Croc Attack (1986-1991) was very different from Road Menace. For a start the sound was a lot more “raw” and perhaps a little bit angry to boot. Not punk by any stretch, but just a bit angry. Because we were a three piece we decided to “muddy” up the guitar sound with phasers, flangers, distortion and other guitar effects as well as beef up the drumming a bit more. I also tried to be a little more “busy” on the bass and EQ’d it to try and make it sound a bit more like a tinny, treble-y sounding bass. I guess at the time I felt that I would have to try and help flesh out the guitar sound and make the bass a little more melodic. I’m not sure if it worked but my bassplaying got a little bit better anyhow. Not that I felt I was that good, but I was adequate.

It didn’t take that long for us to throw a few songs together and eventually we had enough to start playing live shows. We grabbed “Cutt Back” from Road Menace’s set list as it was originally written by Baz and Duncan in the first place before being “stolen” by Road Menace. In my view Croc Attack did the better version of this song by far.

In 1987-88 we recorded a four track demo cassette and started hawking it around shops and venues to get work. The cassette was called “L.C.L.Q.” which stood for Low Cost, Low Quality. We recorded the tracks in the “Blue Room”, where we used to rehearse. Baz and I shared the vocals but, really, we were kinda looking out for someone else to do the vocals. We were also looking for another guitarist (though not very hard I must say) but nothing really came of that. In late 1988 though we did manage to get ourselves a lead vocalist called Erik (real name Richard Millard).

We kept on playing the pub and club scene and writing more songs. I left most of the lyric writing up to Richard and we ended up with some pretty strange stuff. One of the songs we came up with was called “Dementia” and I always loved the line “Dementia, it’s on my mind”. Richard couldn’t quite finish all of the lyrics though so I helped out with writing them. I had no idea until afterwards that the song was about Richard’s own grandmother! Sheese!

In 1989 we went to The Phantom Tollbooth Studios and recorded Dementia as a single, with another original track called “Grunge Swamp”, which was an instrumental, as the B-side. The record was completely self-funded but we did manage to get an independent record company to distribute the record for us. It was cool to go through the whole process of recording, processing, designing, printing and manufacturing and I learned a lot about it. When it came to producing the artwork for our own label, Duo Mondrian, the designer misheard what I said and asked “What? Huey will drown?”. That sounded a lot funnier than Duo Mondrian and so our record label quickly became Huey Will Drown - featuring a “Disney-like” character seemingly holding a slice of toast in each hand? Go figure? The cover of the record is primarily from a college project by my then girlfriend which featured saliva in cling wrap! It kinda looked a bit like some sort of “brain chemistry” and so it made a good image for dementia. The back of the cover features us all standing around a pool at an artists colony called “Montsalvat”. I’m the third from the left.

When I went to pick up the finished records from the pressing plant I could hear someone in the background singing the chorus to Dementia, so that kinda made my day. We ended up pressing 500 vinyl singles and giving out some of them to various radio stations around town. Some of the alternative radio stations gave it some airplay and it was cool to hear something that I’d done on the radio. We didn’t sell a huge amount of copies but we didn’t care!

Unfortunately later that year Duncan was suffering from some type of repetitive strain syndrome in his arms and had to give up playing the drums. We were able to find another cool drummer, Steve Kolakowski, to take on the job for us. His first gig though was very funny, from memory. He was playing all of the songs way too slow and I went over to him and yelled “Faster. Faster”, but he kept on going at exactly the same pace - even though he said “OK, I’ll go faster”

By the end of 1990 the band was kinda stagnating for no apparent reason. I thought it may have been because of the songs themselves so I decided to “prostitute” myself a bit and do a whole lot of research on up and coming alternative bands and then try to come up with some new sounds. Baz and I worked on some really cool new songs - very different from our previous stuff and a lot harder edged - and then we started rehearsing them in the studio with the other guys. It wasn’t enough for Baz though as he had “issues” with Richard and had decided to leave the band. Of course I didn’t realize that he had a problem with Richard until some years later. If I’d known at the time I probably would’ve voted to kick Richard out and keep Baz. Unfortunately for the band though I also decided to leave because my heart really wasn’t into it anymore since the other two original members had left. It seemed like the right decision for me at the time, but I felt bad for getting Steve involved in the band only to disappoint him later on.

In 1996 we had a reunion gig and played to about 400 people in a very hot and sweaty venue. It was an enjoyable show and the three original members were back and playing again - for one night at least! The following songs come from a promotional cassette, called “Purge”, that I put together just prior to the show. It features demo versions recorded at “The Laundrette” where we had our studio set up. Although the versions of Dementia and Grunge Swamp differ to the ones that were on the single I thought I’d put them here instead. Besides, I couldn’t be bothered setting up the record player just yet.

The descriptions of the songs are taken from the “liner notes” on the cassettes.

Mystery Girl - This song marked a change of direction for Croc Attack. Baz and my vocal talents were no longer necessary once Richard joined the band - that was his department. Duncan and Baz came up with the original riffs, while I wrote most of the words. Baz filled in any blank spaces with his lyrics. One strange thing about this song is that although we never released it as a single we did manage to make a music video for it. I have no idea why but it seemed like a good thing to do at the time and it was a lot of fun. We ended up piling about 100 or so people into an old laundrette - where I lived at the time - and filmed a part live/part conceptual video. Then we all partied afterwards!

Grunge Swamp - At the time it seemed to us that we would not be accepted musically in the alternative scene unless we played a specific style. We didn’t know how to write songs that people wanted to hear. At the time we were definitely angry young men, hence Grunge Swamp - our ode to the alternative music scene at the time. No lyrics were necessary - the instruments did all the talking for us.

Dementia - Lyrically a throwback to the old Road Menace days, i.e bizarre! Richard and I wrote the words. I was just making up stuff that rhymed and sounded mysterious, but I think Richard was writing a potted history of his grandmothers’ life. I’m not sure how the music came to be so I can’t comment. This song became our first, last and only record - which meant that we’d finally made it onto radio. The version here, however, is an earlier incarnation.

Cutt Back - One of the Croc Attack songs! Although Road Menace played and recorded it first, Cutt Back was the first collaboration between Baz and Duncan who created it in Baz’s bedroom, alternatively known as the “Icebox”. Baz played it at a Road Menace rehearsal and the band added it to their playlist. Croc Attack’s version is harder and a bit dirtier and, to my mind, is a much better product. This is a later version than the one recorded for L.C.L.Q.

In It’s Own Time - Written by Daniel Jach from Road Menace, and released on his first tape “Sad And Lonely Roads”. I really liked this song and asked Dan if he minded us playing it? He gave us the chords and the lyrics and we gave it an up tempo beat and an extra line in the chorus. Still one of my favorite Croc Attack songs today.

Here’s the songs! Once again please excuse the muddy mixdowns. These ones seem particularly “bassy”

Mystery Girl

Grunge Swamp

Dementia

Cutt Back

In It’s Own Time

Its a shame because we’ve had a good run with the current host and they’ve always been on top of things when there’s been problems in the past. Nice friendly guys too. The past week though the organization has been looking a little shabby. Hopefully it will improve.

As far as other matters are concerned I’ve been busy updating various sites, as well as organizing a few tutorials for Handplane Central. I’ve conducted a bit of a poll there and it appears that most people, by far, want plans and tutorials — so I’ve been digging a few profiles out, sawing some wood and taking a few photographs. I’m part way through making several hand planes and documenting the stages as I go. I had been slowing down on making hand planes in general the past couple of years but I’m on an upward curve again. It happens like that sometimes and I worked out that next year will mark my 15th as an infill plane maker, which is kinda….well weird I suppose. It hardly seems that long ago that I first got into it!

Speaking of which, it’s taken a while — too long really — but I started making a proper tool box earlier this year for taking along to woodworking shows, exhibitions and demonstrations. Previously I’d used a shabby and rather crudely made tote that I had knocked together when I was doing my furniture design course. I basically made that tool chest in a day — and it shows! Still, it worked well enough but it was hardly a showpiece item! This new chest — in a machinist’s style — will be much nicer. For the most part it’s made from mahogany, with rosewood drawer fronts and ebony moldings. The panels are fielded and I’m thinking of designing and casting up the drawer knobs in silver, featuring my trademark “windmill” design. The carcase is done (I should get a few photographs actually) so I just need to do the fitting out of it now - which is really the bulk of the work when you consider those drawer dovetails. Speaking of which, each of the panels for the carcase use sliding dovetails to help keep everything solid. I also want to add a bit of beech wood somewhere… possibly the drawer sides or bottoms. Might add some boxwood and lignum vitae accents as well. Then I’ll have most of the planemaking woods covered!

Hopefully I’ll have it finished by the end of the year. With everything else happening though, nothing is certain!

Later on tonight I’m writing the text for said tutorial on hand planes (again using WordPress I might add) when I do a routine “save”. All of a sudden I get a stupid 404 error when everything should’ve been fine. I remembered that I’d had some trouble on this very blog with that sort of thing a while back. Fortunately I was able to hit the back button and all of my newly written paragraphs appeared again. I then spent the next five minutes or so cutting and pasting text to try and ascertain just what it was that was giving me all the hassle. I finally tracked it down to one word and one word only - curl. Yup, I remembered that was the word that had given me all that trouble on a Speckled Band post. Can’t remember what I changed it to back then but I did know that “curl” is a php command (I think) which, obviously, causes some distress to the program. The sucky thing is that I wanted to use the word curl, not “spiral” or “curve” or what have you — curl dammit!

So then I wanted to find out exactly why curl would cause me so much grief. Not finding anything at the main WordPress site — their search engine is hellishly annoying and inefficient — I decided to Google. I found a whole heap of useful stuff. Actually, that’s a lie….. I found stuff, some of it was useful; but mostly I realized that I wasn’t the only one who was having trouble with that particular word. The solution was that there would always be a problem if the program tried to parse (I think thats the term) the word. One way around it though was to write the word in such a way that the program would be savvy to - as html code. Hence & #99;url (lose the space) becomes curl.

Simple! Problem solved!

p.s. Can you tell that nothing really much happened today? That’s the problem when you decide to post every day - or try to at least!

Hopefully something mildly amusing or remotely interesting will happen tomorrow. Otherwise too bad!

Ran out of time on Friday to post an entry. Had to drive over to my parents house as Amy and I were staying the night there (Mel’s birthday celebrations the next day et al). Talked with mum and dad for a while — primarily dad in regards to starting up the new planemaking venture (which I’ll get into in another post some time) — but then fell asleep while watching TV at around 10.30pm. I seem to be doing that more and more nowadays over there. It’s just so damn hot there with the heater on that I just kinda lose consciousness or something?

Saturday was pretty good. Not only was Mel there but Adrian and Dan — my two best friends — visited as well. There was some concern earlier that morning with Adrian’s mother (who lived across the road from my parent’s house) being a little disorientated and wandering the streets but Adrian managed to sort things out. By the end of the afternoon Amy and I decided to stay at my parents for another night.

Back home on Sunday we started to get back into the groove of things. For some reason though the internet seemed to be playing up and the connection would momentarily drop out all the time. It was quite annoying and so I didn’t bother to update the blog, instead opting to watch a bit of football on the TV. By late Sunday night we lost all connection to four of our websites — The Speckled Band being one of them — though we were able to get to other sites. Even the main page for our web host (for those 4 sites) was down so I was unable to say “Hey? What goes on here?”. At any rate I decided to worry about it the next day and went about updating some of the other sites hosted on different servers (and with different companies). I’ve found that, although it takes a bit of extra effort keeping tabs on different accounts, it makes sense to have the websites hosted by different people. If one (or two) of them drop out for whatever reason at least you can still get income from the others that are still up and doing OK. Website downtime is inevitable so it pays to not put all your eggs in the one basket.

Finally got on to the web host this morning and lodged a “work ticket”. Didn’t hear back for quite a few hours but they eventually got things back on track and working — one site at a time. Had to clear the cache on the browser as it seemed to want to tell me “web site does not exist” etc. which was a pain in the rear end.

So, after a little bit of effort, I’m able to continue on with the updating of this particular site. It’s just a bit of a shame that I don’t have anything brainstormingly fascinating or even remotely interesting right now! Ohh well. That’s the way it is sometimes.

Adieu!