TeamHorseTales

  …the lows To date I have mainly focused my wee stories on the elements that made my career in music a relative "success". It wasn’t all sweetness and light though. There was always an undercurrent of melancholy to our music despite our stage presence being slightly different. As musicians Al and I had severe limitations. We would mask this inadequacy by maybe dressing up in Pavarotti and Sergeant Pepper outfits. Or buying bubble making machines that ended up leaking all over the place in a sticky goo making playing the guitar even more treacherous. To settle the nerves we would sometimes frequent of an alcoholic beverage or two. Or three or four, or five or six, in Al’s case most of the time. At least this way we would ride through our subsequent balls-ups reasonably unperplexed. But as any good musician will tell you, playing anyway inebriated is just not the thing, unless you happen to be Keith Richards, or Joe Perry, who Al certainly thought he was. This raised a dif...

  The Highs... When Foam started out, the internet wasn’t really a thing. Not like the overpowering and all encompassing beast it is today anyway. The only access I had to the internet was in the wee café in Shaftsbury Square and I had to travel up to Belfast from Portadown to go to it. The draw was a local forum called Fastfude. This is where I would make our rare gig announcements and each time we put out a new CD, there would be a new post to herald the arrival. When I got myself a Dreamcast console I could access this at home, albeit by dangling cables over the bannisters to plug the damn thing into the wall socket! There was no such thing as Spotify, or iTunes, or Bandcamp. MySpace hadn’t been invented yet either. One of the first websites dedicated to finding new music and exposing it, was called Peoplesound.com. During one of the BelFest festivals, there was word of one of the head honchos from Peoplesound coming to meet bands. So we found ourselves sat in front of an ex...

Straight Outta Portydown All the time growing up in Portadown, I didn’t really have much feel for there being likeminded individuals who had ideas about being in a band and getting famous. However, around that time Therapy? were starting to make serious in-roads and their manager at the time, had also interests in a band from Portadown called Joyrider. I can still recall shambling into Caroline Music in the Magowan Buildings and picking up a copy of the 7” of their song ‘Dweeb King’. It seemed almost impossible to me that a band from my hometown could have a record out. Albeit my own big brother’s band had pressed up a 7” record themselves a few years before that, but that was a low key affair. Eventually the big record deal landed in front of Phil Woolsey and his band and soon they were being played regularly on the radio and getting tours and support slots. They even appeared on Top of the Pops with their cover of ‘Rush Hour’. Yet we’d never met. Until one night I was at a gig in B...

  Famous Acquaintances At the outset of this blog, I should issue an apology for the amount of name dropping that will take place. Ah sod it, these tales are the my claims to “fame” and I’m going for it! After the departure of Young Simon, myself and Al Brown continued as a two-piece. This was back in the days before you had The White Stripes, or Royal Blood and the plethora of minimalist acts that followed. Sure, there’s always been two-piece acts but we stuck out as an entity in Belfast as nobody else was doing it. We changed our name from Funksmith to Foam. This band name was Al’s idea and I don’t know how he came up with it, I just recall I liked it. It suited us. It was snappy. It just seemed to summarise so much about us. With the disposable income I was generating plundering night shift in a local factory I bought an Akai Sampler and we shared financial outlay on a new Fostex 8-track Multitracker. Or “Fosty” as it was known. Fosty has resided in my attic for 10 years and I...

Early Demos and Radio Plays Before the advent of the bedroom recording scene if you wanted to get your music heard on the wireless, as it was known back in them days, you had to venture to a recording studio. After plundering the Yellow Pages, and there wasn't much to plunder then either, we decided to head to Novatech Studios in Mallusk to lay down some tracks, man. Gary Aitken was the man in charge of polishing this turd and boy did he do a great job! We had written some songs and had a bit of an idea what they would sound like, so this was going to be easy. Introductions over, Gary asked me to tune up my rickety old bass. The sheer panic and confusion this simple task created! I didn't have a tuner and when presented with one, I didn't know what to do with it! It also transpired that old rickety wasn't properly earthed so made the most disgusting hum when connected up to a board. I got away with this in the gigs but when there was a turd to polish, this was not going...

Young Simon We knew Funskmith had limitations, we basically had played our first gig borrowing members of another band. No doubt that "experience" had them thinking their time in this premier pop outfit was over and done with. We needed a sticksman, and therefore a rehearsal space. I can't recall for sure how exactly we advertised for our new member but it might have been one of those hastily assembled A4 pages with some appealing blurb, promises we'd never keep up to, and little tear-offs with our parent's landline number on it. This was so looooong ago that mobile phones were not a thing. I know, hard to imagine. But hey, it worked! We got contacted by a young man answering to the name of Simon Mateer. He was a drummer who seemed keen to join our merry band and made his way up to meet us in the pokey wee rehearsal room, ran by a (green tinged) bearded man called Shams. Shams was a very amiable fellow who would hand you the keys over and let you have the run of a...