Here come The Love Detectives!

There is nothing like exposing to someone else your ambition to undertake a ludicrously challenging project because once you have gone public, the enterprise becomes a reality. Failure to move it forward is now something you will have to explain with an increasing degree of embarrassment the more people you have told about it. Especially if it is eye-catching……..writing and recording an album, for instance.

Besides writing songs that I could be proud of - and I was starting to make progress - I knew I needed a great band. I had a name, The Love Detectives, from a song I had written, but no band members. Having played in covers bands for some thirty years, there were quite a few musicians I knew but I had learned along the way that chemistry between band members is always key. Above all, I wanted a happy band. It just so happened that the three best musicians I had played with over the years all remained great friends of mine and we had managed to keep our hand in taking to the stage together now and then. If they were up for it, this would take care of bass, drums and keyboards. But, as always, there was a catch. As well as being fine musicians, these three guys all had serious business careers as CEO’s of successful businesses. Time constraints would be a challenge. As I approached them with my plan and asked them to play, my fingers were tightly crossed.

They needn’t have been. The responses were immediate and all positive. “I have enjoyed making an exhibition of myself on stage with you for years, why do you think I would stop now?” was the typical response of bassist, Ray. “Of course! When do we start?” asked drummer, Dickie. Keyboard player, Graham, was characteristically more incisive, “Time to stop playing other people’s songs at other people’s parties”, he observed. Best of all, the overwhelming sentiment of them all was that we owed it to ourselves to produce a body of original work to show what we were really capable of. So far so good.

But there was another hoop to jump through. I wanted to complete the line-up with a girl on lead guitar. I thought this would benefit backing vocals hugely, inject a little new life into the old mates’ chemistry of the rest of us and be great for the optics on stage. But where to start? After months of fruitless networking, an old producer friend of mine with whom I had recorded my very first demo some thirty years ago gave me a phone number. “I can’t remember your music after all these years but something tells me that Toshie will suit you very well, “ he suggested.

Toshie was a fantastic guitarist with an edgy, contemporary style, a strong sense of melody and a great voice. Would she like my music enough to take time out of her own solo career? I took her round to the studio where we would eventually be recording and sat her down with Danny the engineer, picked up an acoustic guitar, sang them both ten songs I had written and held my breath. Fortunately, their reactions could not have been more positive.

I had a band.

© 2020 The Madaxeman