Late July a friend emailed me a notice from a newsgroup asking if anyone wanted to start a band. I don't remember exactly when that jam was, but was late July or very early August 1999. I can't imagine how I got up the courage to go. My memory of myself back then was not one of confidence... but I do remember thinking was OK on the guitar.
The jam was at Bruce's place. Bruce was, in 2000, to be briefly be the drummer of my new band. But that's later. Also there was E (later Bruce's wife), Heath, other Andrew and my friend Damien. Other Andrew played bass, which I remember really enjoying playing (while being called a wanker by everyone else because I played it heavy). I remember being impressed that Heath could sing (I believe he was the only singer there) and play piano. Bruce played guitar. I remember debut'd my new song Lego Woman and trying out some lyrics for the first time. Everyone laughed. I also played some of Right Again.
Heath said that on hearing Lego Woman he wanted to start a band with me. We had hoped to get Bruce too but he wanted to start a band with E and other Andrew. We were on the outer.
Shortly after Heath and I met at the house of a friend of his and jammed again. Looking into my diary at the time I see it was almost at Heath's friend Daniel's place, a full year before I'd even heard of him... how it could have different...
The reaction to Lego Woman at the first jam inspired me to write lyrics for it, and Right Again. These are the two songs we jammed on together for the first time. We also played one of Heath's keyboard songs "Manga" which I loved, very computer game inspired, and we covered Powderfinger's "Passenger". I made Heath sing Lego Woman, despite him wanting me to sing it. I did sing Right Again though. Listening back now... I sounded horrible, but not as bad as I expected.
I loved jamming with a singer. Singing is something I've never been able to do. I've also always had trouble with melody, but melody was Heath's thing. I was always comfortable that we'd make a good writing team.
We jammed again a month later. We didn't have a huge amount of time to get together to play. Heath was still at uni, I'd just started work. The time in between we'd sent each other recordings of our demos. I sent him all the Approximate stuff I had. Heath gave me a pile of keyboard demos that sounded straight out of a late 80s computer game soundtrack. Listening now I love them, but back then I couldn't hear any "songs" so couldn't imagine using them.
We only jammed two more times that year, and yet in that time Heath introduced a heap of his acoustic tracks as well as wrote lyrics to a few of my demos including "Ego" and an epic cowboy tale to my old Approximate song "Out Of Tune". His songs included "PJs", "City Loop" and "Glory". Had I known that our last gig at The Espy in 2004 was going to definitely be our last, I'd have begged to play City Loop. I love that song. Toward the end of Walken, I missed the simple old acoustic tracks. "PJs" still holds up well, at least melodically. I think "Glory" ended up making it to our first single purely because the lyrics weren't too naff.
It turns out "Glory" was a very old track Heath had sung with Daniel (on bass) and Bruce (on guitar) before. Where Daniel was in 1999 and the majority of 2000 I have no idea or can't remember. Why he didn't join the band earlier I don't know. Perhaps Heath was still checking me out to see if it was going to work. Perhaps the idea of a band simply didn't click until later, when we felt we actually had some songs worth playing with a full band.
We tried our first properly recorded two track demo, with Heath writing a great little keyboard melody for "Right Again" (which eventually became the bass line). Over this I tried to record lyrics and wrote a chorus. To this day I've never been happy with that chorus. It was was originally a joke over this demo, sung in a low, try-hard creepy voice. Heath kept singing it in jams, until it stuck. Right Again was cursed forever. We never managed to get a proper demo of it recorded.
The last months of the year were filled with exams, but we still recorded by ourselves. I "wrote" "Monkey" and "With Me" one late night while half asleep. I also started some attempts at better demos of "Lego Woman" (with some electronic drums experiments), "Where Has She Gone" and "Nth".
I always hoped "Nth" would turn into a song in the band, but it never did. "Where Has She Gone" almost made it, but got lost somehow in our search for rock. In hindsight I much prefer these songs over "Monkey" and "With Me" which somehow made it to our first gigs. Heath it seems spent a lot of time in Rebirth making many electronic little ditties, most of which I dismissed to be honest, but occasionally one would inspire me.
If anything, jamming with another composer inspired me no-end. I'm sure I'd have kept writing, but I wouldn't have attempted lyrics or melody as much as I did. I also started leaving spaces for choruses, leaving room for solos, thinking about where the drums would go. Something I'd never done before.
I still hoped to play with a drummer though.