A Complete Explanation Of Everything

There's hasn't been nearly enough angsty struggling musician updates on this blog.

I shall seek to remedy this right now.

Where did it all begin?

My brother is a virtuoso musician. Started learning the guitar at three (playing the neck of the guitar and ignoring the bit he couldn't yet fit around) and is classically trained to grade 8 standard and beyond. He can pretty much play any stringed instrument, is a really good piano player and is a passable drummer.

When we were growing up, a kind of unspoken agreement, an armistice / sudden peace broke out whereby certain activities / interests where split between us. This included music. I played football, he played guitar, that kind of thing. And lego. Lego was all mine.

But music was always in the background, my Dad used to play some acoustic about the house and that's probably still wrapped in the back of my mind somewhere, we used to have sing songs the odd evening and I enjoyed that growing up. Sloop John B was a personal favourite.

I guess, the first record, I actually got. Not counting Bosco. Was the Monkees. Sky 1 decided, probably on a tight budget, to re-run the original series at about 4pm everyday after school and myself and my bro asked our Dad to get us the tape. Hell, those songs still stand up today, if you're asking me. Well, not all of them, Daydream Believer is a tragic piece of crap but Last Train to Clarksville is a good tune and there were many others. The revelation that they couldn't play their instruments and didn't write the songs (barring one or two Nesmith compositions) didn't hit particularly hard.

Enter secondary school (that's high school for the North American audience) and peer pressure and all that. I still wasn't into music per se, Nirvana was happening, grunge and Oasis, it being 1991-1996. I remember we went on a field trip down to Waterford and it was all about what tapes you had, I was listening to Van Morrison which evoked incredulity but then again some others were listening to Meatloaf so I didn't take too much flak.

I didn't really pay any attention to the Nirvana phenomenon back then.

I can pinpoint the moment music started to mean something to me.

It was in my best mate's house, we were playing either Sensible Soccer or Championship Manager, one or the other. Nearly every Friday and quite a few days after school, it was football either indoor, outdoor or virtual. Anyway, he was largely into Pearl Jam at that stage and a tune was on off of Ten. I asked him to play it again.

It was Why Go Home? by Pearl Jam, written by Jeff Ament.

And that track stuck with me. Pretty soon, I had a CD player and CDs, the first record I got was Dookie by Green Day. Longview and Basketcase had just been released and were tearing things up in the Emerald Isle as it were.

Then, a declaration of nuclear war on the homefront.

I asked for a bass guitar for Christmas.

This was unheard of, a clear breach of the non-aggression pact that was signed between myself and my brother.

The cold war had just turned decidedly hot.