Band History

  I began seriously thinking about performing musically in about 1961 when I was 14 years of age, but that's all it was then, just thinking about it. The craze for forming one's own band was pretty well established by then, and our school was festooned with plenty of groups of lads (it was a boys' grammar school) who spent their breaks from lessons talking about starting their own band and making it 'big'! I could not play an instrument back then but rather fancied myself as a singer so would spend my free time with a mate who also sang, trying to learn the words to as many Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley songs as we could for no other reason than we really enjoyed doing it. My mate was a year older than me and he joined a band first as their singer, and they were a pretty good band at the time. In 1962, at 15, I got the chance to fulfil my dream by getting an audition with another band forming at the school, but they reckoned I was not quite what they were looking for, so that was that!
  Another year had almost passed and my dreams of becoming a singer seemed to be fading faster a snowflake in a sauna, when I began chatting to a couple of classmates who were both guitarists looking for a drummer and bassist to form their own band. I had a hankering for the drums by then and another friend fancied learning the bass and we were in business! I bought a second-hand set of Broadway drums, my mate bought a Hofner bass guitar and amp, and we got together in one of the guitarist's homes. I don't really remember what the first rehearsal was like, but it must have been pretty awful as none of us were at all proficient on any of our instruments by any stretch of the imagination. I was still getting to grips with using both my hands and feet in such a way that seemed to be an impossibility to keep them all pounding out the driving rhythms that were needed to create the tempos for the rock and blues songs we had decided to play.
  My dad had made a practice pad which I carried around with me everywhere I went and it became an obsession with me to practise the rhythms and rolls that I could hear the great drummers playing on the records that I would listen to as much and as often as I could, much to the annoyance of my parents who would suffer in silence for some of the time before calling that enough was enough, and forcing me to stop, albeit reluctantly. I would play anywhere and on any surface that I could find in order to hone my drumming skills, and I began to improve and the band, which we called The Outcasts, was starting to come together and to tighten and gel. We thought we sounded quite good, and so did those who were privileged to have heard us rehearse, that's what they said anyway, so the real test was going to be when we played our first gig in front of a live audience of our peers.
  The gig went surprisingly well at a local youth club where we played for free and ran the gauntlet of most of the other school bands who had turned up to watch. We actually gigged throughout the Cleveland region for the next 2 years until we all left school to go off to universities far and wide. I stopped playing the drums at that point as I had become obsessed with wanting to learn to play the guitar, having become a devotee of Bob Dylan's acoustic guitar style, so I bought a cheap guitar at a local music store for £3 which I took to university along with 500 Chords For Beginners, and the rest as they say is history! That was in 1965, and my passion and obsession with the guitar has never waned in the slightest since then. I began to learn the guitar and all the different styles I could master and my lifelong journey began. As a guitarist, I have played solo gigs and have been in numerous bands, made records, worked on local radio stations for a number of years, composed songs, musicals and eventually established my own recording studios - GypsyKate Studios, which I started in 1990 with a 4-track Yamaha analogue recording studio. I now have a state of the art Pro Tools digital recording studio, plus a Boss and Roland portable studios for recording live gigs on the road.