I was working on a sort of 'Making the video' type write-up for the Superglider site to accompany the "I've been in an accident" vid the other day, and rambling away tangentially as I do my train of thought took me back to the first band I was ever in. (How I got there is too convoluted and obscure to bother with here). I was 10, and my friend Kamran Javid and I -inspired by a couple of girls in our class who could play "Heart and Soul" (the duet kids everywhere can play)- started writing tunes on the school Casio keyboard. We almost exclusively used the black notes, and we only had three tunes. The first, "Organ Time" I have a recording of that we made in the school hall. It has the sound of kids playing outside in the background and faint birdsong at the start. Our second tune didn't have a title, but I submitted it five years later as a composition for my music GCSE. I got a B. Go figure. The third song we did likewise had no title that I can remember, and never got recorded. It stuck in my head, though, and being reminded of it again the other day I thought that maybe I should record it. So I did. I kept the tune exactly as we wrote it, but I tried to produce it in the way it would have been had record company execs decided that 10-year-old electropop duos were going to be the big thing in '87. Now I can't stop listening to it, though I think it's more through nostalgia than the tune being any good. It's quite sad to hear it now -around the time we wrote it Kamran and I were both pretty melancholy over a girl we both liked who was systematically flirting with every boy in the class. We'd been early targets in her campaign and she'd moved on. I remember waking up one day around this time to "Nothing's gonna stop us now" by Starship on the radio, and being struck from nowhere by this horrible empty feeling and the realisation that after we left for our different secondary schools I'd never see her again. In hindsight our tune is based on the same chord progression. Plagiarism is obviously in my genes. Chris and Carolyn both got the internet this week. Hopefully the next diary will not be mine!
