From Studio One To Studio Two
And so I started to play reggae music. I had this girlfriend, who was a go go dancer and a disco chick, and her dad was a drummer in a salsa band, and he gave me his white tuxedo , a pair of ASBA conga's and a melodica. I bought myself a pair of bongo's and me and some friends started to learn to play reggae from songbooks with Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Burning Spear music. At home I recorded some new age punk reggae experiments in sound on sound. Soldier Soldier and some now forgotten try outs with lot's of echoes. I was already familiar with the ping pong sound on sound recording techniques because at age fourteen me and a friend recorded already some soundscapes and psychedelic music with my dad's Sony tape deck, a mono cassette recorder and home made instruments. We called ourselves Old Fungus and it was supposed to sound like Pink Floyd. So it was logic that Patrick The Bruyn and me build our home recording studio by merging our hifi and disco bars. We called it: "Studio Two". We recorded a lot of overdubs and jams with friends. We had the opportunity to start a band and rehearsed at Bongo Harry's place. Harry had been in Jamaica several times and was an organic farmer.
We called our band King Fruitgrape & His Royal Nose Blowers (1978 -79), because we used nose flutes in dub and drank grapefruit juice during rehearsals. After we split we did a few jams in The Paradox, where we stored our instruments on the first floor. Then we moved to a Youth Club called Jelinko on the West Bank (Saint Ann's parish) and named our band Outer Square. In the reggae café Musical Snack Attack, we met a Ghanaian journalist in exile, and asked him if he wanted to be our lead singer.
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