sPookY sounds

At the end of the summer of 1991 a guy called Fat Dave suggested to his friends that it would be cool to form a band. None of them could play any instruments, but the five of them (Fat Dave, johnnie, James, Squibz and Ritchie) agreed that it would be a good idea. After a few weeks johnnie, Squibz and Ritchie had bought guitars and started teaching themselves to play. Dave said he wanted to learn to play bass and bought one though never played it - in fact pretty much the only time he touched it was to try to play a drum beat which was an incident that led to a "dave's four-string drum machine" promoted alternative night at Tattershall village hall. As a result James ended up becoming the drummer by default when johnnie found a cheap second hand kit, bought it and told James that he owed £80 for it. The kit lacked a snare, but luckily James' dad had been a drummer in the distant past and still had a snare so James used that. The lack of a snare stand was solved by tying the snare drum to a chair which seemed to work ok for a while. As Dave didn't bother with the bass Ritchie started to play it and Squibz, Ritchie, Johnnie and James became POPE. POPE practiced playing other people's songs (mainly Nirvana and The Jesus and Mary Chain, but also some L7, Sonic Youth, Undertones, Ned's Atomic Dustbin and other odds and ends) for a few months.
As johnnie and James were interested in experimental music when they got bored one day they decided to record some and so they wandered around the second hand shops in Horncastle looking for a tape recorder. johnnie bought an old battery operated recorder for £4 and after buying some batteries they wandered around the town hitting various things (usually pieces of metal eg the sight screen at the local cricket pitch, various fences, pieces of playground equipment, etc) with other things (like pens, pencils, sticks, pieces of metal they found, etc). The results were not exactly earth-shattering, but johnnie's interest in recording was started.
After that johnnie recorded a couple of the POPE practices using the tape recorder, but soon musical differences (read as - johnnie being silly playing guitar with drumsticks and making feedback rather than playing the songs) led to POPE splitting up.
johnnie and James carried on practicing together mainly doing covers (Nirvana, Jesus and Mary Chain, L7, Sonic Youth, Ministry, many others), but after writing two songs of their own (Green Check Shirt and Vaseline, both recorded for the first sTriP album) they asked Willa to join on bass and vocals. Initially they had no name, but they soon found one - Liquid Menthol Tortoise. The name was apparently discovered when someone James knew went to McDonalds in Boston and wanted a strawberry milkshake, but was unable to remember what it was called. He asked for a Liquid Menthol Tortoise. He didn't get one, but the band got a name.
Liquid Menthol Tortoise (or LMT as they were generally known) practiced for a while and expanded their repertoire to include some Eric's Trip and Jale covers as well as an instrumental named after the band (later recorded by johnnie and james with vocals for the first sTriP album). LMT played their first gig at the Angel Inn, Horncastle in Sept 1993. This is johnnie's only regret in life - he had wanted to go and see Eric's Trip that night, but ended up being persuaded by the band that they'd tour again and he could see them next time. They toured again, but have never been back to the UK. The gig was almost successful though and people seemed to like it when johnnie played guitar to 100% (Sonic Youth cover) with a toy car which led to an encore of the same song (though the second time it was played with a Newcastle Brown bottle) during which a radiator fell off the wall and spewing tepid water over the floor.
johnnie then went off to university in Sheffield and that was almost the end of LMT although three months later they had a practice on a saturday afternoon, changed their name to sTriP and played a gig that evening that included 3 Eric's Trip covers and then they died.
Soon after that johnnie saw an Amstrad studio 100 four track recorder in a second hand shop and bought it and then a few months later he bought a new TASCAM PORTA 07. Over the next few years johnnie recorded around 40 albums, generally using the studio 100 to record backing tracks which he mixed to two tracks of the porta 07 leaving two tracks for vocals. He then used a stereo cassette deck to capture the final mixes. This method worked for hundreds of songs.
In January 1999 johnnie bought a Fostex B16 reel to reel recorder and an Alesis studio 32 to increase the track count to 16. Sadly the Amstrad Studio 100 died soon after. The B16/studio 32 combination lasted worked out fine for a few months until during a Third Rail recording session the drive belt on the B16 broke, but this was soon fixed. The B16/studio 32 combination was replaced by an Alesis HD24 and Behringer MX9000 in May 2004 as the heads on the B16 had worn out and couldn't be replaced and several channels of the studio 32 had turned into distortion channels and the Porta 07 got sold because it had been gathering too much dust.