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| About: Neil Lough |
I became a bass player at the age of 14, when I realised that amongst my friends we were only missing a bass player to form our first band, and suddenly music took over my life! Every spare minute at school was spent in the music block learning new tunes, playing bass, drums and guitar and generally trying to avoid any proper school stuff!
On leaving school I went to college to study sound and video engineering, only to realise that there was only one studio between about 200 production/music students and no chance of ever getting near it, let alone record anything. Instead we were taught about electronics, digital systems complex maths - yawn. In order to make the most of my college years, I then spent two happy years playing in many bands and drinking a huge amount of Newcastle Brown Ale - well it certainly beat working for a living! Upon returning to Newcastle I met Graham through a mutual friend and joined the band in 1992. We all clicked (almost) immediately, but I think it’s fair to say that we had three lead musicians in the band in the early days. After a few years and one very inventive but not very commercial demo (The Act of Declaring Something Worthless) the Robson/Lough partnership realised that our job was to support the band with a rock solid backbone. For me that was the turning point for the sound of the band, allowing Paul to do that unique and amazing guitar style and we started to morph into the tight sounding rhythm section you hear today. When the band finally split in 97, ill-health meant that I had to back off from gigging and I started getting into recording. I set up my home studio with one of the first harddisk multitrack systems, recording a number of demos for this band and others culminating in an album for Edward Box which earned us enough money to go into a pro-studio and re-record/release the album - Plectrumhead. I laid low for another couple of years, recording only crazy solo bass nonsense, until Ed dragged me out of retirement in 2004 to play and record his second instrumental album Moonfudge and the Robson/Lough rhythm section were once again re-united. It was during the recording of Ed's album that I met Andy "Cable" Watson - recording guru/keyboard/guitar player/T-racks expert! and top bloke. Andy played keyboards on the Moonfudge album and was a monumental help when it came to mixing and production. Through Andy I was suddenly exposed to Yamaha's mLan kit and Cubase which completely transformed my studio and it's capabilities. In mid 2005 I received a call from Graham asking if I would be interested in reforming the band. I explained my reservations about live work, but Graham was undeterred - setting up a practice which was to be a revelation. The songs were almost 10 years old, but the memory of them was still there and the band were sounding like we'd never really been apart. This was the band I wanted to be in - the songs, the amazing guitar parts, the rock solid rhythm section - it was what had been missing all those years. We had to get those songs recorded properly. After a couple of practice sessions I started badgering the rest of the band about recording the material. Initially this was met with some apathy - we had already recorded most of the stuff over the years, or in Paul's project studio, but I knew what these songs could sound like with the right time and effort, and I knew that between myself and Andy we could make a truly great album out of the material. So that's what we did - it's taken almost a year of my life to complete but we have an album that I am immensely proud of. The songs, the production, the musicianship - it's all there.
Name: Neil Lough
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