totally zonked out on heavy-duty painkillers, but that's a pretty creditable solo.

[Happy Jack]

Just over two years later the band has changed, the technology has improved, and my playing is unrecognisable ...

 

 

[BigRedX]

Track 11 on this page is the only publicly released recording of my second band The Perfect Party. Contrary to what it says on the page the compilation was released in early 1982. The song was written a year earlier by my previous band and a very embryonic version of it appears on our third cassette album "Do Modern Atoms Wear Fashionable Clothes?"

 

This time I'm actually playing bass although most of the bass part is played on G-string and it never goes lower than bottom E on the guitar.

 

Believe it or not this recording had CBS records interested in signing the band until they heard our second more polished and less quirky demo and decided that Wham! would be a better choice.

Edited yesterday at 10:11 by BigRedX

[Happy Jack]

49 minutes ago, BigRedX said:

Believe it or not this recording had CBS records interested in signing the band until they heard our second more polished and less quirky demo and decided that Wham! would be a better choice.

 

Guitar groups are on their way out, Mr. Epstein.

[Killerfridge]

This is the earliest video I have if myself, about 18months into playing bass. I was 17 and obsessed with it and would regularly play/practice late into the night. I think I made more progress in those 18 months than I have in the last 18 years!

 

 

 

[knirirr]

IIRC this is the first bass gig I did (I switched from guitar to fretless bass). Apparently the intonation is reasonable given my experience at the time, but the choice of notes is sometimes a bit dodgy.

 

 

[Russ]

I don't have any audio recordings online of my first serious band, Wallflower, but there's a video that was recorded of us at our final gig at the King's Head in Fulham in 1998. 

 

We were a bit arty-farty and perhaps a little pretentious (our singer was an art student who now curates a gallery in Copenhagen), but I've yet to hear another band that soundeed anything like us. And I got to do some fun stuff on bass. 

 

Edited 18 hours ago by Russ

[paul_5]

5 hours ago, Russ said:

I don't have any audio recordings online of my first serious band, Wallflower, but there's a video that was recorded of us at our final gig at the King's Head in Fulham in 1998. 

 

We were a bit arty-farty and perhaps a little pretentious (our singer was an art student who now curates a gallery in Copenhagen), but I've yet to hear another band that soundeed anything like us. And I got to do some fun stuff on bass. 

 

Very 'Tool' that!

 

[Russ]

12 hours ago, paul_5 said:

Very 'Tool' that!

 

There's Tool-ish bits. We all went to see the infamous Tool show at the London Astoria in '97 (the one where a blue-painted Maynard judo-threw a stage invader and sat on top of him for a whole song) and were suitably inspired.

 

The poetic, almost spoken-word delivery is very un-Tool though, and there was a lot of 1990s post-rock influence in there (Tortoise, dEUS, Slint, etc).