Your First Music-Wise Performance

[Benjamin]

So, yeah, my friends and I were having a good time talking about music at the pub tonight, and this topic came up. I don't remember my first very clearly, but I'm not even really counting that, as it was this dance my entire generation in my family did at my aunt's wedding. There's just videos and pictures of it left, and naturally we all look like dorks and are dancing a terrible dance, but we did sync it pretty well, I must say. I was 3 or 4, I think.

The first one I remember very clearly was in pre-school, in the "choir". I use that term very loosely because the video evidence clearly shows that most of us weren't even singing, and the music playing had singer's voice in it as well, and you'd mostly hear that. Very terrible.

I then learnt percussion, guitar and the fucking recorder. So what I consider to be my first REAL performance was when I was 15, and my friends and I played Face Down by Red Jumpsuit Apparatus at some school event. Suffice to say, we sounded really average, but we feel really cool the whole time we're doing it and were rock stars in school from that day on. We were a four-piece, and we had a 13 year old who could sing his heart out and is bloody brilliant. He's still awesome, and it sucks because he's an even better musician than I am. Before the performance, we were scared as fuck, because we were about to play in front of the entire school, and well, I had initially told them that I'd played live a bunch of times, and so had to pretend the whole time that I wasn't a nervous wreck. During the performance itself, I remember going off beat about 4 times, and had to be composed back in by the bassist (this 17 year old who was terrible himself, and still is). Due to this though, the school asked us back a bunch more times for a bunch of other events that year too, and in the years that followed. By then, however, our band went through about 15 changes, with everything from our bassist and lead guitarist graduating to even me quitting for a bit before I came back when they couldn't find another drummer (it wasn't that I was good, they literally couldn't find another drummer). That year, though, because the first event we played at was an interschool one, we got invited to about 3 different schools' proms because of that, excluding our own. We were terrible, but nobody notices that kind of shit at prom, I guess.

But yeah, anyways, what's your first?

[Gazz]

Headlining Wembley with the Stones in 87.

[Benjamin]

Ah, I remember that. You were the one with the tie-dye, was it?

[METALMAN]

I suppose my first musical performance would be performing some (rudimentary) drumming at a school concert as an eight year old. Or perhaps that doesn't count. Maybe playing trombone as an eleven year old at another school thing.

My first actual gig would be when I was around sixteen. I played guitar and sang in a band with some friends at a local youth club. We were awful but it was all friends there so it was still really good fun and I look back on it fondly.

Band I'm in now is a lot better though. Makes me realise how bad some of the ones I was in before were! Still good fun too. If it wasn't fun I wouldn't do it. Obviously.

[Sousa]

I played the fuck out of trombone. Concert band, marching band, jazz band, solo. I was awesome.

[MalaCloudy Black]

I played trumpet quite badly for a few years in high school, but prior to that you could catch me at elementary school concerts pretending to play the Recorder.

[ChrisSteeleAteMyHamster]

Recorder at junior school I'd imagine but now I play bass guitar, mostly at church.