A Band History

 

Back in the mists of time around 1979-80 the Band was started as a Sunday afternoon "Jam Session" for a few musician friends who got together and amused themselves and some guests and things continued in this form for a couple years jamming in locations such as the woodshed Montcoffer with Derek 'Beve' Beveridge (Guitar).  Hugh Burke (drums) and later with Robert Shand (Drums) at Scandas cottage on the Turriff back road. The name the 'Unpredictable Headband' was created around that time as the name of a cassette tape album recorded live at the Montcoffer woodshed.

Keith used to have to sing in a microphone while shut inside an old wardrobe to reduce the feedback from the amplifiers and drums. A memorable track from the wardrobe was 'The forest of blue flies'  where 'the natives turned me into soup'.

 

Finlay and Keith continued jamming together and were soon joined by a new bassist Pete Geddes. They then started recording original songs and parodies (covers) on tape decks and cassettes as the UHB at Petes house in Duff Street, Macduff.  Some Tape exists : (Feet & Keith in Pete's kitchen).

 

Some early Headband songs with this line up of FB KB PG and RS were recorded on multitrack tape by Gerry Duncan at the Banff Castle Studio , a make-shift studio and rehearsal facility. Some of these tracks have been recently reprocessed to digital format from the original mixdown cassette tape version and may be released here. "Out in the desert sun", "I like to go Dancing down in Macduff Town", "Big boys don't cry".

 

After a while the band fizzled out when the players drifted off to pursue the important things of life.  Education, Jobs, Money, Family etc.

 

Keith, bitten by the recording bug, purchased his own recording equipment and after building a studio, he recorded on his Yamaha 4 track hi speed tape machine,  his own guitar parts and keyboards, he  crafted songs and with occasional assistance from Finlay on MIDI guitar and a lot of input from Dave Angus x-"Cathedral" on Bass and drum programming he produced and released  his first Cassette tape to the world.

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"One Day Millionaire" was released on cassette tape in a small batch  and distributed locally in music outlets. Keith actually sold several hundred copies around the North East and claims to have broke even! This Album is due for a future re-release by Keith on the BAX label in digital format.

 

A Variety of digital machines were purchased and used on these recordings including drums, reverbs, keyboards and midi guitar. This stuff was all exciting and new at the time! Previously this sort of equipment was unavailable to the masses at affordable prices.

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Many years later Finlay and Keith reformed as the Unpredictable Headband and recorded a few more songs on Fostex digital four track at Deveron terrace and Viewfield.  They were then joined by Stuart Fraser on Bass guitar and many classic Headband songs were recorded during the next two years. During this period and the next years several musician friends got involved to inject a bit of variety and spontaneity. Gerry Duncan (Keyboards) , Mike Bruce (Bass & Guitars) and many others who happened  to drop bye for a Jam.

 

Around this time RealPlayer TM. and mp3 formats were emerging as the digital delivery for online and Finlay purchased a software package to generate this format from the 44.1 khz 16 bit WAV format for CD.  Some tracks were uploaded as 128 bps to the free  "mp3" web site and became free streaming and download tracks earning  tiny amounts per click. I think I got a US cheque for $65 US for over a years plays and when cashed, with the bank fee's to cash US cheque, I ended up with only £9.

 

Finlay eventually release the first Unpredictable Headband album as a CD "High in the Clouds" on MP3.com.  One copy was sold and then the mp3 site folded selling out to other rival internet competition.

 

Material was migrated to various other emerging and fledgling music sites and made freely available to the growing number of internet listeners across Germany, Europe, USA and the world.

 

Finlay upgraded his recording equipment to a Fostex 16 track system allowing full sterio recordings to be made live , including all the vocals, guitars, synth, keyboards, bass and drums on seperate tracks. This allowed a much improved mix balance and reprocessing to be performed with ease.  The recording system was further updated to 32 track Korg as digital technology allowed.

MP3 became the defacto format for internet music due to its small size. This was employed to realise both CD and internet releases on various web sites.

 

The music industry changed with the internet so quickly that some sites came and went in only a few years, pushed out by the commercial pressures of the music industry. i-Tunes, Amazon etc. gaining major control. Several sites were used to promote headband as a mostly free music band.

 

Headband are now available on Spotify for free streaming and also available for free streaming and download purchase on Soundclick, Soundcloud, Reverb Nation and several other sites.

Albums have been compiled by Keith and released on Amazon and the other distribution majors.

 

The music is collected and remastered from original mixes recorded by Keith and Finlay. In some cases several different versions exist, but all are from the original masters recorded on either analogy tape, 4, 16 track or 32 track digital recorders.  Usually these are mixed to a basic stereo version and the originals then deleted or if considered valuable are archived to Hard drive as individual tracks. Sometimes the record drives are replaced and the old recorder hard drives stored in a cupboard somewhere.

 

The process can be time consuming and no doubt some great material has been lost along the way by 'human error', disk failure  or other catastrophic events like 'out of disks space'  noticed at the end of recording (NOT) a brilliant new song. However we are so prolific that there is still an incredible mass of material.

 

We have probably recorded in excess of 3000 Headband songs over the years and that's a conservative estimate !

 

I plan to pull together a database of all the Headband songs and place it on this site or another site so that it can be searched and referenced. That's a mammoth task.

 

Unpredictable Headband are interested in Film music and Video production  too. It takes a lot more time and effort to pull this together in comparison to audio only. These days it is expected that there is some visual content to all music.  Keep checking back here to keep up with the Unpredictable Headband as we forge into the 21 Centaury.