Review

Will Bowden: We’re In The Band (Grosvenor House Publishing Ltd) ISBN – 10:1908105232

As I sit on my sofa finishing reading this book, a depressing fact just flashed up on my TV screen. American teen “sensation” (not a word I’d use for him) Justin Bieber is the most watched artist on You Tube in the world, with over two billion hits. A year ago, he had six million followers on Twitter, adding at an average of 24,000 per day.

He has sold 23 million singles, and God knows how many million albums. He became the first artist to have seven songs from a debut album, chart on the Billboard US Hot 100 chart. He is only 17. That then ladies and gentlemen, is success, in the business that we call music.

Will Bowden’s book “We’re In The Band,” is the antithesis of young Justin’s story. 307 pages of how to screw it up, not be very good, stay unknown and fail miserably as a musician and band member. While based in the home of rock and roll; Bishop’s Stortford!

Former bassist with Uncle Funk, Bowden is an unlikely rock star, although he does hang out with old fossils and dinosaurs, as Associate Professor of Roman Archaeology at Nottingham University these days. But as he says; he still has not accepted that he will never play Hammersmith Odeon! (I still call it that too, not the Apollo, and London Gateway Services at the end of the M1 will always be Scratchwood to me!!)

I have read a stack of self-published autobiographical tales of musical bods who regale us with lurid tales of sex, drugs and rock and roll. And even published versions by so-called stars, which are usually as boring and self-obsessed as the amateur, vanity-published efforts. Will’s tales are not so much sex, drugs and rock and roll; as socks, rugs and sausage rolls.

It is a very funny, well written account of life in cold garages, church rooms smelling of tea and urine from unwashed jumble sale garments, pubs, clubs, on the back of a lorry in the pouring rain while dodging electrocution, fall outs and splits, band politics, crap gear and crap songs, musicians without talent or their own kit. Egg boxes as sound proofing. Mullets. Shouting “Hello Tokyo” in unlimited intimate (small) empty venues…………

Radio One ran a series on the Mark and Lard show some years ago, from the book “What With Being Stone Deaf & Everything, The Rock Musician’s Survival Guide” by writer David Hallamshire. That dealt with the same subject, and that book is just brilliant. This book, by Will Bowden is along the same lines, but personal to Will’s own experiences, as compared to David’s often exaggerated and fictitious anecdotes of being in a band.

This book is a must buy for anyone in a band, who used to be in a band moons ago and then got a life, anyone thinking of being in a band, or knows someone who is and wants to put them off! With more than four million guitarists in the UK alone, only about 0.5% will achieve recognition beyond a ten mile radius of their home. This book is for all the rest. A tale of one man’s journey from bedroom hero to bottom of the bill support act.

I do take mild offence at him writing that fishing is a waste of time. I fish! I also take issue where he slates music publishing deals, and says they are easy to get as they are a waste of time. I have spent lot of time in Nashville, and worked with some of the biggest music publishers and songwriters there, over the last decade. So I beg to differ with Mr B on that statement. Stick to digging up old pots.

But overall, it is a smashing read. For anyone who has been defeated in their search for stardom by bad luck or complete lack of talent. Or anyone who just wants a damn good laugh with their cocoa. Young Bieber is getting my review copy for Christmas. I bet he has no clue what a twin-wheel base Transit van looks like, broken down on the hard shoulder of the M25 at 4am, in thick fog and driving rain. Then realising there’s no fuel in it, and no one has any cash to get some. Happy days……

myspace.com/wereinthebandsoundtrack
Words SIMON REDLEY