Tony Pell and I
MARK and TONY PELL
Me and Tony have been friends since the heady days of Dyax 1, We both share a similar interest in music and both enjoy writing songs both individually and together. We still see each other at Jam sessions but have not worked together for a few years now since I joined Cracker2 in the November of 1999 and formed Zero Damage in May 2003. He doesn't play too much guitar these days either which is a shame because he was once very good at it. I have 4 songs here that Tony and I collaborated on, you know, those wet Saturday afternoons when nothing much is going on. We actually created a whole lot more that were neither suitable for band or live use, pretty much just like these, just experimental stuff mainly and see where the music takes us.
Tony sings on all of these although I wrote virtually all the music and the lyrics.
KRYMANDA the Rock Open Band
Krymanda is an anagram of Mark and Andy, the two founding members of this one off project. I met Andy Wright at a jam session and we got on pretty well and talked about our music. It was 3 weeks before the legendary Scunthorpe Rock Open started in 1993 (I think) could be 94, brains not what it used to be. We decided we would enter, we needed 3 original songs and a bass player and drummer. We spent a week draughting up 3 songs and then employed multi talented Rob Simpson to join us on bass guitar and Calwyn Hunt on drums. We then formally entered the competition and practiced like hell for 2 weeks to hone our songs to perfection. The recordings here were done on the first night of practice so we could all then have a copy to practice to and make sure we all knew the arrangements. We came 2nd in our heat from seven entrants (beaten by an incredible band from Sheffield) and qualified to play with the best of the rest where we came 3rd. Here are the 3 songs in rough draught quality originally recorded on a small portable cassette recorder in Andy's lounge. If I remember rightly I used Samick guitar at the time, the one with the eagle crafted into the guitar body and played through a Zoom 9000 effects gadget.
Me with Andy Thomas of Zero Damage (now GLAM)
This is a tune we wrote recently, Andy put down the chord riffs and I wrote the lyrics and pursuaded Andy to sing them, he has a better voice than I do and I think this song suited his style.
I added all the extra guitar work later and fiddled with the drums a bit, anyway it is a song that was knocked up rather quickly and like all my stuff it could have benefited from being recorded live in a proper studio but what the hell, who said we were taking this all too seriously.
Enjoy
Me and an american dude called John
I was on the Line 6 forum and came across John's country song which just needed guitar adding so I gave it a shot. The result was not what John was actually looking for but he liked it anyway, he said it reminded him of Johnny Winter which I suppose isn't a bad thing. He has given me his permission to place this song on my website for everyone to hear.
Here is John's myspace page
