Articles
September 2005
Stringing Me Along
April 2005
Pace's Folly
December 2004
Changes
November 2004
Pacing Myself
October 2004
Zappily Ever After
August 2004
Zappily Ever After
August 2004
My name is Julian, and I am a roadie.
In fact I'm not just a roadie. I'm the roadie. And I've been one for a long time.
I still don't know how this qualifies me to write a column for STOF. I mean, what is there in my wild years of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll that makes me a good subject to pin down? What is there in the parties, the clubs, the beautiful ladies, the swimming pools entered while fully clothed, the hotels dashed through while significantly less than fully clothed, the nights I don't think anyone in the band remembers, except me...
But I would like the record to show that I was not involved in the incident with the goat.
Honestly. I am not a bad person. Just misled. Sadly, sadly misled. My innocence was taken and abused, and fed enough liquor that it didn't mind. But I was once a sweet and innocent boy, with a face grannies liked to pinch.
You may stop laughing any time now.
It's all the fault of my dear mate Adam St. John, who began my corruption back in the halcyon days before he had acquired either his nickname, his deadly guitar skills, or that ridiculous shaggy hair"style". We were then two fresh-faced young lads, well-scrubbed and proper.
God, what the hell happened?
The short answer is that one day, Sinjin took it into his head to trade his collection of WWII RAF models for Peter Dickinson's guitar. Don't ask me why. I think he'd have done better to stick with the planes. Maybe he'd have been respectable today. But no; the guitar it was. And he turned out to have rather a knack for it.
I did not, or this story might have gone differently. Despite his valiant attempts to teach me, I was an utter disgrace. But I loved his guitar too, I really did. I'd make him lend it to me just so as I could look at it - with the understanding that if I was foolhardy enough to damage it, he'd take it out of my hide, best mate or no. And so began my long, Sinjin-assisted slide into the depths.
By the time we'd hit high school, Sinjin had traded up Peter's guitar for a gorgeous Fender Strat. He had also acquired an amp that looked like an orange crate and worked about as well as one. Since I was studying Electronics and Sinjin was not, and he was tired of kicking the damn thing until it worked, he generously allowed me to take it to bits in the hope I'd repair it. I was good at this sort of thing; surely I would at least be able to put it back together again.
Only I couldn't. Somewhere along the line, some of the bits went astray, and when I was down to the final handful of solder joins, I found myself with a number of things that I wasn't at all certain went into the holes I had left for them. So there I was, with my best mate's amp possibly irreparable, and said best mate coming round to collect it in short order. So I shrugged, soldered all the bits in anyway, and decided to say not a word to Sinjin about it.
So he arrives, with guitar in tow, all excited-like, and plugs everything in. He brings his right hand to the strings, and I'm all set to look surprised when nothing happens, only his chord comes out so damn loud it literally knocks me on my arse.
"Ju!" he yells, clapping me on the back and pulling me up again. "Ju, my man, brilliant work."
Er, yeah, Sinjin, that's it. Brilliant. Yeah. I am, aren't I.
So that's how I became a tech.
And about five years later, when I was playing roadie for a relatively terrible neopunk band called Tremble Like A Flame and desperately trying to evade the clutches of Blaise Flame, the lead singer, Sinjin rang me up in the middle of the night.
"Hey, I've got brilliant news for you," I remember him saying. And in the instant before I decided absolutely and irrevocably that he would have to die for this, I heard the immortal words, "D'you want to come tech for my new band? We're called... um... what the fuck are we called again? Can't remember. Look, come over to my place tomorrow afternoon and meet them."
And thereby hangs a tale.
So I went, because I was getting really tired of Blaise's lipstick marks – I mean, it looked good on him, but red is not my colour. And by the end of the afternoon, I'd met Charlie, Liam, and Patrick, had much too much beer, and more or less formally signed on with a band that it turned out didn't actually have a name yet. It was a couple of weeks before we did. But when we did, well, I guess you know what it was.
My name is Julian "Zap" Quinnell, and I work for DriveSHAFT.
