// 016 // CHECK SHIRT? CHECK! // GOOD ENOUGH // MUDHONEY

When you listen to a lot of music, at some point, it dawns upon you that it might be possible to be in a band yourself, get lots of girls, be on the cover of the NME and die of a drugs overdose in a hooker's bathroom (okay, maybe not that last one)  I'd been in one band - a really really bad heavy metal band called The Holocaust Pigs.  We had one guitar and two vocalists.  The guitarist was 12 and had only been playing his instrument (or 'axe' as no one ever calls it) for all of two weeks, we had songs called 'Necrophilliac Hamster' and the moving tribute to sufferers of leprosy 'Decaying Denzil (He's Falling To Pieces)  Truly, we were awful.  Skip forwards several years to me being 17 and trying again, after hearing lots of alternative bands and thinking 'yeah, these guys know all of two chords.  I know almost one chord, how hard can it be.

At about the same time, I met a music teacher who was more than a little eccentric and thought that I should be in a band too, and he gave me the use of the school music room after school to practise, so I roped in the other members of The Pigs (as no-one ever called us) and thus Dog Soup was born.  We had all of three songs, one was about being chained to a fridge as I recall, and we lasted for three whole weeks before the rest of the teachers in the school, in their teachers lounge, right at the other end of the school, kicked us out for making too much noise!  How rock and roll! This set-back, however, curtailed my musical experiments for a good few years, as I couldn't afford a bass guitar and we had no room to put a drum kit anywhere.

The band that inspired me to these early experiments was Mudhoney.  They sounded like they could just about play their instruments, and to disguise their lack of musical ability, they layered distortion over everything which made a nasty garage rock stew that sounded ace to these ears (and more importantly it sounded like I could just about stretch my fledgling musical abilities to match these sounds).  They also seemed to be having much more fun than most of the bands that were their contemporaries. They could be a bit hit and miss on vinyl - their albums always seemed to contain way more filler than killer (as some people did say, but these people might have been Sum 41, so we won't go there).