(.....and he wonders why he doesn't get asked out to parties that often!)
Yes I'm afraid I have some bad news for some of you (and great news for
everyone else), I am very pleased to announce that Backlash will be
playing a small set consisting of all our original material (so no requests I'm
afraid) at my wedding next weekend. As it stands right now it looks like we
will be starting at
I'd like to take this opportunity to publically
thank Andy and Jamie for taking the time to come all the way down to
I suppose I really ought to mention RDG in closing, the vocals are done (I had to do them to complete the CD that we all used to refresh ourselves of the songs) but the quality is not good enough to be used in a general release (I had a cold, that’s my excuse and I'm sticking to it!). Rest assured I will finish the vocals (probably after my honeymoon) so watch this space for an update once I've got round to it.
No your eyes are not playing tricks on you, the site has been updated
Well I suppose the biggest bit of news is that of my impending doom err I mean wedding. For those of you that missed it there’s a link on the front page to a site dedicated to it (and written by my beloved). if you cant be bothered to page back to find it here’s a link. At this point in time the plan is for Backlash to reform for a one-off set at the reception, however its worth pointing out that this plan has yet to be 'fleshed out' and there’s a number of things that might kill this idea off before it gets off the ground.
The other cool bit of news is that RDG is nearly finished!!!!! Yes I know its hard to believe but I have managed to get our only good demo recording of it onto my PC and just have to add a couple of tracks (notably vocals) and its done. A word of warning though, while our other 'non-live' tracks were professionally done in a recording studio this one definately isn’t (it was done on a 4-track in a classroom during a practice session actually) and its quality reflects this - it is however the missing piece from the Backlash picture.
Well it's been a while since my last update, partially because I can never get motivated to do it (it's hard to get excited about updating a web site about an extinct band, especially if you don't know if anyone's reading) but mainly because there hasn't been alot to write about. Well the second is no longer true (and I've got a good idea people are reading), want to know more? Read on.....
Well I saw Andy over xmas and he's fine (but not playing) but I must admit I never got around to phoning Jamie. However it appears one of the things I did do last year turned out to be quite a good idea. When I put Backlash on MP3.com I must confess that I didn't expect a reaction. Now I'm not saying that the response has been big, coz it hasn't, but it's always nice to get mail from people that have taken the time to listen to our music, and thought enough of it to let me know. To all of you I'd like to take this opportunity to thank you on behalf of the band. Those of you who asked me to check out their sites please bear with me I will get around to it. Unfortunately I'm trying to move house and pass 5 Microsoft exams in less than 2 months so my free time is pretty limited (that and I must confess I find it hard to listen to other bands stuff without getting all depressed about what happened to Backlash).
I'd particularly like to mention Matt and his portal site British Metal Bands and wish him luck with this project. Without wishing to get anyone's hopes up (least of all mine) Neil has indicated a desire to join a band again, however he may decide a change of style is the order of the day, or he may not go through with it. Finally check out my soapbox page for my spin on the latest TV news magnet Popstars.
Well I've been thinking about it for a while and I've finally got round to uploading our tracks to MP3.com [which is now no longer online, sorry – Ash]. At present only the studio tracks and the two live tracks that don't have studio versions available are uploaded, but I will get round to uploading the other live tracks soon (when I've had chance to re-encode them). This probably means that MP3.com have more of our tracks online than this site (coz I haven’t got enough web space to get them all up here). The other advantage MP3.com gives us is that they can provide you with a copy of "Wedge Of Insanity" which was previously only available from me (and I don't think I did any for anyone except the band members) although this feature may not be online by the time you read this.
Yeah I know but it's worth it. I now have a decent MP3 encoder (thanks John) and the Backlash Studio tracks have been re-encoded. However they have roughly tripled in size (quality is amazing though) so they will take longer to download and may not all be uploaded by the time you read this as I'm having trouble juggling all my web space around to get them all on-line, also the live versions of the studio tracks have been removed for the same reason. Live tracks are next on my list for the audio face lift treatment. Please bear with me if the files you want aren't accessible yet.
As an aside I passed my first Microsoft exam at the end of last week.
Well first of all, Happy Millennium (is that been the most overused word recently or what). As you can see this hasn't been updated for, err, well, over a year (bloody hell has it been that long) and in some ways nothing has changed and in others lots has. The band is still extinct (however I did see all the members of the last line-up over Xmas - yes they are all fine and well, but none are in a band at present, unfortunately the band Andy joined didn't last long) and the copy of this site at my Freeserve account is no more, the samples section has been updated with all our songs in MP3 format (isn't technology wonderful) I may even get round to finishing the recording of our last song (R.D.G.) and putting that up in Mp3 as well (don't hold your breath). There is a new section which may or may not be complete by the time you read this, Ash's soapbox (nuff said?). You may also notice that this site is now part of the Ash Ridley Network (cool huh). Yes I got off my butt and got my very own Domain name, however there is nothing there at the moment as I'm looking for somewhere (cheap) to stick it. If you have any suggestions let me know (the email address works).
Well you may be wondering (although probably not) what the decision has been regarding the future of Backlash. Well after lots of soul searching and consideration (and a little bit of consultation - thanks Greg) I have decided to put the band on hold for the moment. The timescale is 6 months at present but this is completely open to change depending on how bored/depressed/broke/restless etc. I get, and of course the possibility that live [rock] music may get itself sorted out down here (Yeah right!). I believe Jamie's plans are to join another band ASAP, if Jamie decides to leave any band he joins when/if Backlash reforms then that's great, if not I wish him well for the future.
Oh for those of you that are interested, Andy did indeed join another band
in Shrewsbury, and although he tell me that the live [rock] music arena is just
as bad up there as down here (which I can take small consolation from), they
are at the stage where they can gig (notice I didn't say they were gigging,
although I believe there is at least one booked). I do plan to go and see
Andy's new band play,
The time has come in my domestic life where I stop taking advantage of living with my Father and move out into the big wide world............only to move in with my girlfriend and take advantage of her instead :) ). So for those of you who did know where I lived, now you don't :). However as real life starts to set in I've realised that I'm going to be considerably worse off financially (when you include the fact that I've also got a new car), so I'm saving myself a few quid a month by moving from Virgin Net to Freeserve. This basically means that my email address and the web site address will change. The old addresses will be in use until around the end of February when I will terminate that account. Please be aware that the new address may not contain the whole site before the end of February. This is because, during my house move, just to add some stress to the situation, my development server, decided to corrupt the whole disk! After 2 days work and £250 I got all the data off it, only to lose it all to a hard disk failure a week later. This has yet to be rectified, and since Andy's web site was wiped after leaving the band I no longer have access to some of the files (I could download all the ones from my Virgin site, but the thought does not appeal to me)
This may bore the pants off of some (all?) of you but please read all of this, I would value your comments.
A few weeks ago, Andy announced that he would be moving up to
As some of you know, Backlash has been in existence in one form or another for about 8 years, and in that time I have experienced the decline of live [rock] music in the central south of England first hand. Despite the excellent continuing efforts of Venue Magazine (Top marks to Greg, Dave and Doug - free plug for you guys) and the other music related press, fewer and fewer people will go out to see a live band (more specifically a live rock band). Because of this fewer and fewer pubs/clubs will book live [rock] bands and so therefore there are less gigs for those [rock] bands that are still going (additionally many fine live music pubs have changed hands and either have been turned into wine bars or 'trendy' pubs or have just stopped doing live music). Now I acknowledge that pubs/clubs have to make a profit to stay in business, and the pubs have always booked bands to bring more customers in, it's just unfortunate that the bands book the gigs to get exposed to more people, nobody wins, the band ultimately loses as the pubs will book other bands after that. This means that gigs are getting fewer and fewer as time goes on because of the increasing amount of time between them.
Right or wrong I only got into this 'line of work' to play live, for me everything else that occurs in 'band life' serves only to get you on stage (oh alright - I get a kick out of studio work, but it doesn't compare to hordes of screaming girls does it? - I just can't ever remember that happening). What all this equates to is that I am at the stage where half of me can't see the point in putting all the work in to get the band back together, just to sit around for most of the year waiting for those few and far between gigs where hardly anyone but your mates turn up (depending on how far away the gig is) So you see my dilemma. I can't bear to see 8 years work just disappear (which in itself is not reason enough to keep going), but I'm asking what's the point?
Therefore at this point in time Backlash is on hold until January at which point we will review the situation, and people please do send me your views preferably via email.
In the meantime my thanks to Andy for everything, good luck for your future
in everything you do (I just won't be there to fix your PC anymore) and if you
join a band up there may
Cheers - Ash
No new content, but more changes to the look and feel (and sound? - no, not yet) of the site. I finally went out and brought my web page creation program, and it's made my life so much easier (well the bit of my life spend doing the web site, I mean, it hasn't helped the fact the the sun roof on my car still leaks when it rains for example). So you will now see thinner, leaner pages (no jokes about my gut please!) able to deliver that all important backlash information faster and more efficiently. Still to come: The animated GIF of the 3 drawings in "About The Band", RealAudio samples, smaller pic's (in download size), and possibly some Java Applets or Java Script if I can get my head round it (I've only just started learning C++) and can think of something to do with it. Keep checking back here for the latest (if not slightly delayed) info.
P.S. The frames don't appear to work in Internet Explorer for Windows 3.x (I think its Explorer v2) right clicking and choosing open DOES work, but not in the frames needless to say, I WON'T be fixing this problem as Windows 3.x is obsolete (as will 95 be soon :-( ) and you gotta stop supporting old platforms at some point so I'm choosing not to support it at all.
Well I'm back online now, after about 5 days of downtime (the previous news item was backdated). I had the great idea of installing the correct Novell login software for Netware (the login software for my server, written by the guys who write the server software itself) instead of the Microsoft one - BOOM! - Loads of errors, I couldn't log into my server, I couldn't get on the internet, Windows kept crashing. In short it was a disaster. However it didn't want to un-install fully (even CleanSweep couldn't get it all) so I decided to hack it out of the registry manually. Good job I backed the registry up, coz I hacked out more than I needed to and crashed Windows. I then re-installed Windows (over the top of itself so it retains all the settings) but I needed to restore the registry. What then followed was a very long period of installing and un-installing various network components to try and overwrite the files/registry entries responsible for the problem. However this event did give me time to get the web site sorted out (using another PC) so it can't have been all bad :-) (I only say that to try and make myself feel better about the whole thing).
Err...it would appear that there were a few more problems with the new layout than originally thought, I've just been told that only the start-up page works under AOL or CompuServe browsers (Thanks Dave) and nothing else works, but I think I've sorted it now. Basically it looked like I had the frame target reference different to the name of the frame (some legacy code from the original page I lifted the frame syntax from before I understood it). This has now been fixed and works OK on my development server, and SHOULD now work properly (just looks like IE/Navigator are a little more forgiving of coding errors - either that or its something to do with AOL/CompuServe proxy servers caching of web page links).
BTW the pic's/wav's/zips are back in the subdirectories again (repeat after me Ash "Web browsers use forward slash not backslash (Backlash?), web browsers use....)
It was brought to my attention last night (on the way to a gig of all
places) that the new super duper web site doesn't quite work on Netscape Navigator.
Now, I am aware that some of the features of the site don't work properly in
Navigator (the scrolling messages and the background sample) but this problem
was more fundamental (like....err.....none of the pictures were working!). What
I had done was to move all non-HTML pages into subdirectories under the DOCS
directory (none of this will make sense if you don't do HTML code - sorry) and
for some reason Netscape doesn't like this, although Internet Explorer does (I
use both BTW - just IE more often - coz my version of Navigator is really old,
and I can't be bothered to upgrade). So until I sort this one out (which do on
my development server so it won't happen again) I've put it all back how it was
(the directory structure that is)
Sorry Netscape users.
Aha, my HTML tinkering has paid off. A fairly major site modification (well at least in coding terms) and I'm still not using a web page creation package (but I am gonna get one). I think it looks alot better anyway, and it certainly easier to get round the site now (and less spelling mistakes too). BTW all but one of the background samples have been removed so the site should load abit quicker now too (I'm working on reducing picture size too)
I was looking at the live web site just the other night and though "Bloody hell Ash, lots of people have visited the web site!" which came as a bit of a surprise/shock, unfortunately it then dawned on me what was happening. The Backlash web site is my default home page, therefore everytime I run my web browser, it loads this page. However it doesn't load the one from the internet, but the copy I store on my development server (you still all keeping up with this?) but, where the front page contains a reference to the hit counter (which is on the internet) I still clock up a hit everytime I log on to the net.
Whoops! (looks good though!)
Yes I managed to find a free counter service, so I can see how [unpopular] the site is.
The wait is over! Our first original release is here. "Wedge Of Insanity" was recorded at Bob Ross studio's in Portsmouth (England) in Summer 1996, however due to unforeseen circumstances (see below) it has not been ready to release, UNTIL NOW!! The EP contains five original songs, four are studio recordings and the other one was recorded at the Gardening Club Bournemouth (England). The EP also contains live versions of the studio songs recorded on the same night. The EP is only available from the band, formats are limited edition CD (Order required in advance, LIMITED RUN) and Cassette. Prices as yet undecided, but expect around ten pounds sterling (CD) and five pounds sterling (Cassette).
That's right, We've managed to find ourselves two new recruits (one of them is an 'old' new recruit actually) to fill our ranks after our recent......ahem.....departures
For the curious (nosey?) among you, in November 96, Scott Gardener and Backlash parted company. This left us with approaching bookings but no drummer, fortunately, ex-Backlash Drummer Neil Ridley (surname sound familiar?) offered to stand in, and consequently re-joined the band after a 3 year absence. Just when we thought things were on the way up again, Nick Houghton (The artiste previously know as "THE OLAS") announced his departure in mid January 97, to follow a different musical direction. Finally after a month of looking under small rocks we uncovered Jamie "Viv" Cox, who plays guitar like ferrets climb trouser legs. So with new slaves to push our vehicle of mayhem onward, we career into the new year, totally out of control yet completely immune to police harassment.