Finding Floyd
Ian and Steve were a couple of musical misfits, fixated on Pink Floyd, Hendrix, and oddly, Chris de Burgh.
They took me under their wing (I'm not sure why I needed to be taken under anyone's wing, nor why they thought it should be theirs) and we hung out at break times, talking music. There was a Pink Floyd lyrics game they played:
Q: "Fourth album, side 1, track 2, line 12, word 3."
A: "Rabbit" (or whatever the answer was)
They were surprisingly good at it. Whole lunch hours would pass by playing this, just hanging about and talking rubbish. The other two knew a lot more about music than I - they'd started exploring at an earlier age - and passed on their recommendations to me.
The two of them introduced me to progressive rock, power ballads, heavy metal and the concept of a "band practice", which involved driving out to a house on the edge of a village, wolfing down sandwiches made by someone's mum (we were only about 13 or 14 at this point), and mucking about in the garden for hours before spending the final hour randomly playing chords and bashing the drum kit about.
"You should play bass," they said. They needed a bassist. "It's piss easy, you'll pick it up in no time." I should've tried, but fear kept me back. They probably didn't mean it, anyway.
Thanks to Ian and Steve, I ventured away from the the first records I'd listened to, a bizarre combination of my brother's taste (Billy Bragg, David Bowie) and my mother's (Niel Diamond, ELO, folk and jazz). I began exploring other ideas and broadening my tastes.
I lost touch with both of them after leaving school. I've no idea what happened to Steve. Ian Betts is now a world class trance DJ, so I hope I'm not embarrassing him in public by mentioning his early interest in Pink Floyd. And I'm pretty sure the Chris de Burgh LPs were Steve's, not Ian's.
