1994:
It all started, (I think), back when the three of us were in year 11 at Pennant Hills High School. This was the year when we started going to all-age gigs in the city and where we discovered music other than the top 40 junk that was on the radio. We were captured by bands like Frenzal Rhomb, Downtime, Lawnsmell, Nancy Vandal and others. I think Anthony was the first to suggest getting himself an electric guitar, for something to do, and talked about forming a band. At first, Anthony was going to be on guitar, Nick on bass, and me, (Richard), on drums! We all changed our minds until finally Nick wanted to play drums, Anthony bass, and I had moved from drums, to bass, to guitar!
Well, weeks pasted and none of us thought that the band would ever eventuate as we hadn't much money to buy our instruments and if you know us, we always wait around for someone to get of their asses and make the first move. Well it actually ended up being me, (Richard), making the first move, as always! We were at school, playing sport, and I said to Nick that if he kicked the football through the basketball ring from half-way, in two goes, I would buy a guitar within a month. Even if he made it, who was to say I would keep my promise anyway, as we always used to make up these stupid bets. Knowing that this was pretty much impossible, I didn't think too much of it as Nick missed his first attempt. But then sitting there on the bench, I couldn't believe it when Nick kicked his last attempt straight through the middle of the ring! Well of course, I didn't intend to buy one within a month but it happened that I did in fact keep my promise, on the very last day of the bet! Nick found a cheap guitar and amp deal in the paper, at a local music store in Castle Hill. I ended up buying the guitar and the small, (crappy), amp for around $320, on the 12th of November. A few weeks later, Nick bought a second-hand drum set for about the same price.
With the band finally becoming a reality, we tried to think up of a name for ourselves. It didn't take too long before we found a message scribbled on a desk at school. It read, "Tevin Campbell is a dickcheese". We thought, "Dickcheese", would be a great name for the band and so, "Dickcheese", it was! With only Anthony needing to buy a bass, our band was almost ready to go. (Back to the top)
1995:
In January, Anthony bought his bass and also bought a second-hand amp off Nick's brother. With a month left in the summer holidays, we started playing around at Nick's place in the lounge room. This was where we experimented and tried to play some cover songs. None of us had ever played our instruments before. I had basic knowledge of music when I played the recorder in primary school, but that was it! Nick got a drum book to learn from, and Anthony and I got some chord books. It was Alex, a friend of ours, that showed me what the power-chord was, for the guitar, and that's all we had to know to play some Nirvana songs! Alex also tuned my guitar to, "drop-d", which makes it easier to play. I know that that drop-d looks stupid when you play the guitar, but I have had it like that ever since!
Since we didn't know how to play many songs, we decided that we should make up some of our own. Even though our first effort, "Joe Joe", was taken from my recorder book, we added an original bit in the middle. Now we had come to a big problem, "who was going to sing!"? Anthony had done a bit of singing when we played some Nirvana covers, but of course I was forced into singing because Tony was too embarrassed! Well, I too didn't want to sing so instead I shouted the lyrics out on, "Joe Joe". For our first attempt at an original song, I made up this tune on the guitar but when Anthony added a bass bit that he found in a book, the result was the crapest thing we have ever heard!We scrapped that song and tried to make something else. Anthony and Nick actually came up with our first original song which was later called, "Clean Your Skirting Boards". The music was made first and then Anthony made up some lyrics. I made Anthony sing this one but he just shouted so you couldn't tell what he was saying anyway!
We then moved from the lounge downstairs to the spare room upstairs. The room was small and closed in but it was better for recording in. We had always recorded ourselves playing songs and we thought that making a tape would be a good thing to do. We wrote a few more original songs including, "On Your Bike", which we thought was our best song to date. "Smurfing Beer", was a song we covered off the, "Father Abraham In Smurfland", tape. We sang like idiots on that song and so many people liked it, but we weren't happy because no one said anything about our original songs! In May, we put eight songs onto a ten minute tape and called it, "Eggenberger Bier", under the Dickcheese name. The recordings were mostly live, in front of a common tape-recorder that was stationed in the room. We also only played each song a few times before going straight into recording. We have done most our recordings like this for all the tapes we've done, to date.
We were told by one of our friends that, "Dickcheese", was the name given to an album by the Hard-Ons so we thought that it was time for a name change. It took us ages to come up with a new name. Anthony came up with the name, "Fungus", because, at the time, my thumb nail had been over-come with fungus, (mmm). Nick was the only one that didn't like the name but he said that if I got the football that was over the other end of the field, he would let us be called Fungus. Another football deal!
After a bit of a break, we decided to make another ten minute tape and give it to my Grandpa, who was out on a holiday from England. The tape was quickly and very badly made. Our microphone broke and we didn't have any money to buy a new one, so instead we used some of Nick's broken headphones! The quality was really crap but we didn't really care. I was beginning to sing much more songs than Anthony now and I was getting used to the sound of my own voice. We finished the tape in September under our new name, "Fungus", and called it, "Grandpas". We gave the only copy to my Grandpa before he went back to England.
It was our last year at high school and the year 12 students put on a farewell concert every year. At the start of the year we joked that we would play at the concert, but we never thought we would. We picked Magic Dirt's song, "Fairy Park", to play, simply because it was short and easy to play. When it came to the day, (Friday the 13th of October), we didn't have any time for a last minute practice and we didn't even have a sound check. Anthony and I were very nervous, while Nick was sobering up from a long night drinking at a party! We were also dressed up in stupid clothes, for the occasion, which made us look like even bigger asses! It was time for us to get up on stage and we started nervously. Then tragedy struck! When I was supposed to sing, no sound came out. I had forgot to turn on the microphone! We all stopped and a few cheers came out from the school crowd of around 1500! I was seriously thinking of just getting out of there. After about a minute we started again and the irony was that the vocals were very loud this time. In fact, Nick couldn't hear the guitar or the bass but he could hear the vocals loud and clear! We weren't very good at keeping in time with each other and so it was amazing that we got away with it with only a few minor mistakes! I didn't remember too much when I was up there, only that my legs were shaking and I never once took my eyes off my guitar!
After we had finished all our final exams and finished school for good, I bought a new amp and we decided to make yet another ten minute tape with a bunch of crappy songs, including a recording of our nervous live performance at high school! Also on the tape was one of our favourite songs from the 1980's, Nena's one-hit-wonder called, "99 Red Balloons". We called the tape, "Ten Minutes Of Bollocks", because it was just a bunch of pretty crap songs that we didn't want to put onto a longer, better demo tape. (Back to the top)
1996:
I wrote quite a few songs in the summer, at the start of the year, but we never got round to actually recording them until April. This was because everyone got into different Universities and we found it hard finding time to practice at Nick's house. We wanted to record a tape that lasted over ten minutes this time and we did that with, "Jackass", which lasted for around twenty minutes. The tape was better produced than previous tapes. I think by this time I had learnt to play my guitar a bit better and I tried to sing properly rather than just shout out the lyrics. I took more time to think about the songs as well, both musically and vocally. "Teesside", was the first song on the tape and an original song that people actually commented about! The lyrics are about my home town, back in England, and they're probably my favourite lyrics to date. We sold four copies of the tape and gave away two of them.
Again with University, we found it hard to get together and play, but I did write a few more songs in my spare time at home. In the six months that we had off from recording our next tape, a lot of things happened. I set up a web-site half way through the year and put it on the net on the 7th of July. I just did it for something to do as I became more aware of the whole Internet thing. I thought I should add to the masses of junk that was already out there on the net! I didn't expect it though, when after only a month on the net, that I should get an e-mail from Mike Epstein, from the US, wanting us to be on a compilation tape. Even though it was only a none profit, home made thing, we didn't really expect that people would see this site and be interest in our music! The compilation was called, "Homebrew Vol 1: Adventure In Lo-Fi", made up of home-recording bands. We put, "Teesside", and an early version of, "Crave", onto the tape.
On the 2nd of August, we played our first, "unofficial", gig for a party in Paul's garage. We didn't really want to play but a six pack of beer was in it for each of us! The set lasted for around 30 minutes and it went off quite well, even though only 4 people stuck around for the whole set! By this time we had a few more new songs and we recorded a new tape called, "Shank Van Bismont", in the holidays of October. We only had a week left in the the holidays to record everything and we also said we would play another party gig at Alex's house! This was probably the most rushed we've ever been and it probably showed in the final product. We recorded it all in five straight days and we even wrote a new song on the last day! We wanted to sell copies at the gig on the next day, and I remember making copies and cutting out the cover sleeve with just hours to go before the party. The gig itself was the worst thing we've ever done! The sound quality was really crap in Alex's garage, Nick was drunk, and we all stuffed up the songs that we had only learnt a week ago! It was so bad that Anthony said we should quit! We didn't quit, but we ended up not playing for about two and a half months. Dispite all of this, we did get a good review of the, "Shank", tape from a Uni friend, who is a real music buff. I was quite suprised that he thought the tape was good even though the other nine or so people, that we sold it to, haven't given us any good comments!
We got back into Nick's spare room, in December, to practice the songs we had only spent a week on back in October. We also practised for an upcoming gig we decided to do, at Sam's New Years Eve party. We said that we would never play at another, "party gig", ever again, but this time it was in a carpeted room without any echo. We also decided to play earlier than before so we weren't all drunk while we played! The gig went off much better than before, with our biggest party-gig crowd of 14! It was a fitting end to a pretty eventful year for Fungus. (Back to the top)
1997:
For our next tape we thought that practicing the songs before hand, before actual recording, would be a good idea since all the previous tapes were rushed and turned out pretty crap. A good idea was to work on a couple of songs at a time. Once we perfected them, then we would record the songs and move on to the next couple and so on. We ended up just writing about two and a half songs in the three month summer break and we couldn't even play them that well! We thought that we would get a demo tape, with around 10 songs on it, out by the end of February and then play some local gigs around the place, but we were so wrong! We hardly ever practiced and there was no real excuse why we didn't. Then when the first semester of Uni started, we practiced even less because of different time tables and work commitments.
Even though things went really slow in the summer, we still had something released onto a new tape. We decided to put our version of Nena's 80's song, "99 Red Balloons", onto another compilation tape set up by Chris Purcell, from the band Curmudgeon, in America. The tape was called, "Generic-athon", and was released under another homemade record label thing called Generic Records.
Things were still going slow, with no new demo tape in sight, but Fungus were actually getting heard and known a bit more, probably even more overseas than in Australia! Mike Epstein, the person who made the first compilation tape we were on, also has his own show on University radio over in New York. He sent me an email saying that he had been playing songs off the Buttmunch compilation and said that he had played some of our stuff on air! We've had no reaction from it though, so I don't know how well it went down over in there in the States! Back in Australia, we reached number 9 in the, "Australian WebSite Charts", beating off the likes of You Am I and Magic Dirt, for that week! The only thing was, was that mostly all of the votes were coming from the band members themselves! A surprise to us was that our last tape, "Shank Van Bismont", was actually heard by Foxtrotsky from the very popular Sydney band, "Nancy Vandal", after our friend Amir gave him a copy without our permission. Amir said that Fox thought that the quality of the recording was pretty poor, but I'm sure that what he meant to say was that we were really crap altogether!
We had always said that we should go into the Macquarie University campus band comp this year, so instead of thinking twice and delaying things, I put in our application form almost straight away. We stopped working on the new demo tape, even though no work had been done on it anyway, and practiced on playing the set of songs that we had decided to play on the night. We had to play for 20 minutes, up there on stage, and that worked out to be 7 songs for us. Tuesday night of the 27th of May arrived really quickly and we were all very nervous. We weren't even confident of playing all songs correctly as we hadn't practiced that much and the practice session the day before was a disaster! We were the first band on stage, out of four, and the first song we played was a new one called, "VB". I didn't realise it at the time that I was getting no foldback for my guitar and I could only really hear the bass, drums and vocals. The only guitar sound I heard was coming from my small crappy amp behind me. I then realised that I was playing the same wrong note all the time and so it was a great start for our first time up on a proper stage, just like when I forgot to turn on the mic at our performance at high school! We ended up playing the songs at a very fast pace, which was Nick's fault, and we couldn't keep in time in some parts! We finished off the set with our version of A-ha's, "Take On Me", where some of our friends danced and sang. In the end we didn't win, of course, and the judges didn't give us many good comments but it was good experience and we'll know what it feels like next time.
As what normally happens, we didn't play for ages after we played in the band comp. Uni and other things had got in the way as well. Coming towards the end of the Uni year there was still no promised demo tape but gradually some new material was getting written, that would now have to wait till the upcoming summer holidays to record. Its now been more than a year since our last tape so we hope that 1998 will be a bit more eventful that this one! (Back to the top)
1998:
The summer break, once again, was an unproductive time for us. We ended up just going out, drinking beer and sleeping in till midday. Once the summer was over though, we actually finally finished the new tape called, "Seventeen Half Drunken Beers", a whole 18 months since the last one and yet the tape only lasted for 20 minutes with 7 songs on it! The recording of the songs actually only took a few days to do, which made us think that if we got down and did a bit of work then we could have had loads of stuff done by now and we would be making loads of money - (not quite)! The tape though was definitely our best to date, with a bit more variety in the songs. The music gets away from the faster standard punk sound that we had before and goes towards a slower, more structured pop-rock-indie type of sound with more strings used on the guitar than the basic power chord of before. You could say our music has, "matured", even though its probably still at the stage of an 8 year old child!
Once again we decided to enter the Macquarie Uni band comp this year where we had some new and, "better", songs to play. We played in the second heat on the 19th of May with three other bands where once again we got drawn out to play first. We knew what it was all about this year but we were still pretty nervous. Instead of improving on last year though, we got even worse. It didn't have much to do with our playing this time but we had major technical difficulties. In Richards tradition of starting badly, the guitar kept on cutting out when we were in the opening strums of the first song, "Bolofest". The connection of the lead in the amp was pretty lose and we made about 3 false starts before luckily it managed to not cut out again. After that embarrassment our nerves actually went away and we were playing pretty well until the song, "Cruise Mobile", where Richard and Anthony swaped instruments. About a minute into the song, Anthony broke a vital string on Richard's guitar and so we had to stop and get guitar from another band. We played one more song, Johnny Farnham's - Take the Pressure Down, and then quickly got off the stage to a polite applause from the large group of friends that made the effort to see us. No, we didn't win but the judges weren't to hard on us just saying that we were pretty good when we were actually playing!
With the new tape done and playing live in front of people, you would think we would have the appetite to carry on and do more. As usual though we didn't do anything for months and in that time we even thought of stopping all together and calling it quits. We knew we weren't getting any where with our music but that didn't really matter because we only formed the band for somthing to do in our spare time. At the start of another summer holidays in December, we once again got back into Nick's spare room for band practice. Nick had bought a computer program where you can mix your own music samples and beats to create a song. We decided that we would take a selection of songs from our old tapes and re-record them with computer beats behind them. We can also get our hands on a CD writter and so from now on we will probably record our songs straight to the computer and then onto a CD which will hopefully greatly improve the quality. We were even thinking of changing the name of the band to, "Fungus 2000", because of the technology we are using and also a signed band in Europe have the name, "Fungus", and want us to change, (the bastards). (Back to the top).
