The Story So Far..

Submitted: 2007-11-08 04:58:31

It all started in the summer of 2005, when I returned from a long exile in foreign lands and found myself in need of employment. Such was found in the guise of a supermarket which hired me to stack shelves in its chilled section. There I happened upon Alex. Initially Alex

we got talking because we are both bikers but soon found we also had a common interest in music.

Within a few months Alex and I left the employment of the supermarket to work where our talents were put to better use, In IT, Alex as a Web Designer and myself as a systems administrator. My new boss was Matt and it so happened upon one drunken soiree we ended up at a friend's place that had a basement full of musical instruments. I talked of my dreams of forming a band, I had a singer, I played guitar, if only we had a bassist to complete the combo. Matt drunkenly raised his head off the floor and, as if by an act of providence, slurred, I play bass, me". It was enough, the band was born.

Initially we met up at Alex's place to jam and get some songs together, until Alex's then girlfriend hurled us into the street with a mouthful of twisted rage. We then thought it prudent to find somewhere else to practise and my garage became our new venue. During one of our 'Band meetings' at the White Cross we noticed an open mike night at The Golden Lion. We had been practising for a while and felt confident enough to perform but we needed a name.

Initially I put forward "The Dogs" as a name as I felt it had enough connotations, such as Reservoir Dogs, Straw Dogs, Bad Dogs, Big Dogs, Dogs Danglies, Dog tags, Dogs of war etc. Sadly my compatriots failed to see the brilliance of this scheme and I found myself outvoted. The one day working with Matt I found myself working in the Windows folder called System 32. "System 32, that's a good name for a band". To my surprise, Matt agreed, got in touch with Alex who was in a similar state of mind to agree and the band was christened.

Although we had done one previous performance, 'The Gig in the Garden' or to be more precise, the gig in my garden , in front of an invited audience who were guaranteed not to throw stuff or we wouldn't feed them, it was at the Golden Lion was our first public performance.

It went well. It went better than well and we even got our first encore, which caught us completely off guard (Folks at the Red Lion are a warm hearted bunch, plus the beer flows freely and plentifully there). Alex shouted out, Let's do Hotel California! which loosely translates into normal English as, Let's do the song we haven't practised! To this day, spontaneity is still part of our performance. Not intentionally, of course. It just happens. Spontaneously.

At the beginning of this year, largely due to the lack of a drummer, we hit a dry patch. We used our IT knowledge to cobble together a drum machine, and whilst working on this project Alex brought along a mate who had just purchased a drum kit and was prepared to teach himself to play to become part of the band. This mate also played pretty good guitar and played through some of the songs with us, taking the weight of rhythm guitar off Alex and allowing him to concentrate on his vocal performance. This was Rich, who became the fourth member of System 32. The gentle and considerate folk we are, we decided to chuck Rich in the deep end and within a week he was doing his first ever performance with the band, in fact his first ever performance, full stop.

(644 words)

- Posted by Harley

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