TeamHorseTales

  With the Foamboy debut album out there and a panoramic soundscape to inhabit, what would be my next move? I’m not sure why but my mind has terrible brain fog for what happened in these years. As I mentioned in my last blog I found my wee logbook of releases, so that helped me determine what I did for the purposes of the next few blogs. I found some old press clippings too, but they don’t date back to the foggy years! I know I played my only gig in Belfast’s Front Page bar somewhere around this time. I’ve a photo of myself somewhere wearing a fetching pink striped t-shirt and at that time I was sporting a frazzled mop of blond hair. Quite the look I’m sure you’ll agree. Ahem. Anyway, this was a major thrill for me as I was supporting the Canadian post rockers Fly Pan Am. The gig was put on by the lovely Darren Smyth of Strange Victory and I had saw Fly Pan Am on a legendary triple bill in the Empire a few years earlier. They were supporting a then unknown Sigur Ros and Godspeed Yo...

I'm writing this blog a bit of a sweaty mess. Not from doing exercise, but from wrecking the house trying to find a wee tiny hardback book that I recently re-acquainted myself with. The contents were purest gold dust. Especially given my intent to write some historical blogs about my musical past. The front page of this little book still contains the words "Geoff Topley-Cell3-'C' Shift-Kiefel Instructions. There follows 7 points about how to start up the big plastic forming machine I used to run on the night shift in a local factory. Thereafter, there are details of every CD I released under the name Foamboy, or Foamboy Deluxe, or The Foamboy Deluxe Arkestra. Not only that, but a list of every one of the lucky bollockses who received a promo copy of their very own. This information is extremely handy given I have misplaced a lot of these CDs and can't recall the exact order of releases. You see, I didn't just pop up and fire out a lock of CDs and disappear. Oh ...

It was a strange mixture of fear and excitement breaking free from the constraints I found in the latter days of Foam/Roque Junior. I could now set about my art in my own (considerable) sweet time. I was also free from the shackles of working 12 hour night shifts, having moved jobs to daytime employment. I had nothing to stop me now and my newly acquired guitar meant I could make the sounds I wanted to without filtering them through a slightly wayward guitarist. The sampler I had was bought out of my own pocket, so it stayed with me along with the Kaoss pad and other gadgets I would use to turn a shite musician into something approximating a not so bad musician. My skill set was arrangements and knowing how to strip away the best bits of other people’s music to add my own to. I had been doing all of the admin stuff for Foam so that wasn’t going to be a problem, the main issue was always going to be the live situation. At least before I had a wingman to lean on. I wasn’t really the mo...

  …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...