Welcome, September.

I remember taking this photo. It was ages ago, probably sometime in late 2006 or around that time. I had this incredibly bad digital camera with a fixed focus and a shutter-lag of about a second which made framing photos almost impossible and any photos that I managed to get were usually blurry or badly exposed. I loved it. It was like the digital equivalent of Holga but without the light leaks and expensive processing. I think I lost it or broke it, I guess when your camera is £25 you take less care of it but I was gutted when I realised it was gone. I have tried to curb my losing-and-breaking habits more recently, but it's a habit of a lifetime and I still seem to lose my things. Most recently, I left my entire bag in a park in South London. Ipod, wallet, keys, everything.

I remember what I was thinking when I pressed the shutter button and waited the second or so until the picture was taken. It was the night we tried to record a rough version of Justine's Housemate using Joshs Ibanez Artcore guitar through his Peavey Amp. At this time, I didn't even own a semi-good electric guitar, let alone an amp, but it didn't stop our enthusiasm for putting a band together. The semi-acoustic Ibanez dwarfed me and I didn't like playing it standing up. I tended to use an old Strat knock-off that had seen far better days instead, despite its bad tuning and dodgy jack. No matter how it was tuned, F Major was way out. We spent hours that night trying to get a good sound from the Ibanez/Peavey combo and it just wasn't happening. It just sounded shit. Nothing we did could correct the fact that the song we liked playing just would not record how we wanted it to. I think we were about 4 hours in when we deleted all the guitar tracks and resolved ourselves to defeat. I took this photo right as we gave up. The photo below shows Josh, 1 second later, turning off the laptop.

Soon after, I got my first "real" electric guitar - An Epiphone Les Paul. I didn't have it very long. It wasn't very good either and I didn't like the weight of it and the fact that it always sounded "heavy". I accepted there and then that good gear costs money, recording was always going to be a brick-wall and that everything, everything takes 5 times longer than I think it will when it comes to band related stuff.

I think I finished a song last night. I started it 5 months ago and I don't consider that to have taken long at all.