So Tim left the band and we were left needing a drummer. We asked Andy Mason who played guitar on Hope, to join on drums and he accepted. He had been the original drummer for Delirium (who became D-Elz). He was also drumming for Electric Gypsies, a blues rock cover band. I caught both bands live a number of times, becoming friends with them all.
I remember sitting in on a recording session with Electric Gypsies, and in a break some of us went onto the stairwell and sang Every Rose Has It's Thorn - Andy & Space on guitars, Max singing lead, and me with Andy & Space singing back vocals. Good times.
A lot happened before we actually recorded or played live (started editing what I was going to write now, because what I had remembered wasn't quite right). Me and Paul did a lot of writing, and we experimented with singer/keyboard player Owen (can't remember his surname, sorry). A set of lyrics he started writing for a piece of music me and Paul had written was cool, but the whole thing didn't seem to work for some reason.
We did a lot of writing, but when we did go back to playing live we still played mainly covers. I can understand that now looking back, but I was irritated by it back then and for a while after. In some ways I'm still of bothered by playing covers, because you will be inevitably compared, unless you do a drastic re-interpretation of something. I actually thought that what we were writing was too good for people not to hear.
In January 1996 we went into Bandwagon again, and this time we recorded what was definitely the best recording we ever made together. The song was called Down, which me and Paul wrote together with some of best lyrics ever - "Where are the daggers as you try to cut me down, where are the dragons as you burn me to the ground..." The hard hitting lyrics spoke of a person who had got sick of people walking all over them. The music equalled the words, with the best licks that Paul and me had ever come up with. Andy helped with the instrumental lead into the solo sections, so all in all the three of us had come up with a cracking song that is still awesome.
The engineer for the session was Mark Allsop, who we knew as the drummer for Clownhouse and Quango, bands that all three of us loved to bits. He was, and still is, a great all round musician, who can play all sorts of instruments. For this song, Mark got the absolute best mix ever. The drums especially stood out, and my bass kicks ass big style. Paul's numerous guitar takes led to some amazing tracks of guitar, and his vocal was flawless as well.
After this we carried on rehearsing for a long while, until we were ready to gig with a big change of sound that matched that of Down. The setlist was sharpened to include material that was more rhythm related, with myself and Andy particularly knuckling down to getting "in" with each other musically. My bass playing had to link with both the drums for the rhythm side of things, but also had to make up for the lack of a second guitar, or a keyboard or any other instrument - a feat that all three piece bands have to get around really, because when say the guitarist starts soloing, the background music has to still have some semblance of the tune itself.
We were absolutely hot by the time we were gigging, and I'm not messing there. We had the ability to play around 200 songs off the cuff at that point, which ranged from A to Z (well, sort of). We knew everything from Rage Against The Machine's first album, everything by Red Hot Chili Peppers up to that time (One Hot Minute being the most recent album then), also material by Chic, Prince, Queen, Free, Bon Jovi, Metallica, Guns 'n' Roses, the list just went on and on.
We'd gotten into Lenny Kravitz big time, but my idea of merging three of his songs was vetoed - Are You Gonna Go My Way, Stop Draggin' Around, and Always On The Run, but we did do them separately. We also got off on doing Cupid's Dead during sound checks - mint riff.
Later in the year we returned to the studio, but with the idea of recording ourselves at Bandwagon. This was mainly because I couldn't afford an engineer (as I was the one who always paid for recording sessions). So we turned up to record a song that me and Paul wrote together called The Gravy Train. I like the song, with it's many hooks, licks and my fun time lyrics, inspired by Sly & The Family Stone - "Let the music take you, to a higher state of mind, dance to the rhythm, it'll take away time..." I was about just going out dancing and having a good time with mates. The music was made from ideas that me and Paul had that were put together and cleaned up in places (my ideas made less messy by Paul), and it included three distinct sections, with lyrics. Paul took the verse vocals, I took the leads into the choruses, and Andy took the rapped choruses.
We started by recording a live guide with the three of us playing together, and then me and Paul went for it with overdubs. Even I recorded three bass tracks. I don't know why now looking back, but it seemed right at the time (perhaps an ego thing maybe?) We mixed the song very quickly, and that was that.
Notable mentions also go to Denton Williams, who played drums for a short while in rehearsals while Andy was at university, and we did actually try out the female singer Suzi Marriott from Ripley. She had a lovely voice, and we changed our set dramatically. We tried a setlist with her that included Car Wash by Rose Royce, Le Freak by Chic, Blow Your Mind and When You Gonna Learn by Jamiroquai, and more of that kind of acid jazz, 70's funk and soul, and that sort of thing.
We were basically on hold for a long time, during which I'd started a course at West Notts College in Mansfield doing Popular Music, and I was working with Cornerstone. While on the course and all this though, me and Paul still jammed together and wrote, waiting for the band to get back together, which didn't actually happen. I wish we'd have recorded some of the songs that we had written such as Wichita Falls, My Problems, and lots of others. Paul brought a friend of his into the fold singing (I can't remember his name at all, sorry), and Paul had written a beautiful song called Butterfly (his lyrics were amazing).
The three of us (me, Paul and the singer, was his name James?) met up at Ray Peskett's place (a mate on the same course as me), here one of the course's 4-track machines was (me and Ray had been working together on songs as well, such as the fabulous Travelling Man). Ray recorded the three tracks of Paul's guitar, my bass, and the vocal. Paul then added guitar soloing onto the same track as the vocal - quite a bad idea actually looking back on it. This recording was then transferred to the reel-to-reel at Bandwagon, where me and Ray recorded Jamie Thackeray (another friend from the course) drumming to the songs (Paul was in the session as well). It's not the best recording ever made, but a great song.
That was the last of Shadowplay however - the band finished as so many do. I thought the music was great, and we think we became a red hot band in the end. Everyone involved are still great friends (except for those we've lost contact with), and in some ways it would be cool to maybe get back together some time and see what happens. I miss being in a band in so many ways.
After the band and the Cornerstone business, I virtually gave up on music. I thought of myself as being useless without it being part of a band. I kept writing now and then, but nothing came of it until Andy came around to visit me and I got the guitar out and played him something I'd written. He said it was an amazing song and that I should record it, especially after I told him that I'd done a rough demo at home with bass, second guitar, and tin whistle added. The song that amazed him was Slave Song.
Anyway, that's the Shadowplay story then... Hope you don't mind my wanderings into my life history - just getting things out there ready for when I inevitably forget it all and have to be reminded, lol.
Thank you for reading, I hope it wasn't too boring.
Marv - 15th February 2011 (40 years, 2 months, and 20 days old)
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