Regular readers will know that I used to be in a band, and that I’ve been meaning to upload all the old stuff for ages. I’ve finally got round to it, and (most) of the Kasino stuff is now on Bandcamp. If you’re not aware of my occasionally shameful past, Kasino were a Glaswegian rock band from the late 1990s until 2004, and we had some good songs.

(There are a few gaps, incidentally, so if anybody out there has old Kasino / pre-Kasino stuff on CD/good quality MP3 that isn’t on bandcamp, please drop me a line: I’m gary@ this website address.)

It’s been a really odd experience listening to it all: lots of good memories, of course, but also a lot of frustration: if we’d just done this, if I’d just said no to that, if we’d only tried that. As I wrote a few months ago:

No matter how talented the musicians you’re working with, and I’ve been lucky enough to work with some really talented people, if your songs aren’t finished and the recordings are rushed then you’re not going to produce something you’re really proud of.

That doesn’t apply to all the songs – there’s plenty of stuff, especially the more recent stuff, that still gives me chills – but it applies to enough that I can’t really enjoy the nostalgia as much as I’d like to. The really old, late 90s stuff is particularly hard for me to listen to because I made the mistake of adopting the singing voice my then-bandmates wanted, which was a sore-throat growl. I wish I’d known back then what I do now about singing and how to express yourself without going WAAAARGH GRAARGH GRAAAAGH on the loud bits.

Coming back to the songs years later is interesting, especially the really old songs: I can think of quite a few songs that could have been killers but were mucked up for whatever reason. It can be quite interesting to approach an old song with more experienced ears: for example, David and I have rebooted two Kasino songs in our new musical incarnation, DMGM. We’ve redone Fall from Grace and You Don’t Have To Be Alone as more electronic songs, and they work much better in that genre. (I know I’ve been talking about new stuff for ages, but I’m in the final, nitpicking stage of mixing and mastering the songs now. They’ll be online by the end of this month, hopefully sooner.)

I haven’t uploaded the old songs because I expect to make money, wow the planet or even get any attention; I’ve uploaded them because they’re like old photographs: they’re snapshots of good times, high times and hard times.

* That’s a very old in-joke: friends of ours, Mercury Tilt Switch, were once reviewed as “a rock type band from Dundee”.