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Following inaccuracies in recent media interviews concerning my musical work, I thought I'd clarify the details of what I did and when I did it… The first piece of creative writing I ever did was when I was around nine years old when I wrote a short story about one of my childhood heroes - The Six Million Dollar Man. A little ironic, considering what I've ended up doing thirty years later. After that opus, I left it another eight years before I wrote anything else and that was a school fanzine called Sense - this came out for two whole issues and featured a lot of political opinion on world issues, animal rights and so on (I've been vegetarian since I was 17). It was written with some school friends and included two episodes of my second bit of creative writing, a darkly humorous serial called The Curse of the Gloved Hand, which was put in to lighten up all the polemic. Around the same time, 1980/81, I was learning guitar and getting into music and then formed a new wave band called St Vitus Dancers, who had some unexpected success when one of our tracks, The Survivor, was featured on Crass Records' Bullshit Detector 2 compilation album. I think we did two gigs and then split up - one of these gigs was at Manchester's once notorious Mayflower club supporting Becky Bondage's Vice Squad. Ah, heady days… The songwriting and performing continued, either on my own or with bands. Around the mid 1980s, I got into synthesizers, drum machines and sequencers and found myself as keyboardist for Playing At Trains, supporting goth-rockers The Bolshoi on their 1987 UK tour. It was a good experience and meant I got to play some legendary venues like the Astoria and the Marquee in London and it's certainly nice to feel a little bit of the history of those places when you play there. Also in 1987, I had a chance meeting with Tim Booth of James in a Manchester night club. I knew Tim a little through our mutual metaphysical interests and so, in this darkened club, he explained how the band liked to bring in new musicians to co-write with and asked me if I'd come along to a rehearsal and play keyboards. Naturally, I entirely missed the significance of this and said 'I'm busy'… Eventually, however, schedules were aligned and I ended up rehearsing and writing with the band for the winter of 87/88. It was good while it lasted and resulted in a few recordings - somewhere there's a dreadful version of a track called Ya-Ho that we taped at New Order's Sweet 16 studio and I played keys on Are You Ready? on James' Strip Mine album - lots of other stuff was written as well but never saw the light of day. Next, I became singer / songwriter for a two-piece outfit called ET until around 1992 - producing what I considered to be the best songs of my musical career. Our gigs went well, journalists liked us and even the odd record company too but no one could quite classify us and so our destiny was to remain unfulfilled. Towards the end of that band I started to write songs with more sci-fi themes - with titles like A.I., BioMechanica and Robobaby. Along with these songs came ideas that were bigger than just three or four minute pop tunes, so I developed an unreleased project that was to combine three songs with a bunch of short stories and essays I'd written about sentient machines. This was in the mid 90s and the subject just fascinated me for some reason (as it does to this day). One of the short stories I wrote then was called Between A Man and A Machine and, after it was posted on a writers' website in 1998, a US agent got in touch to say 'why not turn it into a full length novel?'. Looking back, it was almost as if that was all the encouragement I needed - over the next four years, the story was developed and eventually released as Machine Nation in 2002. I do still write songs, but I don't have that burning desire to play live any more and that's something that all performers need to have. The transition from song writing to story writing has been natural, if a little unexpected, but it's one I'm more than happy to have made. Richard Evans, November 2004 |
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