Electric Bill

So my new project Touch It is coming up. I’ve been rehearsing with Kraz, from Tumbling Squares and Kieron, from The Five Sides. It’s going really well so far. I’m gonna have a couple of rough recordings done to post in the next week or so.

Was thinking about Tumbling Squares a little bit and thought it’s a shame that our old saxophonist Electric Bill can’t get involved. He was a funny bloke. I met him in a temp office job, in 2007, and he told me out of the blue he plays saxophone. He also told me once that he broke a guys ribs with an iron bar! I couldn’t believe it, he was actually a really nice, gentle kind of guy. Bill came from one of those posh boys boarding schools you always hear are notorious for adolescent buggery. He said the boys used to regularly have gang fights between the different ‘houses’ and someone getting a serious injury was pretty standard.

Anyway, Bill was a pretty shite saxophonist – he never practised and was always hitting dud notes – but he was wicked to play live with. He had this mad energy and he’d always be moving and dancing and grinning. The crowd loved him.

He went and did one of those TEFL jobs in Japan and stayed in east asia. He loves it now, think he’s living in Singapore.

We had a Tumbling Squares tune dedicated to him…

 

 

Dance Rants – Older Brother

So, as I was saying before, I started reading Naked Lunch a few years ago and got really into it. It’s written by William S Burroughs who’s a part of the Beat movement in the 1940’s, although Burroughs is an entity all of his own.

I was working in this office at the time where I was employed to answer the phone, maybe, once a shift. I kid you not. It was the most specific type of phone call from someone who worked for the same company as me. When I did get the call I wasn’t actually given the information or the tools to deal with the problem – which was something to do with fitting a BT internet cable – so I was told to just transfer them to a different department! Bloody madness. They employed four people for that job! To cover shift changes and lunch breaks. The guy on my shift had been doing it for about three months and was so boring I filled the time writing angry rants about anything that popped into my head.

Me and Craz – the guitarist from Tumbling Squares – got together and wrote this tune at the time…

Never See Through

Tumbling Squares is the band I formed while I was last in Bristol. This is around 2007 to 2009. We made RaveYard music, some horror inspired punk dance, with Andrew Crother (aka Craz/The Twang Man) on guitar and Billy Burris (aka Electric Bill) on saxamaphone.

I broke them up like an idiot in 2009 and decided to make some spoken word William S Burroughs inspired dance rants – a couple of which were pretty good actually.

Now I’m back in Bristol me and Craz are working together on a new project called Touch It, which I’ll tell you more about later on.

Here’s a tune called Never See Through that Tumbling Squares wrote in 2008.