For those of you who don't know me, I'm Geoff Topley and for many years I recorded music under various guises (Foam, Foamboy, The Foamboy Deluxe Arkestra, Cruz and Team Horse) and played probably a lot less gigs around Belfast than I could and should have. These blogs will feature some ramblings about my experiences either playing or watching gigs from back as far as I can remember. We're talking the halcyon days of the indie boom when you could find a local gig on in many of the city's venues. Nowadays it must be shite trying to be in a band with hardly anyone promoting and most of the venues I will blog about being long gone. I've often thought about writing a book but that's far too much effort, so I'm going to give this a go. I'll basically tell some tales as and when I remember things I think might be of interest. Don't expect anything too dramatic or salacious! 

A bit of background first on my various attempts at super stardom. It all began back in Portadown College when 3 of my mates decided to form a band. That's a loose term given that they really couldn't play any instruments. My big brothers had a band and ever since I can remember, I wanted to be a pop star. I bought my first record Gary Numan/Tubeway Army '"Are Friends Electric?" when I was 7 years old and my first gig was Gary Glitter in Portrush when I was 12 years old. Probably not do a blog about that gig. Hmmm. Anyway, yes, my first band was called Blue Bananas and we made one "album" which basically was a 90 minute one session recording of 4 dickheads in their mate's shed making a racket. I think if I had made it to the heady heights of being a rock star, someone would have arrived with a copy of 6942 to ruin my career. 

I had my sights on making proper music so I formed a "serious" band with one of the Blue Bananas, an ultra cool mofo called Al Brown. We decided on the name Funksmith because we loved Prince and Aerosmith. The other potential name was Aerosoul. Yeah, both names were pish but we were 17 years old. We would hole up in Al's bedroom and hit record on a shitty wee tape recorded with a mic plugged into it and just record as we made up our songs. Al was a whizzkid at mixing things afterwards and we made demos and tapes in abundance. I would make up covers from cut-outs of magazines and those stencil things you rub with a pencil and then fire off copies to all the major record companies. One day, some maverick A and R man was going to sign us. I'd get dozens of no thanks letters back but that did not put me off. Cool dude Al never bothered with any of this admin stuff. He was too busy being cool. But I needed him, because I just was not cool. But I knew I could write a tune.

We got our A-levels out of the way and got accepted to courses at Queen's University Belfast. This could have been the end of our fledgling band but we somehow managed to keep going. Al got to making friends with some lads who had a band called Forget Georgia. The drummer and bass player and us had some jams in one of the lad's garages in Armagh (I think) and we blagged our way onto their gig with hippy jazzsters Ammonullunomma in The Venue, an upstairs bar in Bruce Street in Belfast. It's not there anymore fact fans. We'd always been show-offs in terms of a stage presence, our previous and official first gig was the last day of the College when we dressed up and mimed through some of our favourite songs. Though I had a microphone and sang over the backing. But this was a proper gig, in a bar, with paying punters we didn't know. So dickhead here ventures into a charity shop and finds a ridiculous silky blouse with big frills up the front of it. I saw Michael Hutchence wear one in the video for "Baby Don't Cry" and Prince was fond of natty threads too. It made sense. It also barely fitted if I remember correctly, being made for a woman, not me. Add in a pair of black shades that Bono would later use (I was ahead of my time) and we were ready to go. Bounding onto the stage someone shouted "Fuck me it's Jim Morrison!" and that sealed it for me. Let's be having you! I don't recall much else about that show to be honest. It was 30 years ago now. But this was the start of it. We had arrived...

So there's blog number 1. I don't have much of a plan or structure to where this goes, but you get an idea of what it's going to be with the above. I'll blog about the shows I did, the music I made and the people I met along the way. 

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