mostly david ephgrave

Yesterday, in an attempt to break the tedium while waiting for a parcel to be delivered, I decided to treat myself to a little musical interlude by pulling out my acoustic to play through a couple of songs before having a jam on the piano too. The last time I’d played the guitar was almost a month ago, when I took it to the Sun Hotel for that night’s Mostly Comedy, after receiving a text from Phil Kay asking if he could borrow it for his set. Knowing how manic Phil can be, my impromptu busk after tuning it up for him felt like saying goodbye before it was sent to battle, perhaps never to return, at least not in one piece; I prayed to the God of Contents Insurance for a little mercy, before sticking it in a guitar stand on-stage to await its final destiny. For someone who’s earned a living (of sorts) from music in the past, I felt guilty for how long I hadn’t even taken my acoustic out of its case. Like my other guitars, it has remained untouched at...

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...