I mentioned a little while ago that I'd rediscovered a cassette of my old band Big Day Out's early demos and was struck by the songs and their energy. One such track was I Get High: a burst of musical sunshine that's very evocative of the time and captures what those first few years of BDO were all about.
The demo comes from a session we did with our then-manager Martin Goodrich in 1997ish. Martin was one of the first people to buy into the band and support us. He was a lovely guy with a fair bit of musical knowledge, who also owned an analogue 8-track recorder, which was a dream come true for the band's two songwriters, Rich and me, to get to play with.
My friendship with Rich must have seemed unlikely at the time - he was one of the cool kids at school whereas I definitely wasn't - but it was a sparklingly productive thing. We first got chatting in Design Technology classes (when we should have been working) when we found out we both played the guitar and wrote our own songs, and before long, we were meeting regularly at each other's houses to jam and write together. I introduced him to The Beatles and he introduced me to Metallica and Guns 'n' Roses, and we somehow managed to marry our tastes into something cohesive and fun.
Comedy played a big part in our friendship too, with us spending as much time chatting about Police Squad, Airplane! and Stella Street as about music. Rich was also a good mimic, which was something we'd use occasionally in little amusing send-ups and spoofs that we'd record on my four-track recorder.
We used to push that little four-track to the limit, recording all kinds of demos, from more standard verse/chorus songs to quite complex instrumental multi-guitar pieces. It's only now that I realise how unusual it was for kids that age to do that. We'd spend hours putting together intricate material that far belied our tender age of fourteen or fifteenish. And when our duo morphed into the first few line-ups of Big Day Out - the touchstone moment being when Chris and Mark joined in around 1996/97 - those first few years of experimenting with recording technique and vocal harmony started truly paying off.
Rich and I had a quasi-Lennon/McCartney arrangement from the off, with every song credited as co-written, irrespective of how much we each came up with. There's no doubting that Rich was the dominant writer in those days, partly through his confidence and the fact he hit his compositional stride earlier than me. But collectively, we were better than the sum of our parts, and the combination of Rich's ridiculously good lead guitar playing and our well-matched understanding of how to build harmonies to create something energised and catchy, we were soon impressing people around us and creating a surprising buzz for a band so young.
I Get High was a good example of our poppier beginnings and was heavily influenced by the sudden influx of guitar groups like Oasis, Blur and Kula Shaker in the charts. Suddenly, all the Sixties stuff I'd grown up listening to was in vogue again and being a successful band felt tangible.
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| Early-Big Day Out: a psychedelic 4-piece, circa 1998 (l to r: Chris Hollis, Rich Baldwin, David Ephgrave & Mark Smith) |
The initial song idea was mostly mine, though Rich sang it because it better suited his range. I brought it to the table pretty much fully intact, though it was his canniness for musical arrangement and harmonic detail that gave it that little extra kick. He suggested a different melody for the chorus and came up with the whole "higher, I get high" call & response vocals that are probably the best bit. Listening back to it now, along with various other demos we recorded as a four-piece, I'm amazed that we came up with so much catchy material and how well we played and sang for our age when we were self-taught. It also reminds me how easily Big Day Out could have got somewhere even in its early itineration.
Sadly, being teenagers, we weren't mature enough to deal with the politics of a band-dynamic. While early Big Day Out did very well locally and garnered industry interest, Rich and I started to pull in different ways. Our writing styles began to jar; he favoured concepts over writing truthfully from the heart while his confidence grew at the same rate that I lost faith in my songwriting ability (which was partly due to difficult home life at the time). Rich left the band quite explosively, which was when Mark, Chris and I took the brave decision to scrap all our old material and carry on as a three-piece. And bizarrely, this was when the band found our feet as I hit my songwriting peak.
Somehow, the newly-stripped-down Big Day Out was more successful and - to give the story a swift edit - we nearly "made it". But thankfully, Rich and I rekindled our friendship soon after and even occasionally wrote together again long after the BDO split. And I can now look back on the whole thing fondly with less pain over the missed opportunities and just enjoy what we did. And it's fair to say that if Rich and I hadn't taught ourselves to write & play together as we did and hadn't pursued the idea of making a living from our creativity, I would probably have never followed the career path I did. It's funny what a few chance conversations about Leslie Neilson in a school classroom can kickstart.
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| Rich and I tune-up while Mark looks on, before a gig at Fairland's Valley Park, Stevenage, in 1997ish. |