A Brief History of Chaulk: Part II

Things were going pretty well. We'd survived the Chundering Carrot Club, and not only that, had managed to avoid getting any of our kit dirty. We'd started to gel a bit as a unit too. I'd started talking to everyone a lot more. Rich A and I had started forming a pretty decent rhythm section. Dickie had keyed into the things I liked playing and started writing bass parts for me which took advantage of that.

The material we were playing was a mix of leftfield covers and originals. Dickie used to compose all the music, which none of us objected to because it was excellent. He'd turn up with a bunch of sheet music for Rich A, Chris and me, and then rehearse Ben separately with the lyrics and vocal melody. It was a really good way of working, meaning that there wasn't too much sitting around. Ben and Dickie would get together outside of main band rehearsals, leaving those for us to practice the music.

Dickie was a prodigious talent. He wrote all the music down to the last bar, including melody lines, and wrote most of the lyrics, though Ben contributed a fair bit too. We lapped it up though, because we could see here was someone who was going to go far, and he was letting us accompany him.

After about three months of rehearsals, attention then turned towards gigging. We needed money, pure and simple, but we also needed an outlet for the originals we were playing. Before doing this, though, we determined to make a demo tape. This was a pretty good idea, allowing us to hawk the tape around as a form of rehearsal.

So, come Easter '98, we decamped to Chris' parents house, a veritable mansion on the outskirts of Nottingham. It was huge. I’m talking seriously massive. And the view from the conservatory was down from a hilltop looking over rolling countryside. Gorgeous.

We converted the garage into a makeshift studio, moving all the kit in there and setting it up in the best way possible. By now I'd well and truly bonded with Rich A, mainly through having to negotiate shifting my ridiculously large bass amp around the country. It was a big beast, and made a sound to match.

Once everything was fixed, the engineer came, with all his equipment. A friend of Chris' family, and being paid by them too, we had him for a grand total of five days. For those five days, we had finalised the stuff to go on the demo tape as six songs:

"Karma Police" by Radiohead
"Boy in the Bubble" by Paul Simon, reworked by Dickie.
"Cigarettes and Alcohol" by Oasis, reworked by Dickie.
"Forgotten Heroes" by Dickie.
"Love Machine" by Dickie
"Piece of Mind" by Dickie

The Dickie originals were by far the most challenging. My particular favourite was "Forgotten Heroes", because it had a soaring vocal line, but mainly because it had a storming bass part which I could mess about with to my heart's content without undermining the song. "Love Machine" was the hardest though. Conceived in four sections, all in different time signatures (including a "Paranoid Android"-style central bit in 7/8), it was a bugger to get right, particularly for Rich A and myself. However, we rose to the challenge, and laid down our parts within a day and a half. And then there was the sitting around and waiting...

The bulk of the rest of the time would be taken up with recording the piano and guitar, before the final day on vocals. So Rich A, Ben and I were at a loose end. Which was pretty good actually, because I started to bond with Ben. Before this, all I knew was that he liked monkeys and was virtually married off to a girl called Becky who Dickie thought was one of the sexiest people he'd met. But over several million games of Sensible Soccer and Jedi Knight, together with the fact that we were rooming together in Chris' dining room, a lasting bond was created.

In the evenings we decamped to the pub, where we all drank too much than was good for us every night. We also spent some of the days working on new songs, and here a problem arose. Chris had formed the band with Dickie, and thought himself to be equally musically talented. He'd begun to resent not being allowed to contribute his own material to the band, and ruptures started to appear between the two childhood friends. In the end a compromise was reached, where we worked on several songs of Chris'. It has to be said that, nice bloke though he was, his songs weren't up to the high standard we were used to. They seemed a little lounge, and in one case, overly clever (the song in question didn't repeat a single chord during it's entire duration). But we played them, and we enjoyed messing with them. Chris was more willing to accept a little outside input than Dickie was, so it felt more like jamming stuff together. Even Dickie enjoyed this, so things began to smooth over between him and Chris.

Overall, we had a riot. And by the end of the five days we had a demo tape. We eventually cut it down to three songs, as we thought that people we would be "auditioning" for wouldn’t need to listen to much more. We went for two covers – "Karma Police" and "Boy in the Bubble" displaying our Indie and Funk credentials – and one original, "Piece of Mind". This latter was a bone of some contention, as none of us, not even Dickie, liked it that much. But it showed a harder, punkier edge to us, so we went with it. "Forgotten Heroes" and "Love Machine" were deemed too "prog."

The remaining four songs were lost to the ether, but we didn't care. We were ready to gig.