Part one of a “memoir” detailing the trials and tribulations of being in an unpopular comedy band.
Warning: adult/offensive content
I was never supposed to be in a band. There are many reasons for this: I cannot claim that I have ever been “cool”. I have never learnt how to play an instrument properly and singing is not my natural forte. This is why I ended up in a band called Swivel Chair.
Swivel Chair started as a joke. And it remained as a joke to everyone but the two remaining members of the band. After 4 years, being a member of Swivel Chair nearly gave me a mental breakdown.
This is why.
Swivel Chair started as a joke. And it remained as a joke to everyone but the two remaining members of the band. After 4 years, being a member of Swivel Chair nearly gave me a mental breakdown.
This is why.
Prologue
It all started with my first job after college with HMV Princes St. I was given the job before the new store opened. There were a lot of characters who started at the same time, people with vast music knowledge who would almost all end up involved in making music some way or another, if they weren’t already. I was out of my depth, and not just because of my naïveté and relative lack of musical knowledge. This was my first full time job and it was torture. I couldn’t cope with the sheer boredom of the job and quickly became embittered with the incompetent management and the jobsworth “supervisors” they had promoted to be their mouthpieces. This dissatisfaction, coupled with my disillusionment of being back to square one after wasting four years at college, led to me joining equally pissed off colleagues in the pub after work every night for a number of premium lagers.
My drinking companions and I shared the same kind of evil humour and we gleefully engaged in assassinating the characters of the majority of management and some of our other, more arse-licking colleagues. On my part this was done more to have a laugh than because of any real hatred towards them, although my immediate “superior” was an exception to this; a Geordie with no sense of humour and very few brain cells, who delighted in terrorising me daily about the state of the chart wall at front of the store (sample quote: “Milo! The chart wall looks like it’s been bum-raped!”). He would later inspire Swivel Chair’s most popular track and video, Teenage Supervisor.
Craig Low was one of these drinking companions. As he worked on a different floor I didn’t work with him directly but got to know him through our frequent after work drinking sessions. We got to talking about making films, something he already had experience of through doing an HND at Glenrothes College, and I had dabbled in with less than brilliant results. We decided to do something together, and we bandied various ideas around in the pub but at first we didn’t put it into action.
One day Craig brought in a CD. It was of various tracks he had made, consisting entirely of samples which reminded me a bit of DJ Shadow in places, although far more bizarre. The one which stood out was called “Ventilated Solvent Abuse”. It featured, over a loop of Led Zeppelin, the voice of our new store manager (the first one was so incompetent he was sacked) which Craig had surreptitiously recorded on minidisc while she was engaged in giving him a bollocksing about being a bad influence on younger members of staff. I was impressed. This was the first time I heard Swivel Chair.
Related posts:
