Bands: Finnegan's Wake

< previous

next>

It's time the tale were told, about how i learnt to play bass in (oh dear)a musical and a folk band. OK, i didn't say that all my glittering career was glamorous did i?

When i was at college i wrote plays because, as you'll have guessed, i'm dead sensitive and clever. One of these was a(nother) thinly veiled fantasy about the Beatles, and i thought "O-ho! This could be a musical!" Another regular at the Casbah was Jon Todd, who also played and sang, so i asked him to write the songs, on the condition that i played the bass.

So he had to teach me, and lo! He taught me well! As a result of this, a year later, he asked me to join his new band, Finnegan's Wake. It was a folk band, and so to this today i could play "The Wild Rover" and that song about fools rushing in, but i choose not to.

The first tape was recorded at a studio in the countryside, where the producer bloke kept alluding to his history in a big band in the sixties, "but i don't want to talk about it". No wonder - he was the bass player in the Barron Knights! HAHAHA! When this tape was finished, the bass was so low as to be indecipherable, perhaps related to my constant giggling whenever i looked at him. I got pissed off, the others became even rummer than they had been before, and so i left.

They got in another bass player - she was studying music on a Performing Arts Degree and so, obviously, was crap. She left them a week before they were going into the studio again (they were all dead rich), and a fortnight before their big St Patrick's night gig (they were all dead irish), so they BEGGED me to rejoin! HAHA! I did on the conditions that the bass was audible and i didn't have to pay, so all through the session the bass was wobbling the windows. We then did the gig, during which i did clashing guitars with the violinist, and realised that his "fiddle" was a Stradivarius! Honest! They really were that rich! I could have busted something worth more than my house!

And that was that - they finished college and, like all "competent" student bands, never ever did a gig again. I wonder what happened to them all?

Releases:

Time To Listen With
Happy Town

< previous

next>