Biography
After finding like minds at college I found myself back in my home town with a head full of noises and no-one to play with. I needed a job but wasn’t keen on a career and went through a few unambitious career moves while hopefully fingering patterns on guitar, bass and drum machine and occasionally putting them on tape. A fortuitous redundancy gave me a bit of spare cash to buy a second hand Tascam Porta One, a Boss SE-50 effects box and a Korg DDD-5 drum machine, as well as the time to learn how to use them and try and turn out a song a day. There were distractions, of which more later, but the main intention was to create a body of work to form a band with, and after that, who knew?
Influences were clear: I had progressed from Joy Division and New Order, through the Cocteau Twins, to Kitchens of Distinction, Will Heggie’s post-Cocteaus band Lowlife, and early effects ridden post-indie shoegazers, but the songs, or rather structures, that make up this collection, exhibit more rather more rock than they seemed to at the time. Had the band existed we would have perhaps sat among the more vigorous end of the room. In my mind I stood stage left making big guitar noises while a, well, be honest, girl voice with attitude shook it up at the front. Sometimes I stood stage right playing the bass parts, which were more fun. In my mind.
Left Songs is a semi arbitrary sequence of the best pieces of the period. In retrospect I would have loved them to be rearranged to fit the band but at the time I that I felt precious about them as they were, but with the hindsight of over 20 years I realise that a band is about give and take and making ideas be the best they can. As it is, these pieces are probably the best they could be.
Influences were clear: I had progressed from Joy Division and New Order, through the Cocteau Twins, to Kitchens of Distinction, Will Heggie’s post-Cocteaus band Lowlife, and early effects ridden post-indie shoegazers, but the songs, or rather structures, that make up this collection, exhibit more rather more rock than they seemed to at the time. Had the band existed we would have perhaps sat among the more vigorous end of the room. In my mind I stood stage left making big guitar noises while a, well, be honest, girl voice with attitude shook it up at the front. Sometimes I stood stage right playing the bass parts, which were more fun. In my mind.
Left Songs is a semi arbitrary sequence of the best pieces of the period. In retrospect I would have loved them to be rearranged to fit the band but at the time I that I felt precious about them as they were, but with the hindsight of over 20 years I realise that a band is about give and take and making ideas be the best they can. As it is, these pieces are probably the best they could be.
