A few weeks ago, I received a brief for a library music album, asking for truly awful music – bad instrumentalists, annoying vocalists, useless songs.
It’s actually a good concept – occasionally, a film or TV series will have the sound of a young band practising next door or an instrumentalist practising in their bedroom and they’d need actual crap music for that.
Sounded like a job for me. I contributed two hopeless tracks to the album.
The first was called ‘School Rock Band’s First Rehearsal’. I started with guitar, trying to ensure there were errors galore. It was actually reasonably difficult to ensure that the mistakes didn’t sound contrived but I think I got there.
Bass followed and then drums, ensuring that I did enough ropy fills and sloppy timing to make everything sound a bit worse.
So far, so bad. But it needed something else to take it from merely a bit crap to truly awful.
Enter my vocals, hammed up for good measure.
It’s fair to say that most school band songs are about either girls or politics – the latter in an attempt to look edgy and ultimately impress girls. Why not put both themes into one song? Genius.
So the first verse is a pang to love-making, the second verse is a scathing attack on our current government. Perfect. Here’s the final result.
That’s not all. I did a second song by borrowing my daughter’s friend’s violin (thanks Jenna!) and doing the worst scales known to mankind.
It was possibly the most fun I’ve had in the studio in one day, and it was very liberating being as crap as I possibly can.
I should be crap more often.