Okay, well you've come to this page to find out a bit about how we started haven't you? This we will explain, but be warned, it's not easy reading. Are you sitting comfortably? Then let us begin...
We started playing in a band slightly more than three years ago. At this stage, it was just Jack, me and another dude called Lawrence, who features in a large part of the rest of the band history - respect to Lawrence. Anyway, he played bass, and I played guitar, and we'd both only really just started, so we were pretty terrible at that point. Jack was by far the best of us at that point. Anyway, we theoretically had another guitarist - Dolly - who was, sorry Dolly, even worse, and who quit after about a week or so, and a singer, Tom, who didn't actually want to be in the band, but who on occasions did come back to do guest appearances. Anyway, pretty soon it was just Jack, me and Lawrence, and we started off playing all the really basic stuff, like Nirvana and Green Day, and we played quite a few of our own songs as well, none of which were particularly amazing back then, although we thought they were at the time. Anyway, at that stage, we were called Brainchild, and we played like that for about three months.
We started to get a bit more serious when we got Mike to join the band. Basically, he came in as another guitarist, and was quite a bit better than we were at that stage. We improved quite a bit after that, and we eventually got good enough to play at a concert supporting The Hamptons, who were really cool and helpful, and have been since as well - respect to them too. Either way we didn't play particularly well, but it was still cool.
Fairly soon after that, we started to buy some of the equipment we needed to play properly, and we improved even more. We changed our name to Stricken, and we wrote a few new songs, all of which were quite punky, and a vast improvement on our older stuff. We recorded three of these at a studio, which came out reasonably well, and which was pretty cool.
At around this time, Mike was playing in another band as well called Hurley, who played punk music as well, with Oli and another dude called Kaivon (the drummer). Either way, they were quite good too at the time, and we played with them in a school concert, which was cool. Anyway, the thing that really got us going somewhere was when we saw an advert for the Live+Direct project in a local paper, and we sent off our demo cd. We were accepted for the project, and we were ready to go along. Anyway, at about this time, we changed the bands around quite a lot. Basically, we changed the band going to the Live+Direct thing to Jack, Mike, Oli and me, which meant losing Lawrence. Jack and Sam and I still play with Lawrence quite a bit though, especially school stuff. Anyway, after that slightly unfortunate incident, we joined the Live+Direct project under the name of 4Foot10.
We wrote a few new songs with Live+Direct including Grace and Raising the Stakes which you can listen to, hopefully, on www.mp3.com/echored and then we recorded them at the ACM in Guildford. After this, Sam joined the band as singer, and has basically given us a major lift with extremely good, reliable singing. He did the vocals for Grace when we did the mixing at Opus Studios.
The next major stage in the band career was the Farnham Park Festival. We were, due to my mistake (sorry), under the impression that our set at Farnham would have to be 45 minutes of our own material, which wasn't so good for us considering that we only had two playable songs at that point. Either way, we took a week out in the holidays before the gig to write and practise new songs, and we came up with 5 of them, all of which sound pretty cool I think. Sam unfortunately could only come on the Thursday before the concert (he was singing for Wales - serious respect), so he had a vast amount of song-learning to do, but he managed and we played pretty well at the concert. Hopefully a recording of it should at some time become available at www.mp3.com/echored, and so you should be able to hear it. Anyway, that's about it so far. Coming up we have hopefully some new recordings, and possibly even a video, if we can get them sorted. Oh, and loads of gigs coming up later this year. Rock on.
If you've read all the way down to here, then I'm seriously impressed. Thank you.
