mostly david ephgrave

My old band Big Day Out used to rehearse in a day centre every Sunday (like most aspiring rock bands, I guess). Whenever we arrived, there was only one thing on our mind, and it wasn’t music. Each week, we’d pray that they'd left their sensory room open by mistake. We only discovered the room by accident. The building was essentially a large square made up of four long corridors meeting at each end, with a courtyard in the middle. These passages had a more than passing resemblance to The Overlook Hotel. We’d wander up and down them in breaks between practising, trying all the doors along the way. On one memorable occasion, a door that was usually locked swung open to reveal a pitch-black room. After a few moments furtively scrabbling for a light switch, I found a whole bank of them on the wall. I flicked them down to be hit by a sea of colour: all manner of mirror balls, disco lights, bubble machines, psychedelic oil projections, fibre-optic and lava lamps came on at o...