A brief history.....
Played drums in bands since mid-80s around Adelaide and gradually
learnt guitar, which enabled me to write songs more easily. Because I only
play by ear I didn't really follow traditional learning paths and norms in
music. So I guess, influenced by early Floyd and
The Church, I went off on my own little psychedelic tangent.....
Written 300-odd songs and have
always discarded any ideas which fit into a top-40 type niche.
AAAArrrgh!!!
After meandering through rhythm and blues,
surf, rockabilly and the like, I met Hugh Wilson and Greg Jones in 1992 and
formed Spiraled, playing often swirling songs with a Ride/Pixies tinge.
This was more definitely where I was headed. Went on to form Thrive
with Wilson
in 1994 with me on guitar/vocals and experimented with a more leafy sound.
Played in Whirlpool on SA's west-coast for a while
and then The Zoids with Hugh Wilson again, as a
psyche-pop duo complete with drum-machine. Made some nice recordings and
wrote some great tunes together.
Greg Jones had an idea to get a
stripped-down punk outfit happening so I moved back to drums and we became
Pogo in 2000, mixing punk, indie, mod and
psyche-pop influences in a grungy blancmange of 'teetering on the edge'
rock. Started mainly doing punk classics but the originals-itch came back and
now we’re full-on originals-going-for-it-sort-of-thing-you-know...
Lyrically I've often delved
into the unlikely topics of natural disasters and the food chain. Writing
from say, a venus fly-trap's point of view when
it's about to eat a fly does more for me than writing about having a 'rockin' good time'. The mood of imagining
meteorites hitting the earth interests me a bit more than the sequenced
bursts of bubblegum music. Takes one to the 'other side', cliché.
Used to write mainly for my own
listening and through the 90s had no idea about the possibility of mp3s and
the internet. Now averaging around 7 000 listens and downloads a
month in my various cyber-guises, including Pogo,
Her Garden (11 albums inc. 3 double), The
Zoids, Moonfish
and Hobgoblins.
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