Recruitment Policy

For the past six months or so, I've been going round a friend's house and making vague approximations of music in his basement: me on bass, him on drums or guitar. Just something to do, on the most part, playing other people's songs and messing about around this warped 12-bar blues riff with a beat ripped off Sound and Vision by Bowie.

Over the past month or two, however, we've accidentally written a few songs of our own, kind of. Motivation enough to start looking for some other music-type bods and so, I put an ad on a website requesting any like-minded souls to get in touch.

Anyone who has seen 'The Commitments' will remember the scene where Jimmy Rabbite is confronted by hordes of applicants to his ad, most of which are totally unsuitable and/or crap. Somewhat mercifully, the modern world of the internet allows us to check out the other people without the cringing factor of having to meet them in person.

After only a day and a half, I've had all sorts in my email inbox. Obviously, this being Manchester, I've already had a couple of Gallagher-clones who are still flying the flag for 1994. The rest mainly fall into very earnest sounding young men looking to be the next Nick Drake or Chris Martin. Great.

The thing with just about all of them is that they generally come across as people wanting a backing band for their songs, something I've been interested in, being a stubborn democratic type who thinks bands should be about equality. This means being able to say "that new song is shit" without risking tearing everything apart. The first sign of any "this is my band, do as I say" will be met with a resounding "get to fuck" from these lips.

There is a potential bright spot: one reply seemed promising and I'm hoping we'll meet up sometime this week to see if we can all get along as people. After all, if you're going to be in a band with others, it helps if you can have a laugh, right?