The Wharf with half the Crucified Brains

I met Ian Cargill in the Autumn of 1984, when the original line up of the Crucified Brains was still together, and we have been making music together ever since. Cameron, Ian and I formed a band called the Cassette Tape Trees in early 1985. We were really terrible and I'm grateful we didn't even try to gig, I think we knew at the time we were very dodgy. What did strike me about this band though, was that Cameron and Ian were such a great complement to each other in a band. Cameron was the most solid rhythm guitarist I ever played with and, freed of any obligation to play rhythm guitar, Ian's lead guitar was often amazing.

After the demise of the Cassette Tape Trees, Cameron and Ian never played in the same band again. Having known each other at school, they had been rehearsing, playing in a succession of "bedroom bands"in The St Clair Hall, Balwearie and various bedrooms for many years, so it always seemed a shame to me that they never played live together until........

Fast forward 14 years to 1999, and Ian was in a band called the Cylinders. Cameron had lived through the experience that was Darlingheart in the early '90's and hadn't played with any band since 1992. The Cylinders played the annual Dalmally music festival every year, Cameron came up that year to help out and played with the Cylinders at the end of their set.

So I think this clip is interesting for a number of reasons. Having rehearsed together and played in so many bedroom bands together, this is the only time that the original two guitarists of the Crucified Brains ever played live together. They are actually playing a song called "The Wharf" that was written for one of the bedroom bands they were in and this was the only time it was ever played live. After almost finding fame and fortune with Darlingheart, this was Cameron's last appearance on stage.

So maybe not the Crucified Brains, but interesting all the same. Now, if only we had video cameras back in the '80's......

Sorry for the very poor picture quality, this is not Youtube's fault, the original tape is very bad too.

For anyone interested, here is a link to the Cylinders My Space

And of course, anyone who knows this blog will know that much, much more information is available on the Crucified Brains and other seminal 1980's Kirkcaldy Bands here.

Side Effects

Ian has been transferring his Kirkcaldy 7 inch singles to MP3. Some are very interesting. I know nothing about this band, but they seem to be very good.

I wonder if I can find out any more about them?

Here is Ian's single, you can click on the links and hear the songs from them -

Side Effects - Little Men

Side Effects - Just like Me

Side Effects - Imagination

Satisfaction

After all the work, I'm happy to say that www.kirkcaldybands.com is up and running and better than ever - even if I say so myself. It's amazing how a tiny little thing can mess you up at the last minute though. After pretty much three days solid working on the site, I took the plunge and deleted the old and uploaded the new. Of course it didn't work the first time. I hadn't realised that the web server at the hosting company was case sensitive. Every website needs a page called index.html in its root directory, or it won't work. My "Index.html" was the reason I had to spend 40 minutes on hold with the customer support people and the world had to do without my main website for a day and a half. It shoud have been small case "index.html" - computers, eh?
There has been some, very tentative, but very interesting, excited talk over the Kirkcaldy Bands e-mail about a possible one off reunion of one or more bands next summer. As a few band members, like me, live abroad from Kirkcaldy (imagine anyone wanting to do that), this is being planned on a long time horizon - so we are talking about next Summer. But I suppose it's been 20 years, so what's another year. If the website results in even one genuine reunion of a great band from the past, to me that'd be success beyond my wildest dreams, when this website was just a funny little idea in my head in early 2000.

Above is my favourite pic of me. It was taken during the happiest period of my life (so far, there may be another........) in late Summer 1985, in Oliver's in Kirkcaldy. My sister took this photo, I was 18 at the time. It was this jacket that I wore everywhere in 1985/6 and I wore this jacket and these sunglasses at out first gig. I still own the jacket, but didn't wear it much after 1986 and stuck it in a cupboard. In the early '90's I found it again and realised it's pockets were a funny little time capsule, stuffed with bus tickets, Bentley's party invites and other junk from the day. I think there may even be a little note that Pru, who I was secretly madly in love with in the summer of '85, wrote me.

If this one off gig comes off, I hope we can get our old band, The Surgical Wars, back together again. We'd have to be bottom of the bill, because were were shite - but it'd be fun to do it. I was just thinking that some of the children of the band members may be coming up to the ages were in the mid '80s. The jacket survives with it's time capsule pockets, contained in my Edinburgh storage locker - so I'll wear it again for the gig, if I can get into it. The sunglasses got nicked at out first gig. I think I must have taken them off between songs, so I could see the audience, put them on top of an amp, forgot about them, then of course they got nicked. The "battle of the bands" prize got nicked that day too. The 21st of February 1986 was an eventful day. Lets hope for another.

Tom the Website Hermit

Having finally got rid of my cold virus and had a relatively productive week at work last week, I have become a hermit this weekend. I tend to do these things. In the planning stage it seems like a good idea to tackle large website related tasks in one go. I re-created www.kirkcaldybands.com over a weekend or so in April. Having used the most crap website creation tool in the world (Rapidweaver) to do so, I now find I have to re-create the site for the third time.

Having toyed with writing my own code, and having been quite proud of myself that I managed to do a page or two, I decided that life was too short to spend it manually typing out XHTML every time I needed to add a image, etc. It's especially laborious for images, you have to type out the exact pixels you want the image to be, etc. I therefore spent the $400 that I've been putting off spending and have bought a "state of the art" GUI web creation tool, Deamweaver.

It's really not the easiest thing to use in the world either, being pretty complex and most of CSS (cascading style sheets) are still a mystery to me. But I'm delighted to say that, as of 10.30pm local time, the re-born site is happily uploading to the remote server, the result of a weekend and a half's work. There will be some loose ends, but it has been worth it. I think the site looks better, and most importantly, I can update it again without all the aggravation of the mind numbing slowness of Rapidweaver (an inappropriate name if I ever heard one!) and the frequent crashes whilst saving, resulting in lost work.

It's great timing, as the site has uncovered some very interesting finds in the last weeks which I've been able to upload to the new version. Julie Watt of The Amused, who now works for Telstra in Brisbane Australia, was in touch and she e-mailed me some very cool pics of the band, one is above.

My favorite find though, is Davie Brown from the Ghost Train's audio tape, which Ian enhanced, edited and transfered to the above CD, which I got on Saturday. It contains some absolutely cracking material, I now see that it is not just nostalgia, the Ghost Train were a tremendous band - shame they split 17 years ago. There is even a radio interview with some of the Ghost Train members, talking about the local scene and their plans to make it big - amazing.

But, of course you can only sit with an iBook for so long and I'm now going slowly mad and am desperate to do something that does not involve computers for a bit. Not an easy task in 2007! It's almost 11pm now, so time to go to bed. Then I'll get up on Monday morning, get dressed, have a shower, something to eat, then - guess what? Go to the computer to begin work! At least it'll be a different computer.

The Kirkcaldy Bands of the '80's. Some of it might have been crap, but at least it was our crap!

I've been a bit light on the old blogging front over the past few weeks, as I've been concentrating on resurrecting a website I first created and ran in mid 2000 - when the internet was new and exciting.

It's now called - www.kirkcaldybands.com and it's a kind of tribute site to the music scene in the town where I went to high school and college. I don't really know if Kirkcaldy was that special at the time (I only knew Kirkcaldy, maybe other local scenes were good) - but looking back on it, there were an astonishing number of local bands - some pretty good. We spent most of our spare time (and we had A LOT of spare time) in the years 1985 and 1986, going to see these local bands, and being members of some of them.

The scene was also pretty good in that, there were very few cover version bands, so we were all writing our own material - pretty creative really. I've enormously fond memories of these days, and I created the original website as a way to preserve and celebrate those times and that music.

The website was a pretty big success in the year or so after it was first uploaded. I got mails from astonished members of these long forgotten bands. I got in touch again with some people who were really good friends in the mid '80's.

Things kinda tailed off after that and I began to resent paying the fees to keep the website up, so I took it down, around 2003. Having gotten into blogging, I checked out the price these days of webhosting and I was amazed at how much webspace you can get for how little money. Even better, you can opt to host your webpage on Linux - take that Microsoft - and it's cheaper!

So I decided to lock myself away in my apartment last weekend and re-create the website. I literally locked the door on Friday and did not emerge until Monday! I struggled a bit to find a good website creation tool, and finally paid $40 for Rapidweaver. I'm not sure if the word "rapid" means something else to the guys who created this software - "rapid" it ain't! It is a huge RAM hog - I'm using it on my favourite computer, the little Apple iBook G4 that is pictured on my first blog entry. But it is taking around 5 minutes each time to save anything. The activity monitor goes crazy whenever it does anything. That aside, it is a pretty easy to use tool, and I think the website looks good. Great URL, a lot better than before.

I'm now in the frustrating position, having created the site, of knowing that it'll take a bit of time for anyone who may be interested in it, to stumble across it. I managed to edit the wikipedia entry for Kirkcaldy (childishly easy - no wonder sites get vandalised - I was looking up a page about a Labour Party Politician the other day, and it said "he is a fan of Celtic Football Club, he is a wee jobby" - nice), so there is a link to it there, and I've been playing with meta tags, so people who are drunk and sticking their own name into google to see what comes up, may stumble across themselves (or is it just me that does that?). I've sent mails off to some of the people who contacted me last time - but of course, the mail addresses are 4-5 years old and (this time around), there is a time difference too.

I'm really in the market for obtaining more material for the site. The MP3's I made from old tapes and the scans of posters, flyers, etc. - are really just mine and my mates. Sad to say, when the website was last active, I came to realise that most other people who played in bands in those days, were a lot less careful with keeping their material. This has had the bizarre effect of making my own band ("The Surgical Wars" - I know, terrible name - it could have been "Hot Knives" - that would have been much, much worse) seem much more prominent in the line up of the bands than we should be, we were really just bit part players, compared with some of the other bands. It's just that we have a ton of our own material and I don't think other bands kept as much of theirs. As it's over 20 years now since these bands roamed the earth (or Kirkcaldy), the material is getting rarer, and rarer. I hope we can turn up more material - I'm intrigued to see how the response to the site may have changed since the last time it was up - the internet changes so much, that 4 years of being away is a long time. I've started what I'm calling the "Kirkcaldy Bands Treasure Hunt" - to see if the people who stumble over the site may have any material they can send me - anyone who will spend any amount of time on the site is bound to have been around in those days, I can't imagine anyone else would find it remotely interesting. It'll be fascinating to see if I turn up anything - I'd love to re-connect band members with any of their old material that they thought they'd never hear again, I'd also love to find some material I tapes of some of the local bands that people borrowed in the '80's and never gave back. I love the thought of re-discovering an preserving and making widely available dusty tapes from the 1980's vortex, before they rot away altogether.

I was just thinking - when I was playing in these bands (the pic above is of me, from this era) and I knew of a guy who was researching the Kirkcaldy Bands of the 60's (i.e. 20 years before the '80's), would I have thought that was cool, or sad? I thought - sad for a while, but now I think - cool! Answers on a postcard to Kirkcaldybands.com.

And - OK, if you download any of the music (particularly our band), some of it is pretty dodgy. I think you would have had to be there at the time to really appreciate it. But at least we were out there at the age of 19, creating music and having fun. We could have been kicking in bus shelters, or (much worse) in our bedrooms, playing board games! It might have been crap, but at least it was our crap!